Op-Ed Contributor http://www.nytimes.com
The Elaine’s That I Knew
By BRIAN McDONALD
ONE night, after I’d pulled the rolling metal gates down over the storefront of Elaine’s,
the legendary restaurant on the Upper East Side, and just as I was
about to put the padlocks on, I realized that I wasn’t sure if my boss,
Elaine Kaufman, had left or not.
It really couldn’t. Elaine’s restaurant opens tonight for the last time, and then will close for good, less than six months after Elaine’s death.
What made the place famous was, of course, fame. Tell a story about Elaine’s, and you’re likely telling about a celebrity. I worked behind the bar at Elaine’s for 11 years, from 1986 to 1997, and my highlight reel includes Jackie Gleason behind the oak doing his “Joe the Bartender” routine; pouring Champagne into the Stanley Cup when some of the New York Rangers came in with it after winning the 1994 National Hockey League championship; and watching Hunter S. Thompson set himself on fire drinking flaming shots of Bacardi 151 rum.
One evening, when it seemed that all of Elaine’s literary lions were in for dinner — William Kennedy, Kurt Vonnegut and George Plimpton, to name a few — Elaine sat with the thriller writer Mary Higgins Clark. Later, Elaine came up to the bar. “She sells more books than all of them combined,” she said with a satisfied expression, one woman sticking up for another.
But what I find more remarkable than the celebrities and writers who flocked to Elaine’s is that the restaurant has been open since 1963, and for much of that time has been packed with customers, and this even though Elaine ran it like a candy store. In this age of computerized point-of-sale systems and restaurant-reservation apps, she wrote all the dinner checks by hand, took reservations over a pay phone and had an old NCR cash register behind the bar that seemed to ring all night. Back when flatbed trucks hauled huge rolls of newsprint paper down Second Avenue past the restaurant toward the New York Times presses, Tommy, my bartending partner, would look out the window and say, “Here’s Elaine’s shipment of cash register tape.”
At the end of business, I’d hand Elaine the receipts and a fat roll of cash, which she’d slide into her brassiere. Then she’d push her glasses up on her forehead, look at the totals of the tape through a squinted eye and say, “Nice,” in a throaty whisper.
I was often asked if I knew the secret to the restaurant’s success. I have no idea, I’d say. Though the food wasn’t as bad as some made it out to be — even considering the afternoon I saw the chef breading slabs of roast beef because he’d run out of veal cutlets — it certainly wasn’t the fare that drew the crowds. Perhaps the chance to rub elbows with the rich and famous attracted some of the customers. Then again, we New Yorkers pride ourselves on our immunity to celebrity fever.
I’m sure some would say that Elaine was the reason for the restaurant’s popularity. But those of us who knew her well would never accuse her of being a crowd pleaser. On busy nights, she’d sit on the cashier’s seat at the end of the bar, stab her pencil in the electric sharpener and bury her head in the dinner checks.
She was much more at ease in the afternoons, when the restaurant was closed. She was always there, reading the tabloids or paying the liquor bill or the fish man. We’d gossip about the customers, and she’d tell stories of the old days of the restaurant. But she was never nostalgic. Nor did she seem all that concerned about the future. One afternoon she was on the pay phone when I came in. I listened as she answered questions about the Queens neighborhood where she grew up and the grammar school she went to. After she hung up, I inquired about the call. “An obit writer,” she said offhandedly. “They keep them on file.”
Maybe that’s the reason her restaurant was successful: for Elaine, there was no profit in worrying about tomorrow or yesterday. What mattered to her were the names in the reservation book for that night.
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