New on the Menu: Come Try Our Vegetarian Reuben and Vegetarian Turkey Sandwich

Now serving BE Hive vegan Turkey and Pastrami! Come try our vegetarian sandwiches at Fat Rabbit: Vegan Turkey, Lettuce, Tomato and Mayo on Texas Toast (add bacon, or make it vegan. We got you!) Or, try our Vegetarian Reuben- Vegan Pastrami, Sauerkraut, Mustard, Swiss on Pain D'Avignon Rye. Served with a pickle :)

What to read next:

BE Hive Vegan Meats- Finally, A Cure for the Common Coldcut

Sam’s love letter to the Turkey Sandwich, and BE Hive’s mission to bring it back from the dead, one seitan slice at a time. Including interviews with Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyond Meat and BEn Stix, the visionary behind BE Hive Vegan Meats and Cheeses.

This is the story of The Turkey Sandwich. Once the boon of any bodega, the “healthier option” served simplest and most satisfying with lettuce, tomato and mayo on a hard roll, The Turkey Sandwich is now in decline. But BE Hive Vegan Meats has plans to resurrect Deli Meat and maybe save our burning planet in the process.

Read More

Menu Highlight:

Calling all pickle lovers, come try our new Pickle Martini

Try our pickle martini made with handcrafted brine from Dilli by Lilli, a bootstrapped artisanal pickle company that's way better than anything you find on a shelf. Come get sipping.

New this Summer

Save room for dessert.

We’re serving two new sweet additions to the menu: a rich, velvety Coffee Flan with caramel sauce and a classic Crème Brûlée with a perfectly caramelized sugar crust.

Complete Fat Rabbit Secret Menu

Everyday Happy Hour: $9-10 drinks, $9-12 bites, $12- $16 combos: Martini & Fries, Michelada & Sliders, and Bud & Fried Bites.

Try our new beers on tap: Three's Brewery Vliet Pilsner and Transmitter IPA

Monday: All Day Happy Hour!

Tuesday: $13 Old Fashioned and Negronis

Wednesday: $13 House Martinis

Thursday: $12 Floridita Daiquiris

Sunday: $4 Shitty Beers + Drag Race reruns

Book your Reservation

This is the story of The Turkey Sandwich. Once the boon of any bodega, the “healthier option” served simplest and most satisfying with lettuce, tomato and mayo on a hard roll, The Turkey Sandwich is now in decline. But BE Hive Vegan Meats has plans to resurrect Deli Meat and maybe save our burning planet in the process.

Chef Mario opens a package of BE Hive vegan turkey with an expression of grave doubt and a degree of disdain. Mario is one of those cooks who likes it busy. Like a martial artist who prefers a worthy adversary to an easy knock-out, he looks at the Vegan Meat like it’s a White Belt in need of an ass-whooping.

He breaks a piece off for himself and one for me. We each bite into it. And surprisingly, Mario doesn’t spit it out. Still, he is annoyed.

“Just try making one sandwich,” I insist.

Chef Mario is no stranger to my requests for experimentation. Sometimes our experiments make it onto the Specials Menu. But more often they go out with trash. So, Mario is not wrong to roll his eyes.

And this is what? Vegan Meat?! Vegan Deli Meat? He is duly incredulous. There are things one should never approximate, things no science can improve upon or equal, like honey or cinnamon. And yes, like a Turkey Sandwich, a thing born perfect.

But over the years, the Turkey changed. I remember when it used to be light and airy, how it could fluff like a mattress in between the bread. The golden days of youth, when, if a slice ever fell from my sandwich, I would pick it right up and eat it.

Now, when a bit of turkey falls from my roll, I stuff it back in urgently, as if it were a sailor tossed from a ship.

It’s not just late-stage capitalism spazzing out in industrial farms with genetically modified poultry that can’t two-step, it’s also the evolution of preservatives and additives, applied like adhesive to the over-plumped gelatinous rugby balls that today sit behind the deli counter.

So, when I bite into Mario’s sandwich made with BE Hive Vegan Turkey Meat and taste the sandwich of my youth, I have an emotional reaction. An unfamiliar flavor of hope enters my body and I need to know more.

* * *

It starts with a Nashville band, Born Empty. A hard-hitting post-punk pop metal outfit, with prog tendencies, and that kind of glistening musicianship that shreds without requiring guitar solos.

Consider their initials BE, and if everyone in the band agrees, suddenly you have a prefix, an article of language, a pimp moniker, and maybe even a way of life. Shows at The BE Hive and vegan potlucks. The Born Empty Hive Mind is a thing. Over years of touring and cooking vegan meals for their hosts, lightning eventually struck their kite, and in a quantum leap this group of rockers pioneered a line of plant-based Deli Meats that is shockingly good.

BEn Stix, drummer for Born Empty, is now the driving force behind BE Hive Vegan Meats and Cheeses. I believe he is sitting on a gold mine. I ask to invest. I wanna cozy up to to this star. I wanna say I knew it first. Because the seitan deli meats he sells are like no other vegan product. And in the case of Sliced Turkey, BE Hive tastes better Boar’s Head!

“I think it’s really important that our products are surprisingly good. There’s so many subpar vegan products on the market that when you try something vegan, you’re going to expect it to be sub par and kinda lame.”

Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyond Meat, concurs.

“There was a big flood of subpar products,” says Brown. “Everyone got in on it. Even Hormel got in on it. Tyson at one point owned 5% of my company. They were very interested.”

The rapid proliferation of vegan meat companies going to market in the wake of the giant success of Beyond and Impossible constituted a spike in the industry everyone has been suffering since. From the big players, like Beyond, to the smaller start-ups like BE Hive, that expansion, too quick and reckless, left everybody with some distasteful stretch marks.

Venture capital dove in, looking for quick returns and to grab some market share from Beyond and Impossible. Many companies lost their way, lost their ideals and ultimately their business.

Meanwhile, the Beef industry took aim at them all, pushing a false narrative that plant-based meats are less healthy than real meat. Even though a plant-based meat like Beyond has 75% less saturated fat, zero cholesterol and no carcinogens.

Regardless, the campaign seems to have worked. Gone are the days of Brooklyn barbeques where all the carnivores show up proffering packs of Beyond and Impossible products. The stock price for Beyond Meat, once $234 per share, is now sixty cents.

* * *

Despite having a brand with global recognition, Ethan is back to Bootstrapping. And as we chat, I can tell he’s not fettered, and is eager to take on new challenges, to adapt. He’s having fun because he believes we are in the economic phase of a cultural-commercial revolution he terms The Slope of Enlightenment.

Like the lightbulb. The first wave led to a frantic expansion into the homes of the rich. But after the DC wiring burned down a couple of mansions, commercial sales plummeted. Until the switch to AC current. Then began the Slope …

Brown is positive the plant-based meat market will return. “Over the long run we feel very good,” he says. “It’s just a question of surviving until then.”

What is at stake? Planetary wellness? Sort of. It’s the future of the Turkey Sandwich if you ask me. It’s the sanity of these dreamers, clinging on to a belief that their product can change the world.

Ben can swat cymbals, rapid fire his double kick, and skitter across toms like Neil Peart. Which means, he doesn’t have to be living in the vegan purgatory he created. Watching the world burn while sitting on a product that could not only prevent those same fires but also light the world on fire with its killer taste. Ben could be a session guy or on the road with any number of Nashville bands. But he must be delusional, like any entrepreneur, Like Ethan, like me, he knows he must delude himself to take on such a risk. To duke it out selling vegan meats in a market with an evaporating floor.

“In a mission-driven business like this,” says Ben, “the only way to survive is to make it profitable so you can keep it going.”

Because, in a weird way, Ben is doing this business for so many things, so many wild aspirations, and profit is not the central motive.

Both BEn and Ethan wrestle with fears of their business going belly up. Because these types of visionary entrepreneurs are never out of the woods. They live their lives taking intrepid baby steps toward a vision that consumes them.

“Having a vegan company grow that can divert dollars away from places like Proctor and Gamble, Hormel and Tyson,” says BEn, “I think that’s punk as fuck…If I could change the world, that’s what I’m looking for.”

Because the math is “producing a kilogram of beef contributes over 22 times more to climate crisis than producing a kilogram of rice and 63 times more than a kilogram of wheat,” according to a landmark study in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

That means, with equal CO2 output, BE Hive can produce 63 Vegan Turkey Sandwiches for one Roast Beef Sandwich.

According to Beyond promotional materials, “Increasing plant-based food consumption is the single most powerful tool our global society has to take control over our health, preserve our planet and support the welfare of the rest of life on this beautiful Earth.”

And even if that statement is a tad grandiose, it is born of facts. It’s not strictly about not eating meat. It’s about eating less of it; changing our eating habits so that we can reduce CO2 production and allow for the restoration of ecosystems.

So, what if BE Hive turkey replaces Boar’s Head? What would we gain? A forest the size of Maryland? Some small percentage of oxygen returned to the atmosphere. A city or two not torched by wildfires.

Don’t think about that. Let your palate be your guide.

* * *

In addition to their wholesale operation, which just landed in Fat Rabbit this month, BE Hive also operates a popular sandwich shop in Nashville, TN. And they just opened another in Austin, TX. Their sandwich game is so strong, Ben estimates between 60-70% of their customers are omnivores, or flexitarians, as Ethan dubs them.

And they are not shy about taking on all comers with their WTF line of goodies. Like their WTF Is McDonalds egg sandwich and their WTF is Chic-Fil-A fried chicken sandwich. These guys are looking big chains in the face and punching them in the nose with vegan sandwiches that beat the carnivorous competition on taste alone.

Ethan’s business is expanding also. As great swaths of Europe are on fire, Beyond is moving their vegan chicken nuggets into McDonalds throughout France. And they are finally able to wholesale their product as affordably as real chicken.

“Imagine when we can do it cheaper,” says Ethan grinning like the Cheshire Cat, with a few more stock options, I’m guessing, in his back pocket. The man is bullish. And like BEn, ever ambitious to scale up, to beat the margins of the meat industry which knocked him down with nothing short of villainous intent.

We at Fat Rabbit are week one selling BE Hive Vegan Turkey meat, and Mario agrees it’s good. And so does everyone on the staff. And so far, customers seem to be quite pleased. Whatever BE Hive has done to get here, there’s a good chance these guys are sitting on a gold mine.

It’s all about removing the starch.

With Beyond’s process, the starch and the protein separate naturally, a granular mutual sifting that occurs due to the variation in size of the different granules. What could be more natural?

For seitan, however, a dough is made then rinsed until the starch washes away. It’s like bread with missing ingredients, like matzah, like something so basic, a component material, or as Ben says, a whole food. Once the starch is removed, spices are added. And oila, that’s it. You got Vegan Turkey!!!

But, buyer be ware. The seitan is lethally glutenous, like gluten incarnate, like pasta. And before I try to squirm my way into the IPO, I ask BEn how that plays with the rising tide of people with gluten allergy and disdain.

“It’s surprisingly not a problem,” says BEn. Because BE Hive uses only flour from Australia with no glyphosates. Which are what, I wonder?

Apparently, Americans with gluten allergies can go to Italy on vacation and eat pasta for ten days with no problem. Or, to Paris and eat baguettes. Because Europe prohibits the herbicides like glyphosates, and additives to extend shelf-life such as potassium bromates and azodicarbonamide.

I had forgotten that. The timing of it all. How we used to eat bread on a timetable from the day of purchase to its consumption or decline. I am old enough to remember fresh foods. We had a butcher for Christ’s sakes!

Back then things looked as they were in America. The Turkey Sandwich was King. Now the giant loafs of cubic ham instill fear in me. And the logs of turkey drip. Smell them and discover subtle notes of unholy preservatives. I can no longer abide the bodega standards.

Thankfully, I don’t have to compromise anymore, because BE Hive Vegan Meats has the cure for the common cold cut. And the Turkey Sandwich has returned, in good health and with better taste.

Here’s what’s happening this month at my diner in Brooklyn. →

Read Now

WORLD CUP WATCH PARTY

Looking to secure a spot to watch the finals? The World Cup Final is Sunday, July 19th, and Fat Rabbit is the place to watch it.

Reserve your table now, spots are limited.

Book now on Resy

What to read next:

On restaurants in New York: The Owner of Lula Mae Plays by Neighborhood Rules

This is Sam’s account of The Lion’s quick burnout, weighed against the slower climb of Lula Mae, where owner Roof has been building a real neighborhood spot service by service.

Roof and his partner rent a U-Haul. They drive it into the West Village and park where West 9^th street dead ends into 6^th Ave. It’s a T-junction doomed to constantly clot. Regardless, Roof leaves the big box truck in a turn lane, in a spot where there is no spot. It’s the kind of illegal parking that sends cabbies into a postal mode.

As he struts away, the cacophony of horns begins.

Read More

Menu Highlight:

Weekend Brunch Chilaquiles

Join us for brunch Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 10am to 3pm, for some of the best chilaquiles in Brooklyn. If you haven't had them yet, you're missing out.

New this Summer

Two new beers on tap: Transmitter IPA and Threes Brewery Vliet Pilsner.

The Transmitter IPA is the perfect match for the Cabbage Patch Kid (fried chicken, house coleslaw, pickled jalapeno, mustard/mayo sauce on brioche), and the Vliet Pilsner pairs well with the shrimp ceviche.

Complete Fat Rabbit Secret Menu

Everyday Happy Hour: $9-10 drinks, $9-12 bites, $12- $16 combos: Martini & Fries, Gretchen Weiner and Talea Pils, Michelada & Sliders, and Bud & Fried Bites

Monday: All Day Happy Hour!

Tuesday: $13 Old Fashioned and Negronis

Wednesday: $13 House Martinis

Thursday: $12 Floridita Daiquiris

Sunday: $4 Shitty Beers + Drag Race reruns

Book your Reservation

Roof and his partner rent a U-Haul. They drive it into the West Village and park where West 9^th street dead ends into 6^th Ave. It’s a T-junction doomed to constantly clot. Regardless, Roof leaves the big box truck in a turn lane, in a spot where there is no spot. It’s the kind of illegal parking that sends cabbies into a postal mode.

As he struts away, the cacophony of horns begins.

Roof has come to exhume some pricey leather banquettes from a restaurant I’m building out mid-Pandemic. Custom tan leather seating that lines the open expanse of a legendary dining room. A place with a big history and a cadre of high-profile operators; where Barbra Streisand made a name for herself, where Bob Dylan once performed and where Lindsay Lohan fled through the back alley to avoid paparazzi escorted by my friend Barry.

The place was The Lion. In fact, it was the Lion twice. Once as a bohemian cabaret in the ‘60s and later a reinvented tavern for the 2010 jet set where the Yankees dined on the regular and Madonna once refused to give up her table because Giorgio Armani was outside waiting for one. My poor friend Barry running back and forth trying to keep the peace.

When Barry comes to visit during the buildout, I am filthy, layered in sawdust. We tour the deserted spaces. No workers on site. Just us, we stroll from the mezzanine to the private dining room through some sliding bookshelves, where there is a bathroom that has a gold sink. A gold sink that has been there for many decades. As I wash my hands, Barry tells stories of sordid happenings on that sink.

I’m willing to venture that in this late stage of NYC capitalism, most restaurants are opening where an old restaurant used to be. Such was the case with & Son Steakhouse, and in order for my client to etch his businesses’ identity separate from the previous iterations of restaurant, he decided to remove all 60 linear feet of perfect-condition leather banquettes. This is swank seating worth upwards of $50k.

I’m a Bootstrapper and a Jew, so it’s difficult for me to see so much good inventory go to waste. Furthermore, it would cost thousands of dollars just to haul the shit away. And even though that tab would be paid by the client, it unsettles me because I dislike wasting my client’s money nearly as much as my own.

So, I put out the word to a couple of people who had used me as a consultant. Roof bit. Immediately.

And now, here we are trying to unbolt these things before the U-Haul, now gathering tickets, gets towed. And it isn’t easy. Whoever had put them together used a bolting system meant to withstand earthquake and Armageddon. I start to sweat, feeling foolish. I should have inspected the undercarriage before letting these guys rent the truck.

I am on the verge of suggesting they come back, which would mean they never come back, when, instead, I unsheathe my Sawzall. Forlorn, I start ripping through some gorgeous solid white Oak. The mad buzz and spume of sawdust unnerving, only mitigated by Roof, not a carpenter, saying, “It’s OK. We’ll figure out a way to put them back together.”

Roof! Fucking Bootstrapper alright!

Eventually we start carrying the segments into the truck. They are of varying lengths. The corners nearly impossible to Tetris into the box. How they will be arranged in their new space suddenly requires other calculations which no one has done. And I feel a degree of pity for these guys going to all this trouble for a bunch of furniture that might not even fit in their space.

* * *

When I arrive for our interview, Roof is banging out admin on his laptop. The gorgeous restaurant he pioneered, Lula Mae, is empty except for a new young chef who is there prepping for service. Roof has two hours until open, and he’s giving me one of them. Bold.

Lula Mae, is named after Roof’s grandmother, the Southern matriarch who cared for his brood and was the epitome of a welcoming spirit.

The name is also that of the literary character who goes by the moniker Holly Golightly. And like Miss Golightly, Lula Mae is warm, welcoming, full of dazzle and aims to please.

Especially when the owner is behind the bar. The drinks are spot on. The conversation shoots around the room as if from a bubble gun. And if you hang out long enough, if you’re a good spender, Roof might pour you a shot.

If you’re lucky, he might tell you something about himself. Roof has published four or five novels. He can’t remember exactly how many. One of them, The Blank Page and the Details I read a few years ago. And it resonates with me still.

Is it any surprise that a guy with four or five novels under his belt is good for banter?

Roof is a romantic. Mentions JD Salinger as an archetype for the main character in The Blank Page. Loves the idea of creating something great and then exiting before having to deal with the hassle of success.

But the restaurant business is nothing but hassles. And now, with Lula Mae, Roof has success.

* * *

It’s getting close to open and the young chef is fretting oysters. Lula Mae does one of the best oyster nights in the city, served with Koh Kong Sauce, Culantro and Fried Shallot. Tonight is oyster night, and the delivery has yet to arrive.

Roof harbors the bad news like the trunk of a Sequoia unwavering in a maelstrom. Need be, he can go to Duncan’s, a landmark fish market on Myrtle Avenue that retails oysters for similar prices to their wholesaler. The oysters are essential. And tonight’s service will be a flop if they don’t get more. But at $2 per, they are all just craggy lost leaders.

When Lula Mae launched, they hit big with a nouveaux Cambodian cuisine featuring killer Lemongrass Beef Skewers, a Crispy Tofu with Soy Chianking Vinegar and inventive dishes like their Hamachi Crudo with Cooled Beet Broth, Serrano, Orange and Cilantro Stem. The crowds came out nightly, teeming fashionables on the sidewalk, chatting boozed up and too loud. There was buzz in the streetlight, fabrics glistening in the smoke.

The Lion, the second Lion, had a similar origin story. The numbers Barry quotes are boggling. The investment paid back in the first quarter, and then some. Numbers in the millions.

“People used to just give me money,” says Barry, a former manager at The Lion.

“What, for a table?” I ask.

“No, man. Those things were booked out months in advance. I mean they just gave me money.”

Those were the good years. Before The Lion crashed and burned. A common story guys like Roof know all about.

Roof, wisely, had been concerned about Lula Mae’s early success.

“We probably grew a little too fast, in my opinion” he says. “Because I really wanted to get to know everybody that came through the door. I wanted to bartend, you know, become this neighborhood restaurant, that every year was building and building and building.”

But the problem was: “We just got slammed right away. We were full every night. We were alienating the community more than we were helping them get in the door.”

A similar scenario occurred at The Lion. People on the block couldn’t eat there. Double parked limousines belching CO2 all night and idling paparazzi in a grotesque throng. All of it taught Barry a lesson:

“All restaurants are neighborhood restaurants,” he tells me. “I don’t care if you’re Popeyes in Bushwick or Le Cirque. If you don’t have the neighborhood with you, you will ultimately fail.”

Because when the celebrities moved on to the next hot spot, The Lion was left with the neighborhood.

“And guess what,” says Barry. “They hated us. We were closed after three months.”

* * *

As the U-Haul muscles into the right lane and the traffic resumes to its bump and grind, I feel a sense of relief. Back in the dining room, with the banquettes gone, a new vacancy lets slip more ghosts from the many restaurants that operated there. It’s wistful, to imagine Streisand as a starlet, Dylan a youth and Barry peeling back a chain link fence for Lohan to slip through.

Lula Mae also resides in a place where many restaurants launched. Looking out the front window, can Roof see the elevated train that used to darken Myrtle Ave? If anybody has a sense of Brooklyn history, he must, having banged out drinks for twenty plus years in various dives and fine dining spots, as Brooklyn transformed yet again, and went through another boom cycle. We wonder daily if a bust is around the corner? How long can we hold on to our dream? One good night keeps you going. A slow rainy one can plummet you into the doldrums.

Roof and I discuss how the industry has changed. Prime cost has become the guru’s signpost. If your prime cost is more than 65%, they say you aren’t running a business, you’re running an expensive hobby.

“Well, hobbies you enjoy,” says Roof. “If you’re running that (a restaurant with 65% prime cost) it’s no fun.”

The margins are tighter than ever. And the risk the same, high, and even higher than before with vanity players mucking up the standards. Standards that evolved over the past century, that we are beholden to. And operators rotate through locations like it’s a game of Duck, Duck, Goose. How to make a business stick, to become a PJ Clarke’s or a Fanelli, is like yanking Excalibur from stone.

Roof is now on the other side of early success. Having survived it, he’s right where he wants to be. Behind the bar. Building his business. Each day a new battle on the same field. Things have fallen into place, like that little bit of history in the back room, where extracted memories of a restaurant that failed its neighborhood reside, the tan leather banquettes of The Lion that Roof did put back together and that somehow fit his neighborhood spot perfectly.

Here’s what’s happening this month at my diner in Brooklyn. →

Read Now

Menu Highlight: It’s Spritz-O’Clock

Happy Pride Month, New York. Check out our rainbow of spritzes — only $12 all month long.

What to read next:

Little Histories, Profiles and Untold Stories from the Restaurant Industry.

After years in the restaurant industry Sam Barron began interviewing the people who make it happen. Not just chefs and owners, but the people behind the scenes who keep restaurants running.

Nothing is more fun than the restaurant business. It’s like making Hollywood movies or being a rock star. Very few succeed. In fact, 90% of all restaurants will fail in the first two years. These broken dreams and busted bank accounts leave in their wake a number of suicides, either by hand or by bottle. Most folks in the industry will remember when Brooklyn’s great restaurateur and pioneer took his own life.

Bootstrap will return next month with an inspirational profile of Dio, the refrigeration guru, the literal Coolest Guy in Brooklyn. This month, however, we invite you to consider some of the industry’s harsh realities most often ignored by media outlets that overwhelmingly favor fluff pieces about corporate expansions and first-timers who happened upon a recipe book in their grandmother’s attic. If you prefer light reading, we harbor no grudge against you. But if you are interested in the struggles inside the food and bev biz, we invite you to read the first chapter of Soft Opening, a novel by Sam Barron, which details his misadventures in opening a restaurant in 2012.

Read more

Secret Menu Reveal, available NOW:

Fried Chicken Sandwich & Spritzes

Summer has a new uniform. Our Cabbage Patch Kid sandwich comes with coleslaw, pickled jalapeno and a mustard-mayo sauce, and pairs perfectly with one of our Pride Month spritzes: colorful, refreshing, and only $12.

Also new this June:

Shrimp Ceviche, Gazpacho, and two BEERS ON TAP.

Complete Fat Rabbit Secret Menu

Everyday Happy Hour: $8-10 drinks, $9-12 bites, $14 combos: Martini & Fries, Sloop & Sliders, Bud & Fried Bites

Monday: All Day Happy Hour!

Tuesday: $13 Old Fashioned and Negronis

Wednesday: $13 House Martinis

Thursday: $12 Floridita Daiquiris

Sunday: $4 Shitty Beers + Drag Race reruns

Book your Reservation

New Year’s Day 2013

When I press my thumb to Jimmy’s wrist, the body is still warm, but I can’t find a pulse. It’s the eye that terrifies me. How it looks at nothing. Five minutes ago, I was sure my life could get no worse.

I should have been bracing myself for this inevitability. Jimmy was old enough to expire at any moment, for sure, but he was vital for a guy in his sixties. Just last week he was bulldogging a hole in a brick wall, cradling the rotary hammer like Schwarzenegger spraying the forest with a machine gun. He was slugging beers and twisting smokes. Tickling his girl’s ass and telling jokes. Shit, he was the loon who traipsed through Hurricane Sandy with a blind white rat in his black leather satchel.

When I arrived at the restaurant, I had assumed he was sleeping off his debauchery, so I went to the kitchen, filled a five-quart Cambro with ice cold water. Then I leaned my phone against a bottle of Jim Beam and pressed record. But someone had flipped the breaker on Jimmy’s nervous system and as the water pressure dented his cheeks, the ice cubes skittered off his face without eliciting a blink or twitch. No comedic groan or guffaw, just slow thoughtless drips in the aftermath and his pasty silver curls clinging to his gray skin.

Now his body lays prone and peaceful on the banquette at table 67. A supine cadaver mummifying in black jeans, a white tee and a Versace leather crew jacket. One thing about death, it confirms a person’s destiny. Even in the eyes of the faithless.

I’m on the spectrum with faith. I’m not sure where Jimmy is currently. The only existential certainty here is that, from now on, he will always be seated at the party table. No matter how many people come to dine here, I will never be able to unsee him as he is now: tucked in the corner behind the grand padauk and ash tabletop–a woodwork he and I built together at Bully’s shop.

There are things I would have liked to say to him. To let him know how sorry I am; to explain how opening restaurants makes people insane, that the industry can send owners over the edge. Like Dorian, the Brooklyn pioneer who sparked the comfort food renaissance. The genius who reimagined mac and cheese in the aughts and found a way to make short rib—a cheap cut—more delectable than rib eye.

Dorian used to drop by my bar, The Double, to chop it up, have some drink, and share industry gossip. Then, one night, he drove back to his childhood home, parked his red Saab in the driveway and left his brains in the back seat. How could a guy that successful shoot himself? Everyone at the memorial in Williamsburg was asking the same question. And they all knew the answer. It’s the nature of the business.

I want to tell Jimmy about that. I want him to know I’m sorry for losing my temper. For blaming him, for cutting him out. For firing him. Clearly, it wasn’t worth it.

Now I don’t know who to call. I don’t know why I’m the person who has to clean up this mess. I have an email address for Linda, Jimmy’s ex-wife, but that seems too ineffectual. I search the room for his phone. Maybe I can unlock it? Then a glint of orange catches my eye. Four empty pill bottles stand uncapped and neatly placed on the wait station shelf. The plastic cylinders catch the long light of the morning sun, their vacancy emphasized by the powdery residue left behind.

Fuck.

I call 911. I recount the events. The person on the other end wants to know if the victim is still breathing. I’m not sure. His face is like rubber. I lower my head to it, but I don’t feel any warm air. Or maybe I do. My mind is racing for alternate realities, rewinding time, imagining a fantasy world where it might be undone.

“I can’t tell,” I say. The operator lets me know an ambulance is already on the way. And cops? Will there be an investigation? I can’t really afford to have the cops sniffing around here. The landlord can kick me out for any illegal activity–it’s in the lease. Jimmy is not supposed to be sleeping here. His drugs aren’t supposed to be done here. Suicide is a crime.

I’ve got Band-aids on my swollen head, and there are scratches all over my arms from falling down a flight of stairs last night. The embarrassment still stings. I’m not feeling very credible right now. Like I could get sucked into the clutches of the law just for being on the scene. What if someone insinuates that I murdered him? Is there a motive? Sure, there is. What have I touched? Who is my alibi? The only person I can think of is my daughter, Ali. How will she reconcile herself with a father who has failed her?

I lift his arm. It is heavy, not yet stiff. A teardrop falls and lands on our laced fingers. His mouth hangs open, tongue pale and flaccid. And there on his face is the blush of livor mortis- the subcutaneous pooling blood.

I’m sorry, Jimmy. I’m sorry if I had anything to do with your decision. But you are an asshole for doing this, for doing it here. The only considerate thing you did was not leave a note.

Instinctively, I snap a photo of the four empty bottles. I don’t read the scripts. I’m sure it was a good trip, Jimmy. Were you back at The Fillmore? Did you fall in love again with Maggie? Did you have a last chat with Hendrix before it all went dark? Did you get to listen, one more time, to the greatest guitar solo of all time? I hope you did, pal.

Yes, I wanted you gone. But not like this. You should have learned. History does not stop for you or for anyone. And as insignificant as my life is, in the scheme of things—in the scheme of Brooklyn restaurants—it won’t matter to anyone if this restaurant ever opens, but I can’t stop for you Jimmy.

This concludes the first chapter of Soft Opening, a novel by Sam Barron. Next month, we'll be back with an inspirational profile of Dio, the refrigeration guru and literal coolest guy in Brooklyn.

Here’s what’s happening this month at my diner in Brooklyn. →

Read Now

Menu Highlight: Loaded Tots and Gin Daisy

The unlikely duo for someone who wants a little bit of everything. Crispy loaded tots topped with shredded cheddar, pico de gallo, and sour cream, with the option to add bacon (if you’re doing things right). Pair them with our Gin Daisy, a bright and refreshing mix of gin, lemon, house-made strawberry syrup, orange liqueur, and soda water that tastes like New York finally warming up again.

Secret Menu Reveal coming this May:

Aguachile Shrimp & Spritzes

Patio season is upon us, and we’re leaning all the way in with fresh aguachile shrimp and colorful spritzes.

Complete Fat Rabbit Secret Menu

Everyday Happy Hour: $8-10 drinks, $9-12 bites, $14 combos: Martini & Fries, Sloop & Sliders, Bud & Fried Bites

Monday: All Day Happy Hour!

Tuesday: $13 Old Fashioned and Negronis

Wednesday: $13 House Martinis

Thursday: $12 Floridita Daiquiris

Sunday: $4 Shitty Beers + Drag Race reruns

Book your Reservation

What to read next:

Little Histories, Profiles and Untold Stories from the Restaurant Industry.

After years in the restaurant industry Sam Barron began interviewing the people who make it happen. Not just chefs and owners, but the people behind the scenes who keep restaurants running.

Mas Tacos started out as a food truck and a dream. This is Sam’s reflection of his time with the founder, Teresa Mason.

MAS TACOS

Teresa has been blow torching a briar of four-foot-tall weeds. Dressed in tan Carhart overalls, thin strips of tank top, bare-shouldered and auburn hair blazing in the sun, she looks like a metal worker having just gone on a rampage. But when she approaches the low iron fence of her front yard, suddenly dainty Southern salutations pour from her lips like bird song.

She’s vital, vivacious and slightly devilish, so when our mutual friend goes to the back of his 4Runner to make space for her to sit, she jumps in the driver’s seat, looks at me and winks. Then she stomps on the clutch and makes grumblings with the engine like she might drive off without him or maybe put it in reverse and knock him with the rear fender just for laughs.

Read more

Teresa has been blow torching a briar of four-foot-tall weeds. Dressed in tan Carhart overalls, thin strips of tank top, bare-shouldered and auburn hair blazing in the sun, she looks like a metal worker having just gone on a rampage. But when she approaches the low iron fence of her front yard, suddenly dainty Southern salutations pour from her lips like bird song.

She’s vital, vivacious and slightly devilish, so when our mutual friend goes to the back of his 4Runner to make space for her to sit, she jumps in the driver’s seat, looks at me and winks. Then she stomps on the clutch and makes grumblings with the engine like she might drive off without him or maybe put it in reverse and knock him with the rear fender just for laughs.

Mas Tacos started in a Winnebago with a sink. But really it started with a road trip. And as my eyes land on Teresa’s, I get a contact high. Yeah, she’s settled down. Her business has been running for 18 years now. But really, she’s still on that road trip.

It was a road trip to the Pacific coast of Mexico, in a town called Barre de Navidad, an area where there is still no English on the menu, a rural region that abuts the Marismas Nacionales, the largest wetlands ecosystem in North America, where she had her lightning moment.

Teresa had been looking to make a move. A big one in her life. To leave NYC and start her own Food and Bev biz. She was hungry for change and in need of sustenance when she saw a woman selling tacos from a mobile stand. The woman had a long line, while the other taco stands had none. Teresa looked at the woman and identified immediately. Long lines, she thought. Open when I want to. Go home when it’s all over. I can do that.

She was not a chef, but after years in the service industry in NYC, she knew she could provide what she calls “an experience.” So, when she returned to Nashville, she kept the road trip going in her Winnebago, cruising East Nashville and selling food to the late-night party scene.

To those eager and often inebriated taste testers, she is eternally grateful. Because their patronage financed her R and D; and after two years she had a recipe book with proven bangers. That’s when she signed a lease.

When we enter the brick-and-mortar Mas Tacos, there’s a cluster of outdoor tables full of slow-moving customers. Folks are savoring the food as much as the sun. There’s is a giant potted prickly pear cactus that looks like an old man in rumpled clothing feeding pigeons in the plaza. Time freezes. Except for the pickup calls to the customers that lollygag on the hot spring breeze.

Teresa insists I try the tortilla soup. And for good reason. The broth is divine. Clean. No oily bubbles on its surface.

It’s a light and savory bone broth. No mirpoix. The folks at Bon Appetit couldn’t believe it when they published Teresa’s recipe. If she wasn’t a chef when she started, she was recognized as one then.

Tortilla Soup Recipe

The workers at Mas Tacos all seem at ease. Even with the owner on premises. Most have been there for more than five years. Some as long as twelve. Their chatter ambles, Southern and languid. Everyone is having a good time. An experience.

Teresa talks about Mas Tacos like she can’t believe it; like it’s a brocade fabricated by some charlatan guru. The idea that she imagined these lines, and then they came to exist. The shirts she sells say it plainly: “I stood in line at the world famous Mas Tacos.”

When I ask her what her start-up budget was, Teresa blushes and giggles. She explains that all she had was $2,200 and she thought she was rich. When I suggest that perhaps she was slightly delusional, she agrees. “That’s part of starting a business on your own. You have to be a little delusional.”

Here’s what’s happening this month at my diner in Brooklyn. →

Read Now

Use the code word "April Showers" to get 10% off at Fat Rabbit Diner this month

Secret Menu Special of the Month:

$4 SHITTY BEERS + DRAG RACE SUNDAYS

The forecast says rain, which feels about right for April in New York. Until the city finally decides to bloom, we’ll be pouring $4 shitty beers and playing Drag Race reruns every Sunday night at Fat Rabbit.

Complete Fat Rabbit Secret Menu

Everyday Happy Hour: $8-10 drinks, $9-12 bites, $14 combos: Martini & Fries, Sloop & Sliders, Bud & Fried Bites

Monday: All Day Happy Hour!

Tuesday: $13 Old Fashioned and Negronis

Wednesday: $13 House Martinis on Wednesdays

Thursday: $12 Floridita Daiquiris on Thursdays

Sunday: $4 Shitty Beers + Drag Race reruns

Book your Reservation

Merch

Support and represent Brooklyn by picking up your new most-worn hoodies and T's. Also available for order on Grubhub!

Order Now

Highlights from our Menu: The Gretchen Weiner

A classic done right. An all-beef hot dog topped with fried onions, pickled jalapeños, mustard-mayo, and ketchup, served with an Italian-style pilsner.

Hot dog + Pilsner for $12 during Happy Hour, available every day.

Throw your next event at Fat Rabbit

Book the event of your dreams at your favorite neighborhood diner. From the design of the space and the crowd pleasing bites, to the energy of the staff, an event at Fat Rabbit Diner is sure to be the night of all nights.

To book, email fatrabbitbilling@gmail.com now to secure and host the New York event you’ve always dreamed of this season.

Little Histories, Profiles and Untold Stories from the Restaurant Industry.

After years in the restaurant industry, Sam Barron began interviewing the people who make it happen. Not just chefs and owners, but the people behind the scenes who keep restaurants running.

This is Sam’s reflection of his time with Paul Ruggiero, one of the “only two people who know how to fix cash register machines” and his take on work, and life.

LAST OF THE REGISTER MEN

Paul has no idea what happens after death. But he promises to write when he gets there. “I’ll send you a letter,” he says. “Let you know what’s going on. If I don’t get into heaven there’s gonna be an investigation.”

Paul finishes his beer, places the empty in the clutches what looks like an orange juicer. One crank on the iron arm and it flattens the can into a hockey puck. Paul tosses it into an overflowing bin. Then he pulls the tab on another, eyes sparkling Bud-Light blue as he takes a sip. It’s 11:30 am…

Read More

Paul has no idea what happens after death. But he promises to write when he gets there. “I’ll send you a letter,” he says. “Let you know what’s going on. If I don’t get into heaven there’s gonna be an investigation.”

Paul finishes his beer, places the empty in the clutches what looks like an orange juicer. One crank on the iron arm and it flattens the can into a hockey puck. Paul tosses it into an overflowing bin. Then he pulls the tab on another, eyes sparkling Bud-Light blue as he takes a sip. It’s 11:30 am.

His work bench is cluttered with metal clips, black tubes and machine parts. Jumbles of hardware large enough to house rodents. The only clear space he keeps is for his ash tray. And unless otherwise indicated in this article, he is either lighting, smoking or stubbing out a Marlborough at all times.

Paul Ruggiero started tinkering with cash registers when he was twelve. And for seventy years he’s made a living off his mechanical talents and fluency in the American Cash Register machines.

Gone are the glory days of ACR, a company that once dominated IBM. Still, Paul has as much work as he wants.

According to Paul there are only two guys left that can repair a cash register. And the other guy charges too much.

When I wheel over my register for repair, Paul appraises it reverently. The machine, over a hundred years old, is in his estimation a real beauty, a classic.

“I should decommission it,” he says to me. “Could have bought it off you for scrap and then sold it for thousands.”

Because around the USA, the antique registers are still used by cash-only bars and saloons that love it for its grand aesthetic, as well as the magic it bestows on sales. Try ringing an order into some plastic ‘80s IBM rig, and you can feel customers lose faith in your establishment. Then ring the same order in with an ACR 313, hear the loud clink, drum roll and ding, watch the wooden drawer spring open, and you know you have their respect.

Paul has lived through the boom and bust of these machines. He tells me that in the 1970s there were nine cash register dealers on the Bowery and a brass ACR register cost more than a new Cadillac. But before that boom came a bigger boom in the early 20th century; an industrial revolution of retail that began with a wily capitalist named John Henry Patterson, a man whose company, ACR, has the only patent for the mechanical cash register. According to Paul:

The Pattersons, who owned NCR, started out running a Five and Dime. James and John Ritter, two saloonkeepers, invented the cash register because they believed bartenders were thieves. Patterson used to water at their bar and asked them to build twelve machines for his store. They did, and his sales jumped twenty percent.

He asked to buy the patent. James Ritter refused, so Patterson challenged him to a duel and shot him. Dueling was legal. Patterson then told Ritter’s brother to sell him the patent or he would be next.

Once Patterson controlled the invention, he made the machines beautiful with ornate brass cases and wood inlaid with mother of pearl. Store owners worried that installing a cash register would signal they did not trust their employees, so Patterson turned the register into a piece of craftsmanship.

As cash registers took off, Patterson bought out competitors. If they refused to sell, he challenged them to duels and took their businesses.

“How did he never get caught?”

He did. But dueling was legal.

Paul then explains how Patterson beat the charges and became a hero in Dayton, Ohio:

In the early 1900s, torrential rains were coming to Dayton, Ohio. Patterson employed half the town. Ford employed the other half. Anticipating the flood, Patterson stopped making cash registers and started building row boats, tying one to every house. When the dam broke and Dayton flooded, no one died.

Later he stood trial for several killings. He walked out of court with a verdict of justifiable homicide.

By then John Henry Patterson was already powerful across the United States. When World War I began, he made a deal with the government. He would supply all the ammunition they needed for free. In return, no foreign machines could enter the country until the next world war.

The government agreed. No foreign machines came in until after World War II. Meanwhile Patterson sold them everywhere else, shipping to Canada and across the world.

Crazy as a bedbug. But smart.

A nest of plyers and wrenches hang on the pegboard wall above where Paul slips a new ribbon into my machine. There’s a black and silver ATT punch button phone from the 1980s. A pair of pens jabbing out like lances. Brushes, wires, rolls of tape, a blow dryer and a faded aluminum oil can. At the top of the peg board is a row of clipped papers, dry and cracked, receipts and tickets that look like they date back to the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Watching him repair my ACR machine, he explains the process. The two screws that allow the new ribbon to be installed. As he works, it all appears so simple. Not just the machines, but life itself, a mechanical procedure that lasts until your number is up, until the body machine fails.

When I suggest that I might do the next ribbon replacement in two years when the ink runs out, Paul puts on a voice, barks at me like James Cagney with a massive stogie in his teeth. “Shammy, Shammy boy. You’re a schmuck Shammy. You’re a schmuck!” People think they can watch once and learn his craft. He had a guy, made a video for him, exactly what to do to change the ribbon. Two years later the guy calls up crying and needs Paul to fix his machine. And I have to admit, my ribbon is still good, I’m only a few months out of Paul’s shop as I write this, and I couldn’t find those two screws today if my life depended on it.

Talking machines is his thing. But after his third beer and a shot of tequila, Paul breaches a new topic that relates to a thin red line on his neck where he recently had surgery on his carotid artery:

I went to do this carotid artery, and uh, surgeon fucking gave me a stroke. Could have killed me. I went through shit before I went there. I took an MRI. I took a Catscan. OK? I took a Stress Test. And then he fucked me up. I said cancer could have killed me too, you son of bitch. I’m in the bed, I said (to the surgeon) come a little closer. I was gonna grab his carotid arteries and hold him for just about a minute. He says, you know there’s a risk. First thing he was late. It was a Monday. I says you look a little tired doc. Oh no, I’m fine, he says. Let me introduce you to my team. A bunch of fucking kids! OK. Well, normally it’s a one-day deal and they keep you over night. And it’s an hour operation. I was in the hospital 5 days. They had an alarm on my ass. I get up out of bed, here comes the fucking nurses. Alarm goes off. Get up out of the chair. I says I can’t stay here. The food sucked! I wanna tell you the worst shit I ever ate in my life.

I did not have a nice time. No cigarettes. No beer.

Buddy Holly is singing on Paul’s “Serious Radio,” a Sirius boombox that’s forever on an Oldie’s station.

“I’m old. I forget shit. But I’m still alive. You know? Basically, Im in good health. If they don’t kill me with the stress test.”

“How was the stress test?” I ask.

“Stressfull.”

“Do you like working on the machines?”

“No! But it keeps me young. What am I gonna do? Hang out with my wife?”

And I wonder, what will I do? Not Paul. When the last of the register mechanics is gone. As if he’s read my mind, Paul concludes our chat.

“So that’s it and I’m still doing this shit. I’m 81. I gotta work until I’m 105. So, you’re ok. I’ll be around.”

Here’s what’s happening this month at my diner in Brooklyn. →

Read Now

Video did not kill the radio star. Though it seemed, at one time, in the pop-and-lock latchkey ‘80s, it surely would. Today, aspiring VJs have as much career opportunity as Morse Code tappers.

So it seems to be progressing with online content. What we all believed would surely be the greatest media revolution, a mind-expanding and democratizing tool, the internet has turned into a prison with only 3 or 4 bars of reception.

How could we have not seen this coming? After all, it was the US military that laid the cables for our neuromantic lifestyles. How could we have been so easily duped into fantasies that the strong arm of the planet would boon us an Arab Spring or any other liberation from oligarchy?

My only hope is that the next media collapse happens soon; and with it online content will be, if not erased, than rightfully debased by that old dusty run-down hero, see him persevering down Main Street full of bullet wounds, the printed word.

What else on Earth can be trusted?

Easy to dispatch bots into the comments section; to engineer warped realities inside a social media platform, or to skew truth with a biased search engine. But do you think Musk or Zuckerberg, or any of their cronies would ever go to the trouble altering a printed artifact?

Imagine a scrubbed hardback of Plato’s Republic, for example, in which Plato writes about the villain Socrates? Or a new paperback edition of The Communist Manifesto in which Karl Marx advocates for the concentration of wealth. The effort just to typeset that book would not be worth it.

Reading The NY Times online used to be ok. But then the interloping of text alerts and sending calls to voicemail began to taint my intake. And the cookies must have started crumbling, leaving breadcrumbs for other content providers to assault me with inanities until all of it became just click bait in a waterfall.

If you can’t throw it out after reading, it’s not a newspaper.

Fucking Plato, man. He had some things right. Oh, but the Allegory of the Cave falls on deaf ears in a bar. People look at you like you are the last gasp of the patriarchy, even though what you are doing is trying shed light on the resistance. It doesn’t matter. For those who have read it have cellulars rammed up their asses charging all the time. And those that haven’t are confident they aren’t missing much.

I have been meaning to sit back down with Plato’s text, because as far as allegories go, it kinda resonates with the global mental breakdown that is happening right now. The total annihilation of reality through whirling dervish devil shadows on the back wall of the human psyche.

Consider the Holocaust denier I have been harassing online. He must have so many puppets dancing in front of him, he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going. I can’t wait to unload on his comment section; an act that will no doubt cement his antisemitism and raise my blood pressure to the point of making me twitch over margaritas as I imagine pummeling his avatar and ruin my family vacation.

The truth is I can’t make time for Plato. Books are hard. Like football coaches or nannies that use corporal punishment. But at least you know where you stand with a printed book. It cannot shape shift. Yes, there are edits made for different printings. Recently, I read a new translation of The Stranger. Some of the words had changed, but it was still…The Stranger. Because ultimately books don’t lie. They are true to themselves whether true or not.

Maybe one day music videos will come back. Who would have thought that they would be whittled down to lyric videos, ignored and only listened to? Ultimately, it is for the best because it is the lyrics that matter, the power of the word. The song. The corollary image has always been a distraction.

I should have known when MTV planted its flag on the Moon that the shadows fell in the wrong direction. Clearly it was a US Government lie, the same way Democrats eat babies, god saved Trump and there is no Zyklon B. No printed book could ever house such madness in one volume but look online and these lies aggregate like organoids.

Video did not kill the radio star. Video killed itself. And each night I pray an internet suicide is imminent. That all these content providers will do the honorable thing, what MTV did when it abandoned M. That they will forgo their founding principles, acknowledge their false claims to objectivity, transparency and free speech and embrace what they really are: entertainment. Maybe then we can bring back the greatest tech boom ever so we might regain our powers of concentration, have access to reliable sources and sit down again with a flourishing economy of printed matter.

My wife and I make a perfect couple. Don’t hate. I’m going to explain how it works. I will let you in on the secret, so that you too might enjoy the all-encompassing spiritual fulfillment in your partnership that we share. It’s simple, really. We watch the same shows.

Easier said than done sometimes. Couples often lose the plot in their struggle to settle on a program, and those that allow for separate viewing habits are soon to part. One technique that has served us is to avoid true crime docs and watch only the dramatic series, because, in the year 2024, the medium remains the message, and all of these series (Ted Lasso aside) are built around peacocking hyperbolized anti-heroes whose wretched acts jump start your spiritual healing like an injection of stem cells to the heart and whose tragic romances can pepper your sex life.

A great TV Guide journalist once wrote: “Life is what happens in between episodes.” To that I would add: “And after the finale.” 

It’s easy to reach sexual ecstasy whilst still mid-season, with the murderer free and at large on the Mediterranean coast as she imagines you a fine silver-haired iteration of Michael Imperioli and you, with eyes wide open and a couple scotches in your belly, can at last appreciate her as the Sicillian sex worker with the lullaby eyes that she truly is. But what happens when the White Lotus season ends and the characters of your lovemaking get dispatched?

It's those interims, without an entertaining show, that can really tear a marriage apart.

Recently, we have taken on the Perfect Couple series, starring Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber. And we have learned so much about what it is to be “The Perfect Couple.” It’s amazing! You don’t need a marriage counselor to get through the doldrums of fifty-year commitment. All you need is a Netflix subscription.

And if you really want to take your marriage to new heights, you can double down by adding an HBO/Max subscription. It’s on that self-help platform that couples can access some of the most contemptible characters of all time. Shows like Succession, The Sopranos, White Lotus; these are the Homeric tales of our day, the very substance of our cultural bonds.

To be versed in this folklore is to be given the tools to survive.

For example, when your partner cheats, you will know not to turn the other cheek like Tony Soprano’s wife. Instead, you will make a better decision than Carmela and maintain your dignity through selfcare acts like defrocking a priest or finding an Italian hitman to rip your bodice. Conversely, if you’re tired of sex with the mother of your children after twenty years, just go to The Bing. But most importantly, after you have done none of the above, sit back down on the couch and do the hard work of keeping a marriage together and watch a show.

Some will protest my thesis. Many will insist that true spiritual growth comes from sitting on someone else’s couch, talking to a paid listener, a professional who, for outlandish fees, will ask you about your parents and point out that you keep making the same mistakes year after year. That’s one way of doing things. But Netflix is only, like, $15 a month and HBO/Max similarly priced. So, you sure you want to slash Hulu for the sake of analysis?

Indeed, money is the barrier between most of us and our favorite anti-heroes. The wealth of all these miserable characters, most of us will never attain. Lucky. Because who among us would want Logan Roy’s headaches? Besides, there’s always the perfect crime: having the luxury without paying the price.

Recently, my wife and I celebrated our Copper anniversary. That’s what you get after seven years. She, being the perfect partner for me, devised a celebration that would be both meaningful and pleasurable. She made us a reservation at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel.

As a child, I revered the Plaza Hotel. Most places, a latch key kid like me could get inside of and shoplift something, a brochure or a bottle of soda, whatever. But the doormen of that most aristocratic of institutions would never let me pass. They had me pegged, and I began to see myself through their eyes as inferior, a boy from the dingy Upper West Side who would never gain entry to the luxury class. So, when my wife took me there, I understood that we were not just going to share a pricey cocktail in the grandiose Palm Court, but to break through a childhood sense I had of myself as being undeserving of wealth.

Not that she wished I were trust funded like Tag Winbury, but maybe in hopes that our reserves might soon increase, the invitation was psycho-spiritual, romantic and laced with the portent of future gains.

The martini was excellent. So was our server, Emily. We became fast friends, we told her about our anniversary and our mission. She delighted in presenting us a special tin embossed with The Plaza logo, four macaroons inside, a keepsake now.

Near us, a quarter turn away on the hand watch of the oval bar, sat two refined gentlemen. We mused who they might be. Perhaps Fifth Avenue regulars. But then they seemed Midwestern in a way, like they might be beef kings or heavy machinery magnates. Fine blue twill shirts and bushy hair on the knuckles. It was anybody’s guess.

Eventually, I had to use the restroom and as I walked down the columned hall, its white marble panels three stories high, I felt at last like I belonged. And I let it be known to the urinal with an easy flush then looked upon myself with some modicum of glee as I hand washed in the gilt-handled sink. I had arrived…at The Plaza.

On my way back, I ran into the two gentlemen from either Fifth Avenue or the Midwest, and they asked me to take a picture of them in front of an enormous photographic print of Marilyn Monroe. I obliged. They were appreciative, and we all shared a robust laugh. Over what? I’m not sure. Then my wife and I did the same. We strolled here and there and took some selfies, then flitted away like butterflies through the lobby into a car, the door opened for us by the very same gatekeepers who once shut me out.

Later, sitting in another restaurant, my wife received a voicemail from The Plaza Hotel informing her that our check had not been closed. We were mortified. Though both of us had a memory of the check being dropped, somehow, we had not paid it! She was in the process of trying to call in a card when an email arrived letting us know that someone, a gentleman named Mr. Joyce, had picked up our tab! By then, it was too late to wrangle the situation back into shape, so we agreed that next day we would contact The Plaza by letter and remedy the situation.

We sent the following letter with a gift certificate:

Dear Mr. Joyce,

Thank you for underwriting true love. After 7 years, K and I love each other more than ever. No itch happening here for the Copper anniversary. That you picked up our tab was a generous, noble and romantic act, and a story that will live on with us.

We would like to return the favor and invite you to….

It is now a dream that we will one day know Mr. Joyce’’s identity. Might he be one of the blue-twilled gentlemen we met at the bar? Or is he more like Logan Roy, or a coked-up Kendall? Could he be a Tag Winbury? Perhaps another silverback, Dominic De Grasso, (also coked up) trying to impress some young prostitutes? Or might Mr. Joyce be playing against character, a sincere man of means with a titanic bankroll deployed only for good ends? Does that person even exist? If so, it must be Mr. Joyce.

But I need my villains! How else can I be the perfect husband? If my wife doesn't see Tony slap Carmela, or Logan cheat, or Tag impregnating youngsters, how will she know how good she has it?

At the end of our anniversary night, we did what all perfect couples do: scrolled the home pages of our favorite streaming services. So many of the programs flashed with promise. Great villains and bad outcomes in every dramatic panel. Tomorrow we would write to The Plaza to rectify our thievery. But for now, we would choose a new series in which to revel in our perfection.

Groupthink is dangerous. Potent. Mobs are dumb. Cults are scary. How do intelligent individuals fall victim to peer pressure? The Age of Social Experimentation, born in the wake of WWII, sought answers. And none of the findings were good. Humans, as complex as we are, bestowed with more intelligence than any of the beasts, will generally behave like animals given the right circumstances.

Take a Knicks game for example. One of the best nights of my life transpired in Madison Square Garden, on May 17, 1995. A Knicks playoff game against The Indiana Pacers in which the audience became a single-minded entity, its groupthink so powerful as to affect the outcome of the game, as well as create a mass delusion.

Everyone was panicking. With seven seconds to go in Game 5, the Knicks faced elimination. Pat Riley called a timeout. 

Great murmuring made its way through the Garden. Stench of spilt beer and hot dog breath. We looked to each other for comfort, but found none. All of our faith in the Knicks ability to play in clutch situations had been shattered in Houston a year before and then decimated by Reggie Miller who stole Game 1 by scoring an impossible 8 points in 9 seconds. The Pacers, we understood, were lethal in the final moments of a game, whereas the Knicks had busied themselves perfecting the art of the choke.

Fortunately, on this night, some MSG line producer, may they be praised in heaven, had a stroke of genius. A scene from Rocky II which perfectly articulated the moment projected on the Jumbotron. In the scene, Rocky is preparing to lose. He wants the comfort of knowing that Adrian will stand by him if he does. Yup. That’s how we all felt. But Adrian, tucked in hospital sheets, weak from having given birth to their first child, does not acknowledge Rocky’s weakness. Instead, she asks him for something: “You know what I want you to do for me … ?”

We waited with bated breath. What did she want? 

“Win,” said Adrian. “Win!”

And as her whisper ricocheted off the rafters and made its way into our hearts, suddenly we were able to believe again. So when Burgess Meredith growled: “What are we waiting for?” and the screen went black, and the buzzer rang and it was time to resume play, all of the fans in the Garden screamed in unison, so profoundly that the din gave Ewing wings to score an impossible buzzer beater. Strangers hugged and grown men cried. 

(Like I said, this was one of the best nights of my life, and its characteristics very much align with that of a cult experience.) 

Now it’s easy for a person like me to fall in love with a game. Less likely that I'd fall for an old white pederast with a story about spaceships and eclipses. But people do. Some of your nicest neighbors are either in a cult or have survived one. And in Germany, nearly an entire nation was absorbed into one, one with such gravity it is a wonder if any individual could have escaped its pull.

Every Jew has asked themself what they would do if given the choice to collaborate or die. It has been a question posed to us since the first Inquisitions. But this is a common human dilemma. Be it Judaism or any other religion, nation, cause; who among us is prepared to die for an idea? Usually, it’s either Socrates or a suicide bomber. The rest of us will walk in the middle of the road to save our necks. Until it gets hot. Until there’s an inescapable group of people telling us what to do and how to think.

Groupthink phenomena are many. Perhaps infinite. So, in order to make sense of the topic, I thought it would be useful to research a few notable studies and see where I fell in with it all (presuming that I and my intellect would land somewhere in upper level management). 

The Bystander Effect: When an emergency situation occurs, the Bystander  Effect holds that observers are more likely to take action if there are few or no other witnesses. With the presence of a group, a person is more likely to do nothing, because groupthink frees the individual of responsibility. It is one of many embarrassing truths about mobs. Like, I could tell you that I’d dial 911 if I saw a lady get shot. But if there were 30 other people there and I was late to work, who can be sure? ... Even the most outwardly moral person has contradicted their own ideology as a result of the Bystander Effect. After learning about this phenomenon, I decided not to self flagellate.

The Carlsberg Social Experiment: Orchestrated by the beer company, the experiment showed the effects of prejudice and stereotypes. Set in a movie theater where all but two of the 150 seats were filled with rugged male bikers, unwitting couples entered. Some left, some took the final two seats. What would you do in this situation? Would you feel intimidated and leave? I like to think that I’d join the bikers. But, then again, there are other situations in which I would definitely split. Like, what if it were 148 seats taken by moms and toddlers? Or a theater full of drunk hooligans on vacation in Greece? I decided that it is OK to have Carlsberged… But I would not mention this to friends.

The False Consensus Effect: During the late ‘70s Lee Ross conducted experiments which found most people that were willing to carry a sign that said “Eat at Joe’s” assumed others would do the same. Similarly, those who refused to participate assumed others would not agree to carry the sign. That means, regardless of any conclusion we might draw on a banal activity, humans assume others will act as they do, that other people are by default in their group. Like when I have a good turkey sandwich, I assume everyone else would agree it is a good turkey sandwich. It doesn't even occur to me that someone might think it’s a bad turkey sandwich. How could they? As such, I was forced to admit that I definitely live in a fool’s paradise of false consensus.

Asch’s Conformity Experiments: 1950s psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that people would give the wrong answer on a test to fit in with the rest of the group. Who would do such a thing? Who would say the short line is long and the long line is short and why? How does it benefit them? It makes no sense. But then I think of all the mediocre plays that I’ve seen where I stood for the ovation and I realize that I too am a conformist.

So, with all the groupthinking I’m doing, I have to wonder what good was all that critical education my mother spent her hard-earned money on? What does it avail me to have read so much philosophy if none of the principles get applied when the rubber meets the road? What if I’m not a worthy individual, not the independent thinker I assume to be everyday, quite sure of my position on topics political and otherwise, but more like an ant following the line?

One recent psychological experiment about groupthink that I found fascinating involved simply interviewing students on slavery. The question they asked the students is: if they lived during a historical period in which slavery was normalized, whether in America, Greece or Africa, would they have held slaves? 

It is no surprise that most students said they would not. But some students became outraged and vehement about holding slaves. Those that had such volatile reactions were termed aggressive joiners. Ironically, aggressive joiners are the types of people who would not only have held slaves, but would have beaten them publicly to demonstrate their virtue as slaveholders. Aggressive joiners are the kinds of people who would not just collaborate with Nazis, but quickly rise through the ranks. So beware of people hoisting their virtue flags. Today’s politically righteous are also yesterday’s Himmler minions. 

But let’s take it back to the Garden. May 17, 1995. As ecstatic as it was to watch my beloved team win the game, as benign as the sport is, there under the surface lurked something quite evil. Something we all agreed to overlook.

In the parlance of the day, when someone committed a travel violation in the game of basketball, often it was said that person “took the train.” In reviewing the play on YouTube, it is undeniable that Patrtick Ewing did more than “take the train.” He took a cab and then a train, at which point he dribbled once, then he flew to Miami and back before finally taking the game-winning shot. It was a gross violation of the rules. But I’ll be damned if any New Yorker cared. I doubt any would have stood up for the rules of the game, and had the referee made the call, the right call, nearly everyone in that mob would have been outraged and many would have become murderous. The NBA would have needed a security detail to get that ref safely out of the City.

But why?

Why do we so easily eschew certain facts in favor of others that suit our purposes? This seems to be the mode of the masses, a serious contradiction of the era of thought we are supposedly inside, the era that has succeeded Postmodernism: The Era of Metamodernism.

With the advent of Postmodernism, we were all gifted the ability to see stories in their fragments, to see “Truth” as it had always been, a splintered thing, not the perfect symmetry that the Greeks possessed. Protagonists became sideshows. The story of a sneaker, more interesting than the life of the player who wore it. It all begins with Borges, where narratives of narratives become the central action, an occult text resurfacing that foments in the “real world” an iteration of the reality within the text. And then it ends abruptly with a noose around the neck of David Foster Wallace. The author that showed us jest is, if not infinite, as sprawling as the characters in his tome that (do or do not) circle around any single plot or idea.

The metamodern mode improves upon postmodernism by allowing for postmodern and modern thought to exist simultaneously. “It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation,” according to expert Robin van den Akker.

But I do not believe storytelling has caught up with metamodern thinking. Hopefully it will. You could say Paul Auster kept the torch burning for a while, but really we are in a pragmatic entertainment-centric period in which novels (and now television series) do the bidding of politics, and the stories we engage in rarely challenge our thinking or leave the reader anything to interpret. What sells seems to be what confirms for consumers what they already believe. As such, our thinking is not confronted and the favored endings of stories currently are the ones most definitive and Dickensian. Fine with me. I love a good plot twist. But still, something is lacking. An honesty, an openness of the author’s intent not dissimilar to the Knicks fan unwilling to admit the travel violation.

In such a context, where good and bad are so plainly understood within narrative, the bad players always win. Like Trump, Russia and China, for example. Powers that can spin their specious binary narratives all over the internet with impunity. Lucky are the dictators of today. Because the new groupthink is all online, available to anyone and proprietary to Zuckerberg and Musk. The social experiment is no longer conducted within the confines of a prison or a laboratory. The laboratory is the network. All of these group dynamics are playing out in text and image, before and regardless of any veracity. The potential for misappropriation is massive, and the influence on the individual is greater than previously imaginable. But still, each individual believes they are an independent thinker, that their feed is somehow real.

How could we not? We are tribal in our DNA. We have forever lived in communities maxing out in the hundreds, like a church, and some, like mine, as small as a family of two. No one is actually an individual. More realistic, we are molded from and by each other. Still, it is an affront to admit, humans have forever been subsumed by groups and willingly conformed to their rules, from Madison Square Garden, to the Danish movie theater and German concentration camps.

My ego resists. I am me! It howls at the black night. Have I no free will? Didn’t physics say each and every point in the universe could be considered its center? Because as the universe expands, all loci move away from each other like raisins in a rising loaf of bread.

Shame on me for being a Bystander, a Calsberger, living in my own consensus like an Asch-hole. Forgive me reader. For though I be a raisin, I am a good and important one, god dammit! And this particular raisin is a Knicks fan, and WE all know where the center of the universe is this spring, the spring of 2024, because we have waited for it, nestled underground with the cicadas, for twenty years. It’s back in the Garden! 

Cue the Close Encounters of the Third Kind clip on the jumbotron. We have presaged this, have we not? In a most Borges fashion, we molded the spaceship of clay with our own hands, until now at last it gyres above us shining like a giant championship ring in the night sky as the NBC tritones play on futuristic synthesizers, speaking in galactic tongues. I’m not trying to convince you to become a Knicks fan. I just want you to know, I would never join a cult or wear a swastika, and I definitely wouldn’t shy away from a room full of burly bikers. I am Sam. I have good thoughts. I believe in equality and justice for all. And I can acknowledge that even a Pacer fan might have a metamodern notion from time to time. But, let me assure you, this year, Indiana is on the wrong side of history.

It is a delicious counterpoint to read the swan songs of Truman Capote and Ernest Hemingway side by side, an experience I recommend to all. No two books could be more different than Capote’s posthumous and incomplete final output, Answered Prayers, and the last book Hemingway published while living, The Old Man and the Sea. Yet somehow, the two make an unlikely sweet and savory combination.

Some might resist this invitation, rolling their eyes at Hemingway's schoolboy story, believing it is time to disregard the great patriarchal blowhard of American letters, to turn the page as it were, and make way for newer, more diverse voices. It is a fair point. Certainly, Hemingway’s moon is currently in its waning phase. But even Capote's characters can't help but wax reverently about "Papa." And as Capote so direly understood and elegantly illuminates, in both story and execution, trends come and go, but good writing endures. 

Answered Prayers cattle brands the reader with its scalding wit. It delights in razor sharp excoriation of the aristocracy and its trail of social climbers and gigolos. Chief among the latter is the narrator P.B. Jones, a likely pseudonym of the author, who labeled his final and incomplete book a "nonfiction novel." 

Capote takes the piss out of everyone and none so much as himself. All of the Unspoiled Monsters get their due and then are coolly dispatched. Even Kate McCloud disappears after her chapter. And while the novel (really a series of vignettes) is incomplete, I have a feeling that were the missing mystery chapters to appear, a coherent story would not be revealed. And why bother with form when the gossip Capote so blushlessly dishes makes it impossible to stop reading?

The Old Man and the Sea, on the other hand, leaves its lens in one very confined place, and it most certainly has a form, one so basic it might pass for allegory. But what surprised me most as a middle-aged person rereading the short novel is its simple ambition to render the agape love between a boy and a near-to-death old man. There are no bulls to fight, or elephants to shoot, no romance or Spanish revolutionaries to excite, and yet the stakes feel as encompassing as World War I.

Meanwhile, P.B. Jones is also dealing with hardship, struggles tufted in silk and populated by men with nine-penny cocks and women who stuff cherries in pussy for better cunalingus. Oh, what a thrill it was to leave Santiago starving in his little wooden skiff and escape for a while with “Jonesy” on a yacht where golden boy Denny Fouts rakes in royals and tycoons with his cocksmanship! 

Really, reading these two books in the same week is a gift to the brain.

How much can we believe is real, though? The word on the literary street and late night TV had been that Answered Prayers was to be the tell-all of tell-alls, exposing well known socialites of the day, movie stars and notorious philanderers of the deepest pockets. But are we to believe that Capote had been a paid sex worker when we read that P.B. unflinchingly takes employment with the divinely caustic pimp, Miss Veronica Self? While many of the characters and their distilled stories are easily correlated to real life individuals and events, the line between the book's nonfiction and novel aspects is brilliantly blurry when necessary.

The Old Man and the Sea, on the other hand, aspires to be nothing but a novel. So, are you willing to go along with the idea that a near dead and starving old man could haul a thousand pound marlin out of the sea and kill five or six sharks on the way home? Sounds like poppycock to me. But then, when you find yourself seasick from all the backstabbing, ass pounding and menstrual sex in Answered Prayers, you may be willing to accept such a mad turn of oceanic events as entirely plausible. And that is precisely where Hemingway delivers. He makes you believe Santiago's journey is real.

Whatever you may feel about these two lionized authors, if you like one and not the other, or perhaps you disdain both, it is impossible not to respect them. And while these books are so conceptually and aesthetically disparate —one terse, the other florid; one embarrassingly pure, the other lavishly degraded, they share a similarity: neither will let you put it down. Unless, of course, you take my advice and read them side by side.

It’s a case of alternating current. A winsome and superior modality in which the alternation of texts delivers a superior voltage. I don’t think I could survive in Santiago’s world exclusively. And as decadent and tempting as Capote’s universe is, it’s clear, as he suffered it as much as he made it his ambition, the constellation of socialite icons that constitute cafe society is as devastatingly capricious as the cruel Sea. 

With the series Duel: The Swans vs. Capote, plunging into the zeitgeist right now, we are all gifted a sumptuous safari into the lives of Capote’s notorious Swans. And the temptation to make a codex for these characters is ripe. Cleo Dillon as Babe Paley or Lady Ina Coolbirth as Lady “Slim” Keith of Castleacre. And who among us would not happily blush to be the source material for Kate McCloud, a character understood to be based on Mona von Bismark? It is a Page Six sinful pleasure to connect the dots. Even though most of these names have faded from memory and lost their relevance, they would only be further down the tunnel of oblivion were it not for Capote’s scandalization.

To Capote’s point (and maybe this is the point of Answered Prayers), the value to the public of the Swans lies not in their fortunes or who they were, but in their fictionalized selves as he portrayed them. It is his genius that phrased their existence in such a way to make it quaffable to any reader. It is his portrait that both condemns and immortalizes them. Because really, the Swans, without Capote, are a dime a dozen. Plug one in and the other out, they are each fine white birds that skim the surface of man made lakes, hardly distinguishable from one another. 

So why rest the monocle on Swans and a world so alluring yet repellent? And how could Capote not anticipate the dismemberment of friendships that La Côte Basque would beget? Surely, he knew, even his attempts to render the women with a modicum of literary adoration could not mitigate their fury at being exposed. Sadly, Capote may not have had a choice. Where else might a late-stage artist of such refinement go? Alas, certain earthbound truths are impossible to avoid. Like the vastness of the sea and the weight of feathers.

Both Hemingway and Capote had parents who died of suicide, and both followed in their footsteps. Hemingway, who so brilliantly captured the essence of perseverance in the character of the Old Man, took the quick way out with a shot to the head. Capote did it slowly, murdering himself in a vichyssoise of pureed pills and blank-pages. 

While many of their peers understood them in their late stage as faltering alcoholics, all the booze in the world cannot diminish what each had to say in their own personal final chapter. 

“Is something wrong with the fish, you seem mad at it?”asks Capote of C.Z. Guest in the new TV series. The two are meeting to discuss the post-publishing fallout among the Swans. Capote’s probe is double-tongued. Obviously, it is not the fish that disappoints. But beyond that, he condescends the lack of material hardship. For the Swans know nothing of fish. They only know the filet. 

The Old Man and the Sea, many will forget, as I had, ends with a tourist, perhaps a Swan, marveling at the bones of Santiago’s giant Marlin. “I did not know sharks had such handsome, beautifully formed tails,” says the misidentifying tourist, a two-paragraph character that arrives on the last page just in time to prove the point: few of privilege will ever comprehend the story of the Old Man. And who of modest origin would know what it is to be a Swan were it not for Capote?

Hemingway, as much as he was a dandy of fine tailored suits and known to quench his thirst on pricey Valpolicella, managed to capture the struggle of a poor fisherman to the same fine degree that Capote quintessentially depicted the murderous minglings of Manhattan’s elite. And while the temptation might be to disregard one book for the other, to decry the shallowness of the affluent, or mock the obvious profundity of the sea and an old man, we are better for both books' existence. After all, rich or poor, we all come from water. Anyone can admire the beauty of swans just as somewhere in the universal subconscious of us all lives the archetypal dream of lions on the beach.