When the man swayed into Tosca Cafe with the distant yet determined expression of a bar-stool poet 50 years late for a drink with Jack Kerouac, I thought he had to be a ringer. When he listed past the gleaming, monumental espresso machine and produced a bottle of off-brand tequila from his jacket, I was sure of it. Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield, the New York restaurateurs who converted this landmark dive bar into an Italian restaurant last year, had clearly put him on the payroll to keep up Tosca's reputation as a haven where unmoored eccentrics raise glasses with actors, go-go dancers, politicians, heavy-metal drummers, cops and Russian ballerinas.Thirty seconds later, though, I was proved wrong when bartenders, managers and servers surrounded the man and gently steered him back to Columbus Avenue. Eccentrics may still be welcome, but not when they bring their own alcohol.
Hiring local color may be the only step Friedman and Bloomfield did not take in their painstaking restoration of Tosca Cafe, in this city's North Beach neighborhood. They carefully shored up an interior that had marinated for 94 years in cigarette smoke and spilled brandy, then added an open kitchen that fills the back dining room with the smells of roast chicken and melted pork fat. In so doing, they joined the small group of restaurateurs who double as historic preservationists.Urban planners understand that cities thrive when we find new uses for old buildings. Much less attention is paid to the fate of timeworn restaurants and bars, apart from the handful whose architectural interest has earned them landmark protection. Yet some of us spend more hours - many, many more hours - eating and drinking in our favorite restaurants and bars than we do staring up at Louis Sullivan cornices. Though privately owned, these places become hubs of civic life. In some cases, the bond we share with them is so strong we feel as if they belong to us.Alain Ducasse is the best known of several French chefs to have rehabilitated Parisian bistros and cafes. With somewhat more modest culinary ambitions, Keith McNally, Graydon Carter and John DeLucie have done something similar with the saloons and corner taverns that are New York's answer to the bistro. But in the rapidly shifting tides of American dining styles, many grand and historic restaurants have run aground. When a proprietor can't pay the landlord's idea of market rent, these spaces may be torn down, neglected or changed beyond recognition.In 2012, Locke-Ober Cafe in Boston closed after 137 years, despite an attempted resuscitation by the chef Lydia Shire. Plans to open a new restaurant there are in the works, but it won't be called Locke-Ober, or look much like it; many of the antique fixtures and ornaments are gone.The chef Jose Garces recently took over Old Original Bookbinder's, which was padlocked five years ago amid bankruptcy filings. Philadelphians who want to get another look at the turn-of-the-century dining rooms are mostly out of luck, though. Garces said he intended to use Bookbinder's as a commissary for his other businesses, a private-party space and a small oyster saloon that he said would operate on "a limited basis."Gage & Tollner, where chef Edna Lewis once baked pecan pies and stirred sherry into she-crab soup, is now an open wound in Downtown Brooklyn. The owner, Joseph Jemal, has allowed a bangles-and-bikinis shop to obscure the 19th-century facade with huge hot-pink banners ("Wow! All handbags $9.99"). A Doric column holding up the portico is rotting away. Inside, gaslights, embossed walls and cherry-framed mirrors are hidden behind rows of cell phone cases and racks of thongs. The Landmarks Preservation Commission plans to issue a violation this week for failure to clear up illicit changes to the interior and exterior, both of which have landmark status, said Elisabeth de Bourbon, its communications director. The building's owner, Joseph Jemal, said Tuesday that he was working on a new plan to satisfy the commission.This civic vandalism is going on in a city where a brisk trade in salvaged interior details supplies many new restaurants with just the kind of atmosphere that has been trashed at Gage & Tollner."Old is still kind of in," Friedman said in a phone interview. "You look around at these places with Edison light bulbs and reclaimed wood, they look old. You look at Tosca and it looked like the kind of places we tried to create - me, Taavo Somer, Keith McNally."
As anyone who has bought a neglected brownstone knows, it can be cheaper to replicate period details than to repair them. In fact, Friedman met with architects who had elaborate plans for studiously defacing new materials to craft fresh grunge. In the end, he and Bloomfield spent $1.5 million to keep the old grunge.Nearly everything was restored, buttressed or subtly upgraded. Layers of cigarette smoke were peeled from Ted Levy's 1938 mural of Venice on the back wall, but the tar stains were left on the ceiling, which was encased behind clear sealant to keep plaster from falling into the bucatini. Tables were resurfaced with wood. Vinyl chairs and banquettes were done over with red leather. Checkerboard floor tiles were patched up. New mechanical guts were built for the cappuccino machine and the jukebox that plays opera 45s."It didn't make sense financially at all," Friedman said. "It will in years to come, I hope, but it was the right thing to do, and if we had passed on the place and somebody else had done it wrong, I'd be kicking myself."Friedman and Bloomfield did make some purchases: restroom plumbing, a meat slicer that looks as if it belongs under the hood of a Ferrari, and a tiled kitchen to replace the old one, which hadn't seen combat since the 1960s. Some open kitchens can be chilly, stainless-steel showpieces with all the charm of an operating room. Tosca's glows like a fireplace."I really wanted the kitchen to be quite welcoming," Bloomfield said. "The heart of the restaurant is the kitchen, and to see it alive and beautiful and inviting was a big important thing to me and also Josh."Josh Even is her chef de cuisine. The menu the two of them arrived at is Italian, unfussy and marked by Bloomfield's well-known fondness for innards (a terrine of pigs' ears) and often-overlooked skill with vegetables (sweet, cherry-size Tokyo turnips, roasted with their greens on).My one meal at Tosca Cafe had its dim moments, like a sharp, aggressively garlicky mussel soup and a delicate liver sausage that was no match for a harsh, salty pumpkin puree. Cannoli filling, which was supposed to be lightly sugared ricotta, had the bland sweetness of pastry cream.But Even's crew also makes dried semolina pasta shells called lumaconi - baked with lemon-scented cream, Treviso radicchio and a fistful of bread crumbs - that I would eat once a week if I lived nearby. I'd follow them with the chicken and a dish of potatoes roasted with garlic and rosemary until they're crackling and golden, then dressed with hot pork fat.Our server insisted that we swipe the potatoes through the chicken's wonderfully old-school sauce of Marsala and cream. "That's where the money is," she said. Actually, I liked it better than money.I also liked that Bloomfield and Even's menu doesn't reach for a 1919 Italian-American version of retro-authenticity. Their food is what you want to eat today, which means Tosca Cafe might be around tomorrow.© 2014 New York Times News Service
Hiring local color may be the only step Friedman and Bloomfield did not take in their painstaking restoration of Tosca Cafe, in this city's North Beach neighborhood. They carefully shored up an interior that had marinated for 94 years in cigarette smoke and spilled brandy, then added an open kitchen that fills the back dining room with the smells of roast chicken and melted pork fat. In so doing, they joined the small group of restaurateurs who double as historic preservationists.Urban planners understand that cities thrive when we find new uses for old buildings. Much less attention is paid to the fate of timeworn restaurants and bars, apart from the handful whose architectural interest has earned them landmark protection. Yet some of us spend more hours - many, many more hours - eating and drinking in our favorite restaurants and bars than we do staring up at Louis Sullivan cornices. Though privately owned, these places become hubs of civic life. In some cases, the bond we share with them is so strong we feel as if they belong to us.Alain Ducasse is the best known of several French chefs to have rehabilitated Parisian bistros and cafes. With somewhat more modest culinary ambitions, Keith McNally, Graydon Carter and John DeLucie have done something similar with the saloons and corner taverns that are New York's answer to the bistro. But in the rapidly shifting tides of American dining styles, many grand and historic restaurants have run aground. When a proprietor can't pay the landlord's idea of market rent, these spaces may be torn down, neglected or changed beyond recognition.In 2012, Locke-Ober Cafe in Boston closed after 137 years, despite an attempted resuscitation by the chef Lydia Shire. Plans to open a new restaurant there are in the works, but it won't be called Locke-Ober, or look much like it; many of the antique fixtures and ornaments are gone.The chef Jose Garces recently took over Old Original Bookbinder's, which was padlocked five years ago amid bankruptcy filings. Philadelphians who want to get another look at the turn-of-the-century dining rooms are mostly out of luck, though. Garces said he intended to use Bookbinder's as a commissary for his other businesses, a private-party space and a small oyster saloon that he said would operate on "a limited basis."Gage & Tollner, where chef Edna Lewis once baked pecan pies and stirred sherry into she-crab soup, is now an open wound in Downtown Brooklyn. The owner, Joseph Jemal, has allowed a bangles-and-bikinis shop to obscure the 19th-century facade with huge hot-pink banners ("Wow! All handbags $9.99"). A Doric column holding up the portico is rotting away. Inside, gaslights, embossed walls and cherry-framed mirrors are hidden behind rows of cell phone cases and racks of thongs. The Landmarks Preservation Commission plans to issue a violation this week for failure to clear up illicit changes to the interior and exterior, both of which have landmark status, said Elisabeth de Bourbon, its communications director. The building's owner, Joseph Jemal, said Tuesday that he was working on a new plan to satisfy the commission.This civic vandalism is going on in a city where a brisk trade in salvaged interior details supplies many new restaurants with just the kind of atmosphere that has been trashed at Gage & Tollner."Old is still kind of in," Friedman said in a phone interview. "You look around at these places with Edison light bulbs and reclaimed wood, they look old. You look at Tosca and it looked like the kind of places we tried to create - me, Taavo Somer, Keith McNally."
As anyone who has bought a neglected brownstone knows, it can be cheaper to replicate period details than to repair them. In fact, Friedman met with architects who had elaborate plans for studiously defacing new materials to craft fresh grunge. In the end, he and Bloomfield spent $1.5 million to keep the old grunge.Nearly everything was restored, buttressed or subtly upgraded. Layers of cigarette smoke were peeled from Ted Levy's 1938 mural of Venice on the back wall, but the tar stains were left on the ceiling, which was encased behind clear sealant to keep plaster from falling into the bucatini. Tables were resurfaced with wood. Vinyl chairs and banquettes were done over with red leather. Checkerboard floor tiles were patched up. New mechanical guts were built for the cappuccino machine and the jukebox that plays opera 45s."It didn't make sense financially at all," Friedman said. "It will in years to come, I hope, but it was the right thing to do, and if we had passed on the place and somebody else had done it wrong, I'd be kicking myself."Friedman and Bloomfield did make some purchases: restroom plumbing, a meat slicer that looks as if it belongs under the hood of a Ferrari, and a tiled kitchen to replace the old one, which hadn't seen combat since the 1960s. Some open kitchens can be chilly, stainless-steel showpieces with all the charm of an operating room. Tosca's glows like a fireplace."I really wanted the kitchen to be quite welcoming," Bloomfield said. "The heart of the restaurant is the kitchen, and to see it alive and beautiful and inviting was a big important thing to me and also Josh."Josh Even is her chef de cuisine. The menu the two of them arrived at is Italian, unfussy and marked by Bloomfield's well-known fondness for innards (a terrine of pigs' ears) and often-overlooked skill with vegetables (sweet, cherry-size Tokyo turnips, roasted with their greens on).My one meal at Tosca Cafe had its dim moments, like a sharp, aggressively garlicky mussel soup and a delicate liver sausage that was no match for a harsh, salty pumpkin puree. Cannoli filling, which was supposed to be lightly sugared ricotta, had the bland sweetness of pastry cream.But Even's crew also makes dried semolina pasta shells called lumaconi - baked with lemon-scented cream, Treviso radicchio and a fistful of bread crumbs - that I would eat once a week if I lived nearby. I'd follow them with the chicken and a dish of potatoes roasted with garlic and rosemary until they're crackling and golden, then dressed with hot pork fat.Our server insisted that we swipe the potatoes through the chicken's wonderfully old-school sauce of Marsala and cream. "That's where the money is," she said. Actually, I liked it better than money.I also liked that Bloomfield and Even's menu doesn't reach for a 1919 Italian-American version of retro-authenticity. Their food is what you want to eat today, which means Tosca Cafe might be around tomorrow.© 2014 New York Times News Service
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