The White Horse Tavern
I have an interesting relationship with lunch. Ever since I was a kid, I liked lunch above all other meals. When I was in grade school and I had won eight full weeks of summer YMCA day camp (by selling chocolate mints far and wide), we were supposed to bring a bag lunch. My problem was that my graduate student single mother did not have much time for mothering and making my bag lunch fell to the bottom of the priority list. That and her “casual Bohemian” style meant that whatever she had laying around went into the lunch bag rather than the sorts of things I and any other kid wants in the lunch bag. Liverwurst sandwiches and brown bananas were not high value kid lunch items. One day I found out that kids who forgot their lunch got to pass a tray for odd lot items rejected by other kids from their lunch. It said a lot for my mother’s choice of lunches that the passed tray always beat her selections.
As an adult, lunch has ranged from the corporate cafeteria to white tablecloth midtown Manhattan fancy lunches. There have been two times when I recall lunch was a dilemma to me. The first time was in the early venture capital days of 2001-2002. We had offices on 12th Street and Broadway and a fair array of Central Greenwich Village eateries from which to choose. We favored the Bon Vivant luncheonette, which had a strong pea soup with croutons on the menu and all the usual diner food selections. A group of three to six of us would go every day and we would get one bill and whack it up. Everyone ordered what they wanted and we were pretty civilized about not trying to divvy it all up to the penny. A funny thing happened though. We began to notice that no matter what we had or how many in our group, with tip the total always came to twelve dollars per person. How was that possible? We audited the check a few times just to be sure we were being charged properly, but it came up correct. We even tried to lean into the lunch menu one way of the other and nothing changed the $12 per person phenomenon. We wondered if it had something to do with 12th Street. We finally just resigned ourselves to this $12 lunch being a law of nature at the Bon Vivant (note that this occurred nowhere else we went in the area).
I am now in a location in the Financial District (FiDi, since New Yorkers simply must name their parts of the City) and we have a range of choices but if we treat the radius of acceptable distance to go for lunch as two blocks, that makes the list of choices finite. To begin with, we do not count street vendors. Most of us gave up on street meat or dirty-water dogs a long time ago. The proliferation of Middle Eastern cuisine available on the street is quite amazing with shawarma, falafel, shish-kabab and souvlaki available on as-much-as-you-can-eat basis on every street corner. It smells great. It sometimes even tastes great. But the after-effects are unthinkable. There are also other fast food places like two Mexican (Dos Toros and Chipotle) and two Delis (Essen and Flavors), which are fine if you want to carry in your lunch. We have two fine restaurants, the favorite being Ancora Antica (who sponsor me with a name plate with my name on it) and Battery Gardens. They both have nice items on the menu, but we have to be in the mood to drop $30-40/head to do that.
That leaves the White Horse Tavern, which is your olde tyme New York City Irish pub. It’s familiar to you as soon as you walk in. There isn’t a table, chair, booth wall or ceiling that isn’t knotty pine or maple. The bar runs about 80 feet the length of the place. This is a place for working men that want to drink away their afternoons. The steam table to the left as you enter shows you the sausages and bratwursts of the day, sitting in their comfortable beds of sauerkraut. I am sure that if you wanted New England boiled dinner you could get it on any day of the week in the place…so long as you had a draft beer with it.
The White Horse Tavern continues to amuse us so we frequent it whenever we feel like eating out and want to not break the bank. I once asked them for a patty melt and to my surprise they didn’t recognize the dish. With a name like patty I was sure an Irish pub could handle it, but not so. I explained it to them carefully and sent them off to make it, knowing full well that they had all the ingredients and the cooking skill to pull it off. What I got back was a cheeseburger with fried onions on two pieces of rye toast. This was decidedly NOT a patty melt the way Howard Johnson’s had envisioned the meal. We laughed about it and worked my way through shaking my head at their inability to make one of the staples of American life.
The next time we went to the White Horse Tavern, I got lots of ribbing about the patty melt affair, so I developed a strategy to force a proper patty melt out of them. I ordered a grilled cheese sandwich. My plan was to explain to the waitress when it came that if she had just put a beef patty and some fried onions in between the bread and cheese they would have a patty melt. When the grilled cheese came it was two slices of rye toast with some melted cheese in the middle. This was decidedly NOT a grilled cheese sandwich. It was devoid of the grilled portion of the equation. It seemed that they were patently unable to conceive of placing bread with butter on it on the grill, letting it sit long enough to grill up nice and toasty and yummy brown, flipping it over and smashing it down with the spatula a few times. They had a grilling dysfunction at the White Horse Tavern.
Now I am just now reminded of Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces (no not the scene with Sally Struthers where he knocks over the lamps and stuff), the scene in the diner where he wants to get whole wheat toast and is told they don’t have any. Jack says, “I’ll have a chicken salad on whole wheat toast only hold the chicken salad…between your legs!” Maybe something like that would work at the White Horse.
The truth is that I live about 150 feet from my office. I may be the only guy in the world who has to travel farther for lunch out than to go home for lunch. I don’t go home for lunch, but if I want a patty melt I’ve decided that’s what I will have to do. I wonder if the Bon Vivant makes a patty melt?