.gif){kind=small}
|
|
||
|
| ||
|
| ||
   |
  |
 |
 | ||||
 |
|||||||
| Feed Me, Baby, One More Time | |||||||
| The dish behind the new Britney Spears restaurant | |||||||
|
|||||
| July 1 — Thank goodness they got the porn star, or the night might have been a total loss. |
 |
 |
|||
 |
||||
 |
|||
| |||
| THE NIGHT WAS Thursday and all of New York’s A-list celebrities—the one-namers like J-Lo, Cher, Bill and Hillary—were expected at the gala opening of Britney Spears’s new restaurant, Nyla. The New York City police even closed East 41st Street to traffic (which they almost never do—unless Turkmenistan’s UN undersecretary for rural development wants to go shoe shopping, that is). | |||||||||||||||||||
|
But something
funny happened: the gala was a bomb. Sure, former mayor Rudy Giuliani was there with his gal pal Judith Nathan. And proto-Britney pop tart (now Broadway nostalgia act) Deborah Gibson was on hand, too. So were members of the boy band LMNT (which sounds vaguely like something that one would find buried in one’s BLLYBTTN). And even Donald Trump brought along Madame Trump du Jour, model Melania Knauss (you know, for a rich guy, that Trump will do anything for a free meal). And just when you thought the A-list couldn’t get any more B, there was Jenna Jamieson—the actress best known for her roles in “Where the Boys Aren’t 7,” “On her Back” and “Up and Cummers 20”—striding down the red carpet. That’s it? No Hillary? No J-Lo? Even Bill Clinton was a no-show, a surprise considering that he could’ve seemingly satisfied all of his principal appetites—for Southern food, for scantily clad babes and for an adoring crowd—in one handy place. The spin doctors blamed the weather—it did rain heavily—but since when do the feet of celebrities, even on a beautiful day, actually touch pavement? Sometimes it seems that New York has an above-ground, celebrities-only subway system comprised solely of limousines. At least Britney, who’s not old enough to legally drink inside, showed up and promptly pronounced Nyla “my new hangout” (if she’s such a big star, why can’t she just go to Elaine’s like the rest of them?). New York foodies proclaimed Britney’s opening night a flop. Of course we did, we’re New Yorkers. The rest of the country has accepted the notion that people’s success as singers or actors gives them an entitlement to serve food to paying customers—think Jennifer Lopez’s Pasadena eatery, Madre, or Cameron Diaz’s new Miami Beach boite, Bambu—but in New York, restaurants create celebrities, not the other way around. Stop 10 Manhattanites on the street and more will be able to tell you that Wylie Dufresne is no longer the chef at 71 Clinton Fresh Food than the name of Jennifer Lopez’s new single. All three newspapers—even the staid New York Times—run gossip columns devoted solely to the movement of our city’s top chefs. (Editor’s note: Wait a second, Gersh. Did you just say that Wylie Dufresne is no longer at 71 Clinton Fresh Food? Gersh note: See what I mean?) But that same obsession with celebrity is what put Nyla on the map in the first place. After all, Spears is just an “owner” in name only. The real force behind Nyla is Bobby Ochs, a longtime New York celebrateur whose publicist humbly calls him “the perfect amalgamation of restaurateur, chef, and celebrity” even though he is none of those three things. Ochs’ celebrity-restaurant world is one in which you win some—Ochs ran Mulholland Drive Cafe for Patrick Swayze during an eight-year run—and you lose most, such as Peaches, the Marla Maples Trump restaurant that opened and closed in 1998. Even Ochs admitted that Spears hadn’t tasted the food at Nyla—not even the fried okra, the Southern fried chicken and the Johnny cakes that she supposedly demanded be part of the menu—before the place opened. “She has been busy touring,” Ochs told The New York Times. “She tasted it by osmosis through her manager.” |
||||||||||||||||||
|
And the girlish
neon-chiffon décor? The Georgia O’Keeffe-inspired video screen? The
catwalk and mezzanine lounge area? Certainly those must be Britney
touches? Not really. “We wanted to create an environment that embodies Britney’s image today…a just-bloomed flower,” Jay Haverson, the restaurant’s interior designer, said in a supposedly serious statement. (It says something about the cult of celebrity that even Reuters, which usually does let the facts get in the way of a good story, reported that Spears “designed much of the interior herself.” If that’s true, I will eat my hat…without even a Remoulade sauce.) Spears, who once declared herself “not a girl, but not yet a woman,” is clearly not a New York restaurateur, either. At Thursday’s opening, she acted as though her “Gee whiz” approach to life will protect her in the shark tank of the New York food world, where restaurants collapse at a rate that approaches that of celebrity marriages. When asked why she wanted to open a restaurant, Spears looked surprised that a reporter would have the temerity to question her motives or abilities: “Why not?” she said. “I love New York.” Clearly, it was time for another of my famous fact-finding tours. I had to see for myself—and taste for myself, since Newsweek was paying—what New Yorkers were quick to deride as Britney’s “navelle cuisine.” After walking the neon-chiffon gauntlet, we were shown our table in the center of what is actually a small dining room. (When Britney and friends “hang out” at Nyla, our bubbly waiter told us, they’ll do so in the upstairs mezzanine. “Everyone else can watch them from here,” he said. Who said celebrities don’t want to live their lives in a fishbowl?) We ordered a wide-variety of menu items, including the “signature” dishes like duck and wild mushroom etouffée, Creole gumbo and even “Southern sushi,” which appeared to be little more than an excuse to serve something rolled-up. I’m not going to criticize the food—I’ll let The New York Times do that in a couple of weeks—but I couldn’t help wondering who is going to come to this restaurant. With entrees that hit the $24 mark, it’s far too expensive for Britney’s teen fan base (although, judging from some of the clientele, not too expensive for birthday parties thrown by rich New Yorkers whose kids’ rooms are covered in Britney posters). |
||||||||||||||||||
|
At the same time, it won’t draw the “lounge” crowd that Nyla’s publicists
are touting. Britney told the press that her new restaurant is “in the
heart of the city,” but somebody should’ve actually done more than look at
a map of Manhattan and stick a pin in the geographic center. After 6 pm,
that neighborhood feels more like Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery than a
bustling bar crawl. And on weekends, the only people walking around
Midtown are tourists who don’t realize that the Museum of Modern Art has
moved to Queens. Of course, in New York, there’s enough traffic to make even celebrity-owned restaurants succeed. Michael Jordan’s The Steakhouse, which opened a few years ago in Grand Central Station, is filled nightly with more Japanese tourists than a road show of “Cats.” Obviously no one told the tour book publishers in Tokyo that MJ would be more likely to turn up at a minor-league baseball all-star game than at his own restaurant. Nyla probably won’t last a year; but, then again, maybe that’s the point. After all, this girl (sorry, she’s not a girl, not yet a woman) clearly entered into this restaurant thing with eyes wide open—if her new song, “Overprotective,” is any indication. “I need to make mistakes just to learn who I am,” she sings. Well, she couldn’t have picked a better learning experience than opening a restaurant in New York. Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post and the Brooklyn Cyclones beat reporter for The Brooklyn Papers. His website is at http://www.gersh.tv/ © 2002 Newsweek, Inc. |
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
.gif){kind=spacer}
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||
| |
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
 | |||||||||||||||
  | |||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
 | |||||||||||||||||
|
Advertisement |
||||
Perspectives
