Strangely New York: At Ladurée, Cookies Are the New Cupcakes

By Mitch Broder

When I arrived at Ladurée it was packed with two dozen people, which is why the people congratulated me for arriving at a lull.

I understood. It was a rainy day and if I had arrived when the line was longer I’d have had to open my mini umbrella and consequently figure out how to close it.

As it was, I could march right in and watch people wait for half an hour to buy imported Parisian macarons, whether they knew what they were or not.

Many of them, of course, knew what they were. This is a neighborhood with people who go to France the way I go to the Catskills. They were here because they already had a relationship with these cookies and were excited to keep it going without paying a surcharge for luggage.

Others were here simply to get their hands on the latest thing, for which time was running out because Ladurée has been here a month. The cookies are something new to displace our formerly new Beverly Hills cupcakes and our recently new East Village alcoholic cinnamon buns.

Macarons sounds like macaroons, so there are indeed visitors who expect to find something like the coconut lumps that come in cardboard cans labeled Manischewitz. These aren’t those. They are soft sandwich cookies with a creamy filling. In America they are known as Oreo Cakesters.

I take that back. A store representative gave me a chocolate macaron, and I admit that it made an Oreo Cakester seem like an Oreo Cakester. The cookies were like flaky madeleines and the filling was like chocolate ice cream. Ladurée is a place for the privileged, but it bought me for $2.70.

Anyway, most places on Madison Avenue are for the privileged, and at least this new fancy boutique has some simulated old-world charm. Its décor and its furnishings mostly evoke various recent centuries and combine to make you feel like you’re in a quaint French home with a cash register.

Within the home you’ll find the colorful little cookies in fourteen flavors including fleur d’orange, cassis violette, and pétale de rose. They are about the size of a Cakester but are indeed $2.70 apiece. Or, in “prestige boxes,” twenty-four for $67. Or, in “crystal boxes,” twenty for $58.

If you want to truly live the Ladurée life, you can accessorize your cookie collection with, say, a jar of confiture de fraise (strawberry jam) for $12, or a brioche-scented candle (in glass) for $62. But no pressure. The sales clerks do not disturb you. They wait quietly in their gray vests and ties and call out “Who’s the next guest?”

This unlikely empire reportedly began in France in 1862 and promises to keep expanding under its current vigorous leadership.

Ladurée already plans a tea room where it will bake its cookies here in New York.

I intend to visit it when it opens.

I will bring a golf umbrella.

Line up at Ladurée, 864 Madison Avenue, between 70th and 71st streets, New York City.

Strangely New York: I Wonder Whether They'd Take a Bald Eagle

Zula keeps an eye on you.

By Mitch Broder

Fall arrives next week, and everybody knows what that means:

So does Sunny.

You’d better get over to the barber’s if you want to see the parrots on the sidewalk.

The parrots are Sunny and Zula, who live outside Jean Romano Barber Shop, but only when it’s nice out, because at 50 degrees you’ve got yourself cold parrots. Otherwise they live inside with the shop’s two dozen other birds. You could always see them in there, but you’d be encouraged to get a haircut.

So this is the time to see them with no strings attached, if you can ignore the water-cooler bottle requesting donations for parrot food. All right, it’s tough in this city to find something for nothing. But it’s getting tough in any city to find parrots outside a barbershop.

Jean Romano has been various barbershops since 1973, but it’s been a tonsorial aviary for only about two years. As Mike Malakov, one of the managers, tells it, they started with a pet canary. That canary marked the place as a wayside inn for the winged.

A woman who herself had to fly to London asked if they’d like to watch her canaries. When she decided to move to London she asked if they’d like to keep her canaries. A precedent established, other people proceeded to drop off their canaries. Eventually the barbers gave up and started to breed their own canaries.

Meanwhile, the canaries were joined by parakeets, finches, cockatiels, and parrots. The parrots, being the biggest, were awarded the best view. Still, they bite, which is why there are signs on the cage that say “Please Don’t Touch/ Birds Bite Hard.” So naturally, people stick their fingers in and get bit hard.

But they accept it, Mike says, just as the people in the barber chairs accept the fluttering little birds in the indoor cages.

“Everybody loves them, knock wood,” he says. “Nobody’s complained yet. They like having the birds around. It’s relaxing.”

Get a look at Jean Romano Barber Shop, 301 East 82nd Street, near Second Avenue, in Manhattan.

Strangely New York: At Last, Have Your Martini and Eat It, Too

By Mitch Broder

Last week I brought you the new downtown place that makes food inspired by drinks.

So this week I bring you the new uptown place that makes drinks inspired by food.

The downtown place is Jane’s Sweet Buns, in the East Village, which sells things like raspberry tartlets containing gin. The uptown place is the 2nd Ave Deli, on the Upper East Side, which sells things like gin containing half-sour pickles.

The 2nd Ave Deli just opened on First Avenue, which in itself reveals something of an appetite for the incongruous. And with the incongruous address has come improbable concoctions like the Apple Latke Martini, the Dirty Pickle Martini, and the Lokshen Kugel Cocktail.

The premise was that you don’t see a lot of drinks based on Jewish food. The deli opening seemed as good a time as any to make some seen. Jeremy Lebewohl, who owns the deli with his brother Josh, convened a cocktail caucus, and in a few weeks had a drink list perhaps unprecedented in Judaism.

The Apple Latke is made with potato vodka, apple sauce, and lemon, and is garnished with a potato pancake, also known as a latke. The Dirty Pickle consists of gin, or the vodka of your choice, along with pickle brine, garnished with a half-sour pickle.

The Lokshen Kugel is the most complex, comprising rum with pineapple purée, peach schnapps, vanilla, cinnamon, lemon juice, and non-dairy creamer. It, too, is garnished with its namesake, which is sweet noodle pudding. The deli also serves potato kugel but that is not yet in liquid form.

There are five other original cocktails, like the 2nd Ave Balanced Diet, which is Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Soda with gin and plum brandy and a celery stick. But those first three are reportedly the leaders out of the gate, which is not surprising, since between celery and pancake, which would you choose?

Your mixologist Jeremy suggests the Dirty Pickle for pastrami sandwiches and other meat dishes, whereas the Apple Latke and Lokshen Kugel, he says, would pair better with pierogen and blintzes. His co-creator David Teyf concurs, though he adds that the Dirty Pickle also works well with lox, herring, and assorted smoked fish.

I imagine that Jane of Jane’s Sweet Buns will like Jeremy’s food-laced drinks. But I have reason to believe that Jeremy will like Jane’s liquor-laced pastries. Among his own cocktails he is partial to the one made with orange vodka, Dr. Brown’s cream soda, chocolate soda, and orange juice. It’s called the Creamsicle.

Mix it up at the 2nd Ave Deli, 1442 First Avenue, at 75th Street, in Manhattan.

The Automat: A New York City Icon is Slotted for a Comeback!

By Mitch Broder

Your nickels won’t go into the slots, which is best, since they’d buy paper food.

Still, you can’t deny that the Automat is back.

Not the entire Automat, but a twelve-door section of one, complete with windows, slots, knobs, and prices from one to four nickels. It opens, so to speak, at 11 o’clock on Tuesday morning, along with the new First Avenue branch of the 2nd Ave Deli.

It used to be in the Second Avenue branch of the 2nd Ave Deli. There, too, it was just inside the entrance. When that store closed in 2006, the relic was put into storage. I’ve been waiting for it to come out ever since. The owners humored me with an exclusive preview.

It is magnificent. It evokes a beloved tradition of New York City, even if the tradition did get its start in Philadelphia. In keeping with its home, it offers only Jewish deli food, and only pictures of that. But you still want to deposit your coins and turn a knob.

Of course, the opening on Tuesday is actually more for the deli. And that’s fitting, since, unlike the Automat, it has survived. The new deli is also magnificent. (It wasn’t finished, so I couldn’t take pictures.) And it marks a milestone for one of the best-known families in Jewish deli history.

The 2nd Ave Deli opened at the corner of Tenth Street in 1954, which was late in the day for Jewish delis. But Abe Lebewohl didn’t care how late it was. Having worked his way up through the deli world, he turned the tiny former luncheonette into a 130-seat institution officially approved by Jackie Mason.

On March 4, 1996, on his way to make a bank deposit, Abe Lebewohl was shot and killed. His family resolved to keep his life’s work alive. His brother Jack ran the deli till a rent dispute closed it ten years later. But Jack’s sons Josh and Jeremy reopened the next year on 33rd Street — and are now about to open a second branch, for the first time.

As for the real Automat, it predated the 2nd Ave Deli by half a century. Joe Horn and Frank Hardart launched it in Philadelphia in 1902. The first New York City Automat opened in 1912. By mid-century, dozens were dispensing the likes of Salisbury steak, baked beans, and pumpkin pie.

An Automat photograph made in 1942 by J. Baylor Roberts.  From the National Geographic Image Collection.

The mission of the Automat was to sell good food cheap. The appeal of it was such that moguls and movie stars went there anyway. It got poor people through the Depression and got rich people into the papers. It was good for everyone. Especially for Joe Horn and Frank Hardart.

At its height, it appeared in movies, songs, books, and magazines. Its strange marriage of automation and humanity was unique. In a book called “The Automat,” the authors quote a company executive: “New York in those days had only two types: Park Avenue and the workers. But they all came to the Automat.”

New York again has only those two types. But it has no more Automats. They all succumbed to the usual scourges of cities — notably, the suburbs. Plus food has just gotten too serious, and besides, it’s gone up too much. To buy a 2nd Ave Deli pastrami sandwich at the Automat, you’d need 319 nickels.

But it’s a good pastrami sandwich. And the new deli is a great tribute. “We want to make sure that it lives up to what my uncle would have wanted,” Josh Lebewohl told me.

He also assured me that he, too, cherishes the 2nd Ave Deli’s Automat: “We’re serving classic Jewish food, and the Automat is part of classic New York.”

The new deli also has this nice clock.

Drop some coin starting Tuesday at the new 2nd Ave Deli, 1442 First Avenue, at 75th Street, in Manhattan.

Strangely New York: At Least One Celebrity Chef is a Bit of a Wag

David Burke Townhouse.

By Mitch Broder

David Burke’s dogs don’t have faces, which is kind of creepy, though there’s something to be said for a dog without a mouth.

There’s also something to be said for a chef who puts faceless dogs in your face in front of three upmarket restaurants on the Upper East Side.

It’s a little thing. But it’s a droll thing. And that’s more than you typically get at the type of place that serves dishes like Hudson Valley Rabbit Degustation. The dogs disarm you. You crack a smile. You crack the jokes that everyone cracks. You have a moment of mirth on the sidewalk. You can’t argue with that.

Fishtail by David Burke.

A white plastic dog is tied by a red leash to a long wooden bench in front of David Burke Townhouse, on 61^st Street. Another white dog is tied by another red leash to a railing in front of Fishtail by David Burke, on 62^nd Street. An orange dog looks out the window, or would if it could, at David Burke at Bloomingdale’s, on 59^th Street. It has no leash; it’s indoors.

Kids sit on the dogs and get their pictures taken. Other dogs sniff the dogs because, plastic or not, they’re dogs. A few people have dognapped the dogs. But Burke has always replaced them. They’ve become a trademark. And they were conceived in a matter of principle.

Burke moved into a building that had just altered its pet policy. “If I’d moved in four months earlier I would have been able to have a dog,” he says. He fleetingly toyed with the idea of filling the foyer with toy dogs. He chose instead to be mature. He bought the toy dogs for himself.

“We’re serious restaurant people, but we want you to come and have fun,” he says. This is, after all, the man who also sells Cheesecake Lollipops.

And the dogs ask for so little, he adds: “They’re very loyal, don’t bark, there’s very little cleanup, and they’ve all had their shots.”

David Burke at Bloomingdale's.

Pet the trademarks at David Burke’s restaurants on the Upper East Side, in Manhattan.

Paul Molé Barber Shop: Does It Still Have NYC's Hottest Haircuts?

Adrian Wood chats with a client in a barber chair from the '50s. The client is the newsman Allan Dodds Frank.

By Mitch Broder

I’ve spent a lot of time at Paul Molé Barber Shop. Someday I may spend some money. I just have to conquer my aversion to paying. And my fear of a charbroiled head.

The boys' chairs are downstairs.

The aversion is defensible, since a wash and cut would run around forty bucks, which is eighty times what I paid as a boy, and I thought that was too much. The fear is less rational, but it’s based in reality. The shop’s namesake got famous for cutting hair with fire. I don’t even like hot water.

The century-old business is owned by a genial gent named Adrian Wood. Paul Molé has been dead for decades; he is no longer a threat. But his legend lives on in framed clips on the walls that tell of his renowned “flame cut.” Reading the walls is one of the ways I spend time there without spending money.

Molé hoped to be an actor but became a self-promoter, back in the days when those were two separate things. He upstaged his celebrity clients and got on TV igniting hair with candles. He claimed to be reviving an ancient Egyptian art. You can see apparent disciples in videos like “Fire Hair Cut.”

When Adrian talks of Molé, I think of a parent shaking his head at a child who’s just shown up wearing a shaving-cream hat. Molé was cheeky. Still, his clients did range from Fred Astaire to Joe DiMaggio, John Steinbeck to Benny Goodman, and Tennessee Williams to Bing Crosby.

Adrian has his own famous clients. But he knows the value of his forerunner. And he knows the value of his forerunner’s traditions. Like Molé, he hires barbers, not hairdressers. Like Molé, he keeps a masculine atmosphere. Unlike Molé, though, he does not torch hair. He told me so. I want to believe him.

Three members of his family work at the shop, including his son Michael. I’ve spoken a lot with Michael. He seems very creative. One day as we spoke, he unearthed a box labeled “Barbers’ ‘Singe’ Tapers.”

The box was very old and dusty. And yet I could feel my ears burning.

Cool your heels at Paul Molé Barber Shop, 1031 Lexington Avenue, at 74th Street, in Manhattan.