A Change In The Marrow

My first visit to New York City’s meatpacking district was magic. The year was 1995, or thereabouts. A friend, know-ing my affection for any city’s nether regions, directed me to the northwestern edge of Greenwich Village, near the Hudson River, where canopied streets flanked by brownstones give way to cobblestone streets lined with graffiti-tagged warehouses fronted by metal awnings. That’s where I found Florent, a round-the-clock diner with American sensibilities and a French backbone.

I recall a cigarette fog. And lots of hip people in black T-shirts. And a long linoleum counter where, at two in the morning, I ordered boudin noir, which translates from French as blood sausage. Stuffed with rice and pork, colored and flavored by the blood of a pig, that link arrived with a side of cooked apple, a saucer of sharp mustard, and a demi-baguette.

It wasn’t necessarily the meal I wanted. But it was late, and I was impressionable. And it seemed the right food to order in a neighborhood defined by blood and guts and other by-products of breaking down pigs and cows into butcher-shop-ready parts. I devoured every bite, as if by ingesting such a meal I might lay claim to short-term citizenship in the hipper-than-hip meatpacking district.

Visit two came in 2001. My wife and I were newly married. I told her tales of the district, of its avant-garde charms and its kinship to other emerging entertainment neighbohoods, from Deep Ellum in Dallas to SoMa in San Francisco. I promised her a late-night breakfast at Florent. I promised her funk.

But by then, the neighborhood had begun to gentrify. Designer dress shops and buzzer-accessed art galleries appeared to be as numerous as meat lockers. We saw but a few men in soiled aprons hefting freshly butchered lambs on their shoulders, strutting down the middle of Little West 12th Street.

The precarious balance between endearingly scruffy and terminally hip was tipping. Throngs of the young and the restless now caromed through the cobblestone streets, bark-ing hook-up coordinates into cell phones, eating dinner in big-box restaurant concepts. One evening, we heard two high-heeled damsels arguing about who makes the best Cosmopolitan in the district. And we knew the jig was soon to be up.

Pastis saved us. An American riff on a Parisian brasserie as imagined by Keith McNally (the fellow behind Balthazar in SoHo), it proved to be a worthy extension of Florent. The place is counterfeit French: a corner barroom with a dining room on the side, accented by foxed mirrors, a zinc-topped bar, and a tin ceiling. But who cares when you’ve snagged a seat at that bar, ordered a bottle of Cotes du Rhone, and have begun knifing into a perfect hanger steak (often called the butcher’s filet) served with a side of honest fries and a gravy boat of béarnaise?

On my most recent trip to New York, I returned to the meatpacking district. Florent, my old haunt, was in its final throes, the victim of ever-esca-lating rent. Gentrification had continued apace. The number of meat packers had continued to fall. Velvet-roped bars commanded every other corner. Twentysomethings ruled the night, bouncing from Ono, a Japanese restaurant concept in search of a soul, to Tenjune, promoted as an “underground ultralounge with celebrity enthusiasts.”

But during daylight hours, the district — and the far west end of the Village — revealed itself to be a pleasant neighborhood, sparsely populated, small-scaled, and altogether walkable. On an afternoon gambol, I ate a perfect lemon-roasted chicken drenched in green sauce at Barbuto. That’s Jonathan Waxman’s corner trattoria on Washington Street, the one with a fire-belching oven in the back and roll-up doors for walls.

By 4:00, I had snagged a stool at the Rusty Knot, a faux-wood-paneled bar serving reinvented blender drinks and sandwiches of smooshed chicken liver and artisanal bacon. At 5:30, Wallsé on 11th Street opened its doors. And I was soon seated in Kurt Gutenbrunner’s hat box of an Austrian bistro, forking into a rabbit spaetzle threaded with tarragon and drinking a crisp and nutty Neuburger white.

In the meatpacking district proper, I ducked into Merkato 55, Marcus Samuelsson’s upscale homage to the foods of his native Africa, where I munched on akara, black-eyed pea fritters with shrimp. But, as the sun began to dip and the dine-and-dance crowd began to descend, I called it a night.

I began the next morning at Pastis, the epicenter of the modern-day meat-packing district. Seated at an outdoor table, watching salarymen and shop-girls trundle to work, I ate scrambled eggs draped in a blanket of smoked salmon and drank cup after cup of coffee poured from a nickel pitcher. I enjoyed my breakfast so much that I returned for lunch.

While drinking a rosé from Chinon between bites of an arugula salad, I troweled steak tartare on baguette slices. And as the sun rose in the sky and the tile-floored room began to fill, I caught sight of a butcher’s panel van making the turn at Gansevoort Street, bound, more than likely, for Hunts Point in the Bronx, where New York City’s heavy lifting (and cutting) are done these days.

Pastis
9 Ninth Ave.at Little W. 12th St.
212.929.4844
pastisny.com

John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, is general editor of Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing.

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