This Must Be The Place

Last Sunday, Marlow & Sons in Williamsburg had its last service. Marlow was a cafe/bar/restaurant, opened in 2004, next door to its sibling business Diner, a refurbished dining car opened in 1999 by Andrew Tarlow and Mark Firth. Diner opened to offer a place for friends to hang out, along the way it ended up focused on sourcing of seasonal ingredients from local farms, based on the focus and integrity of the first chef, Caroline Fidanza. There was a symbiotic relationship of this local, sustainable ethos, an explosion of wild/cool/beautiful people, everywhere, and wild/cool/beautiful restaurants, soon to be everywhere, with their wild/cool/beautiful food. These places weren’t fancy, they were better than that. They were fucking good.

I moved to Brooklyn in March 2005 from Chicago. I pulled up to my friend’s place on Franklin Street in Greenpoint where just a few months later, in late May, we opened a restaurant. Every Monday we were closed that summer, so every Monday we went to Marlow for dollar oyster happy hour. And there, I met some of the best people of my goddamn life, and they all worked at Marlow. The aforementioned Caroline Fidanza, chef of both Marlow and Diner, set the tone for those businesses both in what food they served, how to care for it, along with the people who make it. Rebecca Collerton, her sous chef, a true badass, creative, tough, unflinching, who I first met after she had dental surgery, nursing a Jameson in the afternoon at Marlow to quell the pain. The two of them went onto open Saltie, the sandwich shop with a more ideas, flavor and impact, still!, than square footage. Marlow was also the neighborhood coffeeshop and general store of gourmet, esoteric goods, from Marvis toothpaste to those southern baptist peanuts and beautiful kitchen equipment. Tom Mylan was the grocery guy, the kind of nerd who would translate the Sabatier website from French to English to place a knife order because Julia Child used those knives. He went onto become the butcher for the corner, then left to open the Meat Hook. His partner, Annaliese Griffin, was one of my best gets, technically she didn’t work at Marlow, but proximity counts. She is a writer, editor, and back then, hype person for the great fuck-ups of the time.

Marlow was also the place I met AD Dunn, the barista everyone crushed on. We’d talk about our dogs, pit bulls we adored, each adopted in the previous cities we resided. AD was the editor-in-chief of Diner Journal, the quarterly publication published by the restaurants, an extension of the work—where the food came from, how it was made, who grew or raised it, who made it, who served it. Diner Journal evolved into an expression of the ridiculous wealth of talented people attracted to work at these places, Becky Johnson and Julia Gillard to helm the visual language, Caroline Fidanza and Scarlett Lindeman wrangling the recipes. Eventually I was brought into the fold as a regular contributor, bestowed with the title editor-at-large. The feeling of creating the journal every few months, that there was nothing, and then, we wrote it, we cooked it, we shot it, it was printed, something very tangible, something to hold, something to hold. Print.

These people, and the litany that followed, so many folks beyond those initial happy hours, continue to be salient in my life. I’ve been thinking a lot about 2005, I’ve been in New York for twenty years, the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. Facebook came in 2005, the iPhone in 2007, Instagram in 2010, changing how we participate with and in the world, putting the internet in our pockets. The internet offered such idealism, the promise of connecting people, free information, removing barriers to education and offering endless inspiration.

The internet also taken us away from living, getting us addicted to screen dopamine and absurd convenience, even though we generally are inefficient people. It allows us to have eyes on anything we could possible buy 24 hours a day, and the subsequent consequences of that reality, like Amazon. ABB-always be buying. Barely twenty years have passed since social media and smartphones have impacted how we live. Whichever way the wind blows determines if that’s a depressing or optimistic statement.

Then we got the dilettantes, influencers buoyed by clicks, eyes, algorithm, base curiosity, forwarding, sharing, sponsorship, setting standards for what we should consume, where we should go, all by someone on a screen, all based on this serpent eating its tail of clicks, eyes, algorithm, base curiosity, forwarding, sharing, sponsorship…what works in the two-dimensional world of the screen.

What a change that is from the three-dimensional world, going somewhere to check it out, you heard something new opened, or someone just met mentioned it and you took note because you like the cut of their jib. The perfect album is put on and the barstool feels right. Who are you to walk away from a good time? The new shipment of Spanish anchovy-stuffed olives came in. The grocery guy lets you buy enough green tomatoes to get through the night’s service, and just the exchange with the counter person fixes your retched day, making it feasible to get through another triple double. Knowing that this must be the place, this place combining nourishment—physically, spiritually and emotionally, comfort, possibility. All these little things add up. A great place percolates, truly a rarity. I know Marlow isn’t the last great place, but it was my first great place in New York City, and maybe even in my life.