At this time of year, lawyers at the high-flying firm Dreier LLP might normally step out of their Park Avenue offices and stroll a few blocks south to the Ferrari dealership to pick up a nice set of wheels. But – to paraphrase a Christmas classic – not a creature is stirring these days at the East 55th Street car showroom.
As if Wall Street's swoon and Bernard Madoff's swindles hadn't already dulled the consumptive spirit of the season, last week more than 200 Dreier lawyers lost their jobs when the firm announced it was shutting down, all of them unwitting victims of the malfeasance of their boss, Marc Dreier, whose alleged massive fraud cheated investors out of more than $450-million.
But if times are bad at Ferrari, they may prove to be very good for the city's restaurant industry. During an appearance last week on the Leonard Lopate Show, a popular noontime radio program on the local NPR affiliate WNYC, the French Culinary Institute's founder Dorothy Hamilton said that, since the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September, admission inquiries at her school had doubled from 500 to 1,000 per week. “If you've lost your job in finance, what are you going to do? Look for another job in finance? I don't think so!” she crowed.
In the last few years especially, lawyers and finance professionals who were left unfulfilled by their white-collar jobs have been cashing out and opening up many of the city's bars and restaurants.
With that wave projected to grow, Hamilton sounded almost giddy at her good fortune. It was a little unbecoming.
It's true, many high-end dining rooms have been quiet this fall, and experts are forecasting gloom for the beginning of the year, with dozens of places closing, but foodies are licking their chops at the prospect of the falling real-estate market removing one of the major obstacles to restaurant survival. Last week, the parent company of Honey declared bankruptcy. Reports suggested the move was designed, in part, to negotiate more favourable rents.)
Like many others, Hamilton suggested that New Yorkers' definition of “tough times” tends to be relative. Sure, they'll be cutting back on their Hamptons house shares, but tight money isn't suddenly going to mend their famed estrangement with their kitchens. They'll just be looking for better value when they eat out.
Affordable is the new buzzword: Last month, when I interviewed Toronto superchef Susur Lee about his New York outpost, Shang, which he was about to open at the Thompson Hotel on the Lower East Side, he used the word about half a dozen times. Tom Valenti, a popular chef who led the charge for good restaurants on the once culinarily barren Upper West Side, is still serving entrees in the $30 to $40 range at his bistro Ouest, but his new neighbourhood place the West Branch is specializing in comfort food at about half that price. It's an instant hit: On an average weeknight, you can easily wait an hour for a table.
The co-host of the reality show Top Chef, Tom Colicchio, said on the Lopate Show that good restaurants will survive if they know how to provide value. Colicchio, a straight-shooting laser-eyed chef who runs three restaurants in town and others around the country, has apparently become an inspirational figure among those mulling a career change: Like Woodward and Bernstein in All the President's Men, who spurred thousands of American kids into making a living scribbling for newspapers, Top Chef and its cooking reality-show siblings are apparently making kitchen work look glamorous. Anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant would find this hilarious, but then reality TV's grip on reality has always been tenuous.
