Friday, May 02, 2008

The Center of the World

Cafe Spice - 1 star
Grand Central Station

Two Boots - 2 stars
Grand Central Station

Today I passed through Ground Zero for the first time since it became Ground Zero. I looked at it once in early 2002, when there were still crowds of people lined up against all the fences and pictures of victims plastered to those fences, but this was the first time I was actually down in the pit itself. Because, you see, the World Trade Center sat on top of a major station for short-haul trains to and from New Jersey, and even though it appears that absolutely no work has been done on whatever will someday occupy the site, the train station does work. Although there are literally millions of people for whom passing through this station is no big deal, for me it was a little eerie. Imagine a typical train or subway station buried thirty feet underground; then take away everything on top of that station, so you have just the framework of the tracks and the station, surrounded by thirty-foot-high concrete walls, on top of which you can see the surrounding streets. That's what it's like.

I was coming back from a meeting in the waterfront skyscrapers of Jersey City, just across the river from where the World Trade Center once stood, and on my way to Grand Central for train back to my parents' house in Chappaqua. Once some researcher posed the following question: You have to meet a friend in New York City on a given day, but you don't know when or where. Where should you go? The most common answer, by a wide margin, was the information desk in the center of Grand Central Station (the one with the little analog clock on top of it), at noon.

For a long time, Grand Central has been the metaphorical center of the city (and by extension, as Marcus would say, the world). Now after the major renovations of the 1990s, it's also a great place to get a quick lunch, with multiple sit-down restaurants and a food court with something like twenty places where you can grab a bite in the ethnic variety of your choice, their lines of waiting businesspeople snaking past each other in some elaborate abstract design.

For lunch, I had a vegetarian combo from Cafe Spice, including a vegetable curry and another dish of potatoes with peas, which was not particularly distinguished but which I would happily eat again. And before catching my train home I couldn't resist getting a slice of pizza from Two Boots, even though I wasn't hungry and I had a huge home-cooked dinner ahead of me. Two Boots is quintessentially New York pizza - which is to say it's not as good as the pizza in Naples or New Haven, but it reminds me of growing up. The crust is thin, but without body - not the chewiness of real Neapolitan pizza, nor the blackened surface produced by the coal-fired ovens in New Haven. Confronted with the tomato sauce and cheese, the crust just ... gives up, which is why most New Yorkers fold their pizza in half (the long way) before eating it. But still, there are few things more comforting, especially since I no longer eat the hot dogs from the pushcarts (one of the few things I really, really miss now that I no longer eat animals).T

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