Robert Sietsema on Downtown Gourmet
| In 1977, years before Robert Sietsema embarked on his two-decade stint as the Village Voice’s food critic, he was just another young midwesterner newly arrived in Manhattan’s East Village. How was the neighborhood? “A beguiling spectacle,” as he writes this week in the NYR Online. “Nearby were storefronts selling discontinued fabric by the bolt, craft stores flogging bowls made from tree stumps, used record stores, and, best of all, junk shops so cluttered you had to gyrate your way around the teetering piles of dusty merchandise just to take a look.” But most important, given Sietsema’s apartment’s “rudimentary” kitchen, was the discovery of the downtown food scene, “what were then called ethnic food joints”: Katz’s Delicatessen back when it was “purely utilitarian”; the Kiev, a twenty-four-hour Ukrainian diner; Vinny’s, a Sicilian sandwich shop that specialized in the vastedda, fried cheese and fried spleen on a roll; De Robertis, an Italian pastry shop and a favorite hangout of the mobster “Handsome Jack” Giordano; twenty-two Bangladeshi-run Indian restaurants on 6th Street; Christine’s, a Polish café known for its challah French toast; and dozens of other greasy spoons and butter purveyors, now mostly lost to time. Below, alongside Sietsema’s essay, are five articles from our archives about the New York that was. Memories of East Village restaurants, circa 1977 Hidden within the storied Greenwich Village hangout Spain were remnants of the neighborhood’s bohemian past. —August 22, 2023 “Someone told me about a writer’s workshop called Umbra. The group met in the East Second Street apartment of its cofounder Tom Dent, and I showed up to my first meeting in the spring of 1963. Present that evening were Lorenzo Thomas, Askia Touré, Charles Patterson, David Henderson, Albert Haynes, and the workshop’s cofounder Calvin Hernton—Black writers who would become pioneers of the Black Arts Movement.” —January 14, 2023 The neighborhood became the epicenter of what the remorseless rise of rents will do to a once mixed and diverse city, rich foremost in its peoples and cultures. —October 9, 2019 Following Ornette Coleman’s death, Charles Simic spoke to his brother Milan Simich, who has produced concerts and recordings for more than twenty-five years, about the avant-garde jazz scene in New York’s East Village that gave rise to that music. —July 29, 2015 “Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions.” —November 6, 2003 Special Offer
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