That is what New York feels like right now, as though the death of one age ushered in the dawn of another. There\u2019s a sense of teeming\u2014as though all manner of eclectic forms, some new, some revived, are finding their niche. Neglected neighborhoods are springing to life, pop-ups are finding their forever homes, new ideas are occupying old spaces like hermit crabs. A beloved East Village Ukrainian diner, Odessa, dies, only to birth the punk-vegetarian unicorn Superiority Burger in its place. On one stretch of Sixth Avenue, in the Village, I passed two reversals I never dreamed I\u2019d see: In a shuttered chain drugstore, once the scourge of \u201cauthentic New York,\u201d there was a new Central Asian supermarket and hot bar while, down the street, the old Gray\u2019s Papaya, the iconic hot dog shop cruelly replaced in 2014 by a juice bar, had reverted to a slice shop\u2014which is at least a step in the right direction.<\/p>\n
As a lapsed New Yorker,<\/strong> I wanted to see the shape of what was coming to life for myself; as someone who was born in Brooklyn and lived there for four decades, I took some perverse pleasure in limiting my explorations to the borough from which I sensed most of the energy coming: Manhattan.<\/p>\n I have been paying attention to the Brooklyn restaurant scene since it was nascent enough that my article on a Manhattan chef setting up shop in a Park Slope bar warranted the headline: You Want Pesto Aioli With That, Mack? One of the biggest ongoing stories of my career has been the diminished centrality of Manhattan in the dining cosmos. For decades, talent and energy have flowed outward: across the river to Brooklyn and Queens, and thence around the country, to innumerable cities, large and small. Compared to these, the aged bastion could seem staid and hidebound, prisoner to the ruthless demands of its own economies of real estate and attention, an overmanaged old forest with no room for unruly new growth.<\/p>\n But the past few years have brought a kind of turnabout. Restaurateur Kip Green told me that at her successful Brooklyn businesses, Margot and Montague Diner, the crowds have grown older and more conservative in their tastes. In 2018, when Green arrived in New York from South Carolina at 17 years old to attend culinary school, there was no question to which borough she would be headed. \u201cThere was so much more energy in Brooklyn,\u201d she said. \u201cI very rarely went to Manhattan. Now it\u2019s kind of the opposite. It almost feels like everybody left Manhattan and now everybody\u2019s coming back, so there\u2019s fewer rules.\u201d<\/p>\n If you needed a symbol to sum all this up, last September offered that too: That month, the quintessential restaurateur of early-21st-century Brooklyn, Andrew Tarlow, opened his first restaurant in Manhattan. Borgo<\/strong> is a smooth, almost aggressively unquirky trattoria, located on East 27th Street, on the edge of Kips Bay, a neighborhood which may not be the almost literal wilderness of early 2000s Williamsburg, but is nevertheless way off the cool map. The shot of Tarlow\u2019s arrival there was followed, five months later, by the chaser of his announcement that he would close the 21-year-old Marlow & Sons, the restaurant that did as much as any to establish the Brooklyn aesthetic now found around the world. Tarlow downplayed the significance when we talked, insisting that each transaction was a separate matter of real-estate economics, but the resonance is real. Kip Green put it this way: \u201cSo long as Marlow & Sons was open, it felt like there was still space to do anything in Brooklyn.\u201d Now, that sense of infinite possibility felt foreclosed. (After we spoke, Green and her partner announced plans for their next restaurant, Cleo, located in, yes, Manhattan.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That is what New York feels like right now, as though the death of one age ushered in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":126084,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,392,77451,4180,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,8935,14979,77452,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-126083","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-culture","10":"tag-gq-hype","11":"tag-magazine","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-newyork","15":"tag-newyorkcity","16":"tag-ny","17":"tag-nyc","18":"tag-onecolumn","19":"tag-textbelowcentergridwidth","20":"tag-the-must-read","21":"tag-united-states","22":"tag-united-states-of-america","23":"tag-unitedstates","24":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","25":"tag-us","26":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114987003568499574","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}