Liver Lady and Anything Man

Abstract

Liver Lady and Anything Man Aaron Landsman (bio) My most successful table-waiting blunder took place on a June Wednesday in 1996, at Nick & Eddie in Lower Manhattan, and involved a woman we called "The Liver Lady." This was about four months before the restaurant closed for good. Nick & Eddie was a "pioneer" in a long line of SoHo restaurants that served fancy comfort food made with a lot of fuss, at inflated prices. It occupied the corner of Spring and Sullivan Streets for about nine years. Nick & Eddie served "a great burger" and a "solid steak." The bartenders "knew their way around a martini" and "didn't ask too many questions if you just wanted to nurse your drink alone." Even the Zagat quotes conjured a New York City of bereft, nostalgic anonymity. This was the vanilla noir fantasy the owners wanted to provoke. For a long time, it was hard to get a table on a Friday night because movie stars and rock bands ate there. Models you could see in magazines that week picked at their fried catfish and rearranged it on their plates. In the late '80s, to open a restaurant with a thirteen-dollar burger west of West Broadway was still a bold move—a "just so crazy it might work" maneuver. New York Magazine covered Nick & Eddie more than once. Drew was a regular. Sigourney. The band Anthrax. Even toward the end, waiters easily cleared $250 a night on a Friday without having to deliver anything remarkable, service-wise. [End Page 11] By the time I worked there the restaurant was past its prime. A competitor called Blue Ribbon had opened the year before, upping the ante equally on price, comfort, and authenticity ("chefs coming off a shift go for the steak frites") and lines ran out the door there six nights a week until 4:00 a.m. While our Fridays and Saturdays were still busy, our regulars, though they sometimes included people who hoped to be next year's Drew, Sigourney, and Anthrax, more often included Yuri, the UPS driver who delivered our fresh fish every other day and who brought a different date each week. We became part of his big-shot act—and by that time it kind of wasn't an act—through which he could gain proximity credits with his date by pointing out Drew and Sigourney and Anthrax, or at least the tables where they once sat. Sunday through Thursday nights had become slow. Since the place opened, there had grown a regular clientele of neighborhood people who came in for this or that dish or to chat with the staff, and who were made to feel welcome because they added to the veneer of realness. In 1996 the area west of SoHo was still a neighborhood on its own terms, with first-generation Italian and Portuguese immigrants raising the loud, metal grates on unselfconsciously sawdust-strewn butcher shops every morning, and old barbers who gave men $10 haircuts and $5 shaves. Drew and Sigourney and Anthrax may have made the trip to eat a $13 burger on Friday night, but on a Wednesday in July, at closing time, after we'd served a couple dozen dinners to forlorn couples, or single diners with magazines, you could still feel like you were in the city the way it was supposed to have been. The Liver Lady came in that June Wednesday because she came in almost every Wednesday for the liver special. She ordered it cooked a special way—with extra onions, or with rice instead of potatoes. The liver was always on the menu, but on Wednesday it was two dollars cheaper than usual and The Liver Lady was nothing if not thrifty. She told one of the waiters, who then spread it around, that she had millions to give away when she died, to several nieces and nephews, but she didn't want to waste even a dollar of their inheritance on overpriced food. The problem, she said, was that she had fine, uncompromising tastes. That was why she came to Nick & Eddie on Wednesday and got the liver, because she knew value when she...