On this week's episode of my WVOX Radio Show "Almost Golden," on Wed. January 18 at 11AM EST,I will be interviewing Noah Isenberg on his book about Hollywood director Billy Wilder.  Go to: WVOX.com. The episode will also be archived at: almostgolden.

NEW YORK CORNER

            As I predicted, the New York restaurant industry is on a soaring trajectory post-pandemic, despite fears of recession and, most important, a continuing lack of qualified staff, both in and out of the kitchen. Not only are restaurants in New York full—especially during the recent holidays—but significant new ones open every week with no sign of stopping.  Hope springs eternal in the New York restaurant sector, for as soon as one place closes, another one opens, and with so many landlords desperate to fill office buildings they have been willing to make good (well, at least reasonable) deals with restaurateurs over spaces the realtors cannot afford to stay empty. Restaurants are both an anchor and a draw for a building, as well as manifesting a vitality.
        So here’s what I believe will be the trends in New York restaurants for 2023. The rest of the country may not show such resilience, but no one should ever doubt the draw of Gotham’s gastronomy.

 

Travelers are back.  Like a bursting dam, foreigners and out-of-towners are booking hotels and restaurants post-Covid. Pent-up desire and held-back money—despite a strong dollar—are bringing in the Europeans and South Americans, though Asians have been slow to respond. Also, foreign travelers are as ravenous as domestic visitors to eat at restaurants they can’t find back home. The city expects to attract 61.3 million visitors in 2023, up 8.6% from last year, when international visitors more than tripled.

 

Fewer tasting menus. If you counted the number of people who even like 12-course tasting menus, I doubt you’d find more a thousand seats per night filled at such restaurants, where four-hour meals of tiny morsels and too much wine go for extravagant prices. Few restaurateurs are going to take the chance to find their audience to plan out the intricacies of such a meal’s ingredients, service and even the china.

 

Fewer trophy wine lists. A cogent, well selected wine list is more impressive than one that carries hundreds of label names (with perhaps one bottle in the cellar), because it indicates what wines go well with the chef’s food. The capital expenditure for a trophy list is now outrageous, with fewer Chinese and Russian billionaires around to show off.

 

No ethnic “food of the year.” Media feel the need to declare a kind of food the trendiest of a year. Remember Nordic cuisine? Last year it was Mexican. The year before Korean. This year I predict there will be no single cuisine that stands out because of media hype.

 

A surfeit of steakhouses. To a sure degree, opening up an expensive steakhouse is a no brainer, and in the past two years they’ve popped up everywhere, and all do good business. But this year that trend will slow, mainly because there is now a surfeit of them and too much competition, especially in Manhattan. In just the last couple of years COTE NYC, St. Anselm, Gage & Tollner, American Cut, Bowery Meat Co., Hawksmoor, Valbella and Ramerino Tuscan Prime (left) all have been added, so it’s not clear how many more the city can absorb.

 

More seafood. The supply of first quality seafood is never going to be adequate, which is why every restaurant in the city now serves farm-raised branzino. Still, New York does not have a plethora of seafood places below the paragon of Le Bernardin. But I think there will be some proliferation along the riverside neighborhoods on the Hudson and East River that will offer a wide variety of seafood.

 

Harlem Boom. With residential home sales soaring in Harlem and the expansion of Columbia University into the Upper West Side, which will have tens of thousands employees, students and apartment dwellers who want to eat locally, restaurants in Harlem should boom this year, especially west of Park Avenue. Places like Harlem Public, Fumo Harlem, Fieldtrip Harlem, Melba’s, Renaissance Harlem and Oliva Tapas (right) have proven to attract people from all over the city.

 

Vegetarian options. Instead of more vegetarian restaurants, more and more menus will offer more and more vegetable dishes outside the usual spinach and broccoli, not least more regional pastas and Asian restaurants using Asian greens. The switch of Eleven Madison Park to an all-vegetarian menu hasn’t spurred others to do so.

 

Regional Italian. You’d think that New York would have just about every region of Italy covered, from Trieste to Sicily, but the vast majority of the city’s Italian restaurants cover the boot, with favorite southern and a few northern dishes. Now, though, I expect to see more menus reflecting regions like Abruzzo, Liguria, Puglia, Sardinia and others that will distinguish them from their competitors.

 

Moderate French. New York may well have a sufficient  number of grand French restaurants, even though some food media have been predicting their demise for decades. But in the next year I see a return to bistro and brasserie interest, with comfortable, cozy atmosphere and the kinds of classic French dishes that never went out of style, as evidenced by new places like Corner Bar, La Brasserie (left), Le Rock and Daniel Boulud’s Le Gratin.

 

Prices. The great inflationary spiral may be peaking, after causing everything from rutabagas to Prime beef to soar. But, while diners continue to eat out as much as they do, restaurateurs are always sensitive to price and rare will be the one to increase prices if the other guy’s don’t budge. Based on my eating around NYC for the past year, I find that full portions of pasta now average $25, steaks $65 and desserts $14, not to mention $20 cocktails.

 

Outdoor dining. Although the municipal authorities have dragged their feet on rules and regulations, it seems that outdoor dining is here to stay in NYC. And restrictions on simple tables on the sidewalk have gotten easier for smaller storefronts.

 

CHAPTER THREE
 

 

“A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.”—Graham Greene

 

            Katie dug into the background research she always did first: primary sources, secondary sources, then requests for interviews with people she thought might lead her into further inquiries. She told David of the arrangement with Dobell, and David was happy to help any way he could, although it was not clear how much help he could be in what was initially to be a literary investigation.
            “Tell you what,” said Katie. “You seem to know a lot about the movie, so while I’m chasing after Graham Greene, how about you find out what you can about the movie?”
            “Katie, I’m no film scholar. I wouldn’t really know where to begin.”
            “Pretend you’re looking for clues to Mafia mob behavior by watching and researching mob movies out of Hollywood and Italy.  You always said mobsters like John Gotti copied the behavior and style they saw in the movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas, right? Y’know, life imitates art?”
            “That’s a pretty thin line of investigation,” said David, “but, hey, it’ll be fun. I’ll get a DVR of The Third Man—they probably have a copy at Blockbuster—and watch it over and over for clues. What are you up to?”
            “I’m reading all I can get my hands on about Greene. There’s a recent two-volume authorized bio of him by a guy named Norman Sherry, and a collection of Greene’s letters just came out this year. I love that kind of research.”
            “I know you do. Okay, see what you come up with and I will on my end.”
            Katie had every intention of reading every page of Sherry’s two 500-page volumes, but first she just checked the index for any references to The Third Man, Carol Reed, Orson Welles, and Harry Lime to get some background. She figured that, since Greene wrote the novella in 1948 and the movie came out a year later, Sherry’s first volume, covering Greene’s life from 1904-1939, was going to be useful only as a peek into what made Greene tick as a young man. The second volume, from 1939-1955, covered the years most pertinent to Greene’s spy career and The Third Man. Katie felt a third volume, on the years leading up to Greene’s death in 1991, wouldn’t be very productive, nor was the final volume likely to appear any time soon (the time between the publication of the first two volumes had been six years).
            Katie would read a chapter of the bio while checking to see if there were any relevant comments by Greene in the published letters.  She skipped around the letters when this or that name came up, and, remembering that Harry Lime was involved in selling bad—actually,  diluted—penicillin, she was excited to find a 1950 letter by Greene written to a Roman Catholic chaplain in London who’d insisted that there was no evidence that diluted penicillin was dangerous, chiding Greene by asking, “Is the story—as it seems to me—just a leg-pull?”
            “Dear Father Harrington,” Greene wrote back, “the penicillin story is not a leg pull as it was a definite racket of which a description was given to me by the chief of police in Vienna. The same kind of racket took place I believe in Berlin. The point of danger and using diluted penicillin is the fact that even if you injected somebody with plain water the chances would be that you would cause death, or so I am told by doctors. It was the other point that in cases of meningitis very quick treatment with penicillin is needed, and in the case of the children in Vienna the diluted penicillin was not strong enough to work and it was too late for any other remedy, but in the case of the children losing their minds I am told that this might of been caused by the polluted water. I feel sure that there are several medical inaccuracies in the story but the general idea is based on fact.”   
            Finding out more about such drug sales seemed a good place to start in her research, beyond the Greene bios, so she called David to ask whom they might speak to about such criminality going back to the post-war years in Europe.
            “That business with the bad penicillin is gruesome stuff in the movie,” said David over the phone. “That scene in the children’s hospital: All Reed had to do was show Holly Martins’s face to see how horrified he was at what his friend Harry Lime had caused.”
            “I remember watching that and cringing,” said Katie. “So do you know anyone who would have knowledge, or even records, of such activity right after the war?”
            “I can see if Gerald Kiley has such info,” said David, referring to the Interpol agent he and Katie had worked with on the Vermeer case.  “I think Interpol was founded before World War II, and they must have been pretty busy right after it.”
            In fact, Interpol, under its original name of the International Criminal Police Organization, was founded in 1923 with the mission to coordinate all worldwide criminal police authorities in dealing with international crimes ranging from organized crime and drug trafficking to war crimes and genocide. It took the name Interpol in 1956.
            Gerald Kiley had been of enormous help on the Vermeer case and David felt Interpol’s files should contain info on the illicit drug trade in Vienna in the post-war years.
            David met Kiley at his office near the U.N. building.
            “So you haven’t retired yet?” asked David, remembering that a year before Kiley had said he would be by then.
            “I will, just not yet,” said Kiley. “Y’know, the older I get in this job the more I’m intrigued by the vast number of truly despicably evil people in this world who need to be put behind bars.”
            “Glad to hear it,” said David, “because I’m here to ask you about one of the worst in post-war Europe.”
            “Who would that be?”
            “Harry Lime.”
            “Harry Lime? Wasn’t he the villain in The Third Man movie?”
            “Same guy.”
            “But he was not a real person, David.”
            “True, but Katie Cavuto has a notion that it would fun to try to find out if Graham Greene, the author, based Lime on a real person.  Greene had been in the British Secret Service during the war. Katie thinks there’s a good story in trying to find out if there not only was a real Harry Lime but that he might still be alive somewhere.”
            “And, as with the Vermeer article, she’s basing this on sheer supposition, without any evidence?”
            “More like wish fulfillment. But, hey, wherever Katie goes, I’m happy to follow.”
            “I figured that out a long time ago, David. So, how am I supposed to help you this time, with a bad guy who never lived?”
            “Well, do you know if Interpol would have info on any such drug crimes after the war?”
            “That was long before my time, or anyone else’s in the department, but I guess I can ask around and see. We’ve been building a good database over the past several years, so I’ll see if there’s anything there. Otherwise, if there is info on that period, it’s likely to be in our headquarters in Lyon, France (left). I doubt very much stuff that old has been transferred from old paper folders to computer discs. I can ask.”
            “That would be great. I’m sure Katie wouldn’t mind a trip to Lyon.”
            “With you in tow, I suppose.”
            “Never occurred to me.”