During those couple of years alone in my small apartment, I would cook very simple meals for myself but I was not yet really as interested in cooking as I am today. I mostly made pasta marinara, chicken cutlets, and the like. I don’t ever remember even using the oven. I cooked everything on the narrow four-burner gas stove. When I didn’t cook, I mostly ate in coffee shops, burger joints, or Cuban/Chinese places. （I will address the latter in a moment.）
At coffee shops, like John’s on Sixty-Seventh Street, whose walls and cabinets still retained the original white enamel of the 1930s, one could order a breakfast of fried eggs, corned beef hash, toast, home fries, orange juice, and a bottomless cup of coffee for about three dollars. For lunch, at the Cherry Restaurant—which was really a glorified Asian-owned coffee shop that also had a full Chinese menu—a soup and a sandwich, like a bowl of split pea and a grilled cheese or a turkey club, was filling and affordable. Dinner out was usually at a burger joint like Big Nick’s, which sold enormous, greasy, bloody burgers on plump buns that to this day I still salivate over. （I am actually salivating as I write this just thinking about the goddamn things.） After that heart-stopping repast, either alone or with friends, I would take in a movie for about two bucks or pay a visit to the bowling alley on Seventy-Sixth and Amsterdam that had remained miraculously unchanged since the 1940s. Here I would drink Budweiser or Miller High Life beer from long-neck bottles; eat American cheese sandwiches on white bread, though I had just eaten practically half a cow an hour earlier; bowl the night away; and never spend more than ten pieces of the great bourgeois long green.
Like the West Village, the Upper West Side also had a large gay community, and Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues had many independently owned and operated gay bars and restaurants. Unfortunately, in the mid-and late eighties gentrification took hold, and many buildings were turned into condominiums and co-ops or simply demolished to make way for new, poorly designed dwellings for the up-and-coming at prices that most people could not afford. The skyrocketing rents caused by gentrification also coincided with the AIDS epidemic, forcing many gay-owned businesses to fold just as the disease was taking the lives of many of those who owned them and decimating the ranks of their devoted patrons.
As the profile of the neighborhood became less diverse in every way, the independent businesses that supported the inhabitants and gave the area its particular flavor went the way of so much of America and became homogenized. One by one, old coffee shops like John’s and the Cherry Restaurant disappeared and were quickly replaced by a Starbucks or some version thereof. Independently owned hardware and clothing stores were replaced by huge chains, as were individually owned pharmacies, shoe stores, bookshops, and barbershops, many of the latter with interiors that were unchanged since their heyday of the 1930s and ’40s. The beautiful old World War II–era bowling alley was demolished and turned into a cheaply decorated “upscale” pool hall. What were also lost were many little eateries that reflected the diverse ethnic and cultural profile of the neighborhood. There were quite a few Jewish delicatessens that served classic dishes like matzo ball soup, potato latkes, pastrami sandwiches （although none nearly as good as those from the now sadly vanished Carnegie Deli）， and marble babke. To that point, let us leave the Upper West Side for a moment and head about twenty blocks downtown so I might mourn the loss of the aforementioned Gan Eden of delicatessens.
The Carnegie Deli was founded in 1937 and became an institution beloved by New Yorkers and tourists alike. Usually if any restaurant in any city is discovered and frequented by tourists, native patrons will take their business elsewhere. Yet with the Carnegie Deli this was not the case. Native New Yorkers might have gone at odd hours when the endless line to enter had disappeared and the dining room wasn’t so crowded that it became what seemed to me to be a firetrap, but they still went. And the thing is, one couldn’t help but go there. Yes, the food was good, but it was also a way to get a dose of old New York while too much of the city was making itself brand-new again and again and again. Often, if I had a meeting, had an audition, or was performing on Broadway, I would stop into the Carnegie Deli for a bowl of chicken soup （with noodles and matzo balls, thank you very much, I will have both） and a tower of a pastrami sandwich. In every Jewish deli the sandwiches are huge amounts of meat or chicken or tuna salad between two pieces of bread. （Please go on YouTube and find the brilliant comic stylings of Nick Kroll and John Mulaney performing their hilarious sketches in coffee shops revolving around “too much tuna!” Your life will be changed for the better.） But the Carnegie Deli took it to the extreme. Their motto was, “If you’ve finished your meal, we’ve done something wrong.” Yet although the sandwiches were monstrous and almost anyone would have been hard-pressed to even get the behemoth of rye and still-warm pastrami in their mouth, let alone finish one, you were not allowed to share a single order. So a friend and I would each order a sandwich, eat as much as we could, and then take the rest to our respective homes for a midnight snack. If I were really peckish I would order the Frisbee-size latkes with a side of applesauce as well. Waiting for my meal to arrive, I would sip a beer or a cream soda and partake of the pickles floating in the small stainless-steel bowl of room-temperature brine that sat on every table. Searching for my catch, I preferred the half-sour pickles; I tried not to think about when the murky liquid had last been refreshed or how many hands prior to mine had fished around for “just the right one.” On occasion, if I were feeling particularly Chekhovian, I would order the borscht instead of the chicken soup. Any of it was good. All of it was good. The Carnegie Deli’s food warmed you up on a frigid February night after you had been to a Broadway theater or seen a dance performance at City Center just a couple of blustery blocks away. It coated your belly and comforted your soul when you popped in late at night after a few too many at a cheap downtown bar, en route to the one-bedroom apartment you thought you’d be living in for the rest of your life if someone didn’t give you a job soon.