list of my favorite places in New York that shut down this year
This year was a crazy one and a bunch of institutions in New York City closed down. Their losses pale in comparison to other losses. Obviously. I mean that goes without saying. But if you worked at these restaurants or places or even hung out there a lot they might mean something to do. Some of these meant something to me. Or a bit.
Caridad 78 (closed in July)
Caridad was one of the last Cubano-Chinese restaurants in Manhattan, run by Chinese immigrants who had lived in Cuba and spoke perfect Spanish. When I was a kid my dad would talk about them all the time. It was kind of a cool dichotomy. The menu at this place was half Chinese and half Spanish and you could get, like, lomo saltado and chow mein if you wanted to. 78 also had really good fried chicken which came with rice and beans. There was a Cubano-Chinese place on 14th near my old office, it’s a bagel store now, but after one of my first days of work here (2008, beginning of the baseball season), I made a point of having dinner there to cement my status as a working man in the city. I never ate there again and it shut down I think early last decade. Caridad I didn’t go to that often. It was once mentioned on a Seinfeld episode. The last time I went to Caridad was September 2019 after I saw The Irishman in theaters on the second day of the New York Film Festival:
for a matinee. I forget what I got but it wasn’t the fried chicken. This guy across from me got it, though. It’s only about 15 blocks up the road from the opera. Flor De Mayo is in all likelihood the better restaurant. They do Peruvian and Chinese and are a few blocks away and the seats are nicer. There are a bunch more Cubano Chinese places around, with many uptown and in the outlying boroughs. I don’t really sit around at home and think about restaurants. But in the spring it got caught in my head. Maybe because it chased the Scorsese movie. I liked it there, and only ate there alone.
Richie’s Gym
The absolute worst part of living in New York City is that gym offerings are sparse if not degrading. To get a good facility that isn’t always busy and with the right type of equipment—say a reverse hyper machine?—you need to pay $200. And even then… Richie’s was the best gym in New York City, and the only good thing about Bushwick. I worked out there in 2009 when I lived in that neighborhood. There was only one squat rack and it was always taken. All the machines were too close together, so if someone was working on one you had to wait to walk by them or scuttle like a crab and get through sideways. The counter sold these orange drink and egg protein shakes that were… in a word… inedible. The tub they served them out of was at least 20 lbs. I have never seen a tub that big outside a restaurant kitchen. The tub was always open also. The gym had airbrushed photos of Ronnie Coleman, Arnold, etc. breaking out of the ground on the wall. There was no other gym like Richie’s; I’ve yet to find one that can be mentioned in the same breath. I don’t know when or why they closed.
Jimmy from Jimmy’s Corner (passed away, May)
I’ve never had a drink in my life but this is one of my favorite bars to not do that. My friend Nat says the mixed drinks are cheap and my friend Jonah says the beer tap is the coldest he’s ever experienced, although he lives in London where I’ve heard beer is served warm. Jimmy’s was the last dive bar in Times Square, on 46th and 6th just about, run by Jimmy, who trained boxers for a living, and whose photos (with boxers and alone) are all over the bar. Last year I went often. Once it was Fleet Week and I couldn’t get a seat. Another time the lead actor from My Cousin Vinny (1992) was there and she bought the drinks and brought them back to the table. I don’t know, I liked hanging out there. I wonder when I will be in midtown again. With all due respect to the bartenders and employees there, it seems much different without Jimmy running the oasis.
Carroll Gardens Classic Diner (closed September)
There’s not a lot worth writing home about as far as food in Carroll Gardens goes. All the supposedly good restaurants here aren’t, and all the NY Post-type Italian restaurants that are actually good have gone to seed, in a way, and in any event aren’t open on Sundays. What’s left is not bad, but again, not worth writing home about. This place was pretty good. The name was painted on the window in the big old grease paint letters that they used to do storefronts in. When you ordered a club sandwich, which is the only thing I get at a diner, they give you both fries and onion rings. Which to be fair is something every diner does, but they’re the first one I noticed who did that. For a long time I wondered how diners stay in business. I guess they don’t.
88 Lan Zhou (closed Halloween)
I really liked this place. I always confused it with Super Taste and Tasty Hand Pulled Noodle, both of which I like more. 88 I ended up at a lot, usually by myself, before or after doing something in Chinatown. It was very cheap and had a long menu so you could really let it fly. It felt when you ate this stuff you could pull a truck afterwards with your teeth. Maybe it was the broth, which felt healthy. Or something in it. The food was pretty fatty, not in the way all restaurant food is, but in that much of the menu was noticeably laden with animal fat. So it was either that or the subtle, small feeling you get after paying for dinner that is less than $7. I think I stopped going in spring of 2019. This is a papercut loss that will be felt more acutely as time goes by.
Bubby’s (closed, IDK when)
Only the High Line one is closed. I’ve never been there. I have a weird relationship with this place. It’s an embarrassing relic, it’s in TriBeCa, the juices on the menu are half-assed, they are called Bubby’s, they hew to pie, which is never good at a restaurant. But for a long time their fried chicken was constructed, and I’m not making this up, completely identical to Popeye’s, only “better quality”, as in made with more expensive, organic poultry. It was something. I think in 2015 I went there five times. But every time I did they changed up the fried chicken part of the menu. It originally came with two sides, then with waffles, then one side. The price went up every time. Why were they doing this to me? Did they want me to leave and never come back? Still, what’s a few dollars. I was happy to pay it. Sometime a few years ago life changed and I haven’t been back to Bubby’s or thought about it since. But no one ever talks about how good the fried chicken was there before Donald Trump got elected.
John Jovino Gun Shop (closed May)
I don’t really have an opinion about guns. I think aesthetically they’re very cool but it ends there. Maybe they’re not very cool. I don’t know. But I liked Jovino’s Gun Shop for that reason. Around since 1911, their sign was featured in a number of films, and it’s even on the (French) poster for Mean Streets (1973).
And in a critical scene in the film. Jovino had the best T-shirts out of any business in the city. The store, in Little Italy, had new Chinese owners. The T-shirt I bought there a while ago had the name spelled out in Chinese letters with drop shadow, a drawing of a gun, a .457 I think, and the store’s address, phone number and email address, which did not include a custom domain. When I was in there everyone was buying T-shirts, and by “everyone” I mean myself and a Norwegian family. For more information, check out Nat’s post on the subject in May that goes into further detail.
Gem Spa (closed May)
Obviously this place was great, what else needs to be said? The Stage Diner across the street has been shut down for years now, ever since the sushi place near Gem Spa exploded, and that one stings too. Stage never reopened because of an alleged code violation. It was my sister’s favorite restaurant in the city.
New York Health & Racquet Club (closed July)
I always mixed this place up with New York Athletic Club, which is the gym near Central Park that would sponsor Olympic athletes who couldn’t get a merchandise deal before the Games or marathons. (This was up until a few decades ago; athletes don’t really go unsponsored anymore, though there are exceptions.) But they’re not the same gym. Still, it’s sad to see an exercise-specific gym close. Back to the Athletic Club. It has guest rooms, which is cool. I don’t know people who stay there, but I know about them.
Foley’s (closed May)
This place was a dump, this weird baseball bar in midtown who would let you sign a baseball and put it on the wall if you asked to do that. Twelve years ago when I started here I was working in baseball and would hang out at Foley’s a lot for work things, Christmas parties and the like. It was a baseball bar. Once I skipped a hangout in Boston with all my friends, including Casey Watson, who flew in all the way from Oakland, to go to a sabermetric conference at Foley’s on a Saturday in the interest of professional development. It worked out. My future boss saw me there and was impressed, and for my efforts made a push to hire me full-time at the company, which earned me a 50 cent an hour pay raise, a vesting pension and a health care plan that could not be rivaled by the king of Siam. Still, a dump. Worth noting is that in the back of the bar there was one row of balls that lined up as follows: Marilyn Chambers, Derek Jeter, Kaz Tadano. Really good.
40 Knots (closed IDK when)
Really the only pool table in Carroll Gardens, even though it was the size of a couple of tote bags taped together and slanted southeast and had a bump in the middle. I would say I played more pool on this table than any other.
Jeffrey (closed IDK when)
I was thinking that this store in Chelsea which isn’t around anymore is the one that was featured in the lede paragraph of John Seabrook’s 2000 New Yorker profile on Helmut Lang, where he tries on some pants. But that was Camouflage, a better store, from what I remember, and which shut down way longer ago. Still, a loss.
China Chalet (closed July)
This place wasn’t bad. When people smoke indoors that means good things are happening and to see that taken away is a loss. Now you can only smoke indoors in New Orleans and in the casinos in Atlantic City. I think in Houston too. I like the Irish bar in the back, on Trinity, more than China Chalet. My photographer Adrianna says they have the best wings in the city.
Lucky Strike (closed April)
This place was also cool. I liked their pepper steak, which not a lot of places here serve, and went there for my birthday every year for a little while, about a decade ago, but haven’t been back since. They had a tin bar, which you don’t really see around anywhere.
Angry Wade’s
I spent New Year’s Day here with my friends. It is on Smith Street somewhere, or was.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Other work: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-JLRt0Ec6gZBm50hATYCYmLctnF9GhVijoEbam50JSw/edit