The Corner Bar is gone, which is deflating. How many disappointments can beer drinkers take? I guess the good news is that we don’t have many future disappointments — in the form of bars and greasy spoons, beloved but endangered — left, so we won’t have to endure too many more.
I was glad to read that the new owners of the Corner Bar also currently run the Clam Bar on Napeague: Who doesn’t love the Clam Bar? I’ve never met a cold halved lobster or cherrystone on the half shell I didn’t like. Not that I have eaten there for a couple of years; I’m allergic to waiting on line for anything, kind of ever, and the Clam Bar always has a throng of expensive cars and Montauk-bound Brooklynites prowling in a circle around it, waiting to pounce on a tray of steamers. My patience for waiting on lines is less than zero under any circumstance, and slimmer still if I’m being asked to wait for my dinner. The minute the hostess hands me one of those black pager boxes that flashes red and vibrates when your table is ready, I pivot on my heel and move swiftly toward the parking lot, turning a handspring and tossing the pager over my shoulder like a rhythmic gymnast tossing high her red rubber ball in the summer Olympics. I haven’t been to the Clam Bar for a long time, but I’m very glad it’s still there.
The last time I went to the Corner in Sag Harbor was about four years ago, if I’m honest. I sat with a friend at that big glossy bar and drank a Cuba Libre (my unsophisticated cocktail of choice) while she told me stories of middle-age dating and romance that singed my eyebrows right off my face.
Given who the new owners of the Corner Bar are, it does seem possible that it will be the exception to the golden rule that, once sold, a favorite old watering hole or pizzeria — whose new owners promise “will remain exactly the same, only refreshed” — will be utterly destroyed in its new incarnation. (I’m remembering the late, lamented Paradise on Main Street, Sag Harbor. I’m watching you, Sam’s Restaurant of Newtown Lane.) The new owners of said favorite old shoe of a bar or restaurant always make that promise, to quell public anxiety, and then swing the doors open to reveal a completely ruined and unrecognizable interior and a menu indistinguishable from any number of menus available at middling restaurants on the Upper West Side. The sign outside remains the same. Sometimes.
We should all be more concerned about the survival of the luncheonette. We thankfully have John Papas Cafe still, of course, on the Reutershan parking lot, although it’s so crowded on weekends and at peak lunch hour that the waitstaff there have begun handing out the dreaded black pagers (like the pirates in “Treasure Island” handing the card with the “black spot” to a crew member about to be thrown overboard).
The lunch counter at Poxabogue’s Fairway Cafe, however, has been closed while it undergoes renovation. I’m worried. I’m very, very worried. Poxabogue is my favorite lunch stop and, of course, the very best thing about it is that it hasn’t changed in decades. Indeed, they still prepare — at least still did until the “caution” tape went up — the same recipe for chunky chicken salad that they always served, in a line of luncheonette genealogy going back a very long way, to when the chef at Poxabogue arrived from another East Hampton luncheonette, the Newtown Cafe, and that’s going back 40 years, is it not? I was a teenage waitress at the Newtown Cafe, so I recognize that chicken salad for certain.
The Newtown Cafe may not be remembered by some of you, but it was where the old Eddie’s Luncheonette had been before it, which is to say, it was where the Golden Pear is now. I was a teenage waitress at the Newtown Cafe (and, later, a dirty all-night restaurant called Nightbirds in the East Village, where the rock-and-rollers and club kids drank margaritas and ate Nicoise salads at 3 a.m. in the 1980s). I leaned into the pass-through window between the lunch counter and the kitchen, sticking my order slip into the overhead slot, and, in my high teenage voice, sang out the short-order language of the greasy-spoon kitchen — “down” meant toast and “whiskey down” meant rye toast. I swaggered into the back dining room, where there were booths once upon a fairy-tale time, with plates of poached eggs and tuna melts up and down my arms, feeling like Mabel Stark, the lady lion tamer with the Ringling Bros. Circus. What a great job that was. Waiting tables gives you a feeling of competence, of mastery. This is why waitresses in old movies are always so sassy and wisecracking. They’re in charge and they know it. It is we who wait on them.
I like being able to tell new acquaintances that I was a waitress for a few years, as a brag. It conveys a whiff of working-class credibility that I, with my boarding school education and almost unbelievable innate sense of snobbery, cannot otherwise legitimately claim. (I guess this is what they’d call “stolen valor.”) But despite it being a long, long time ago, having been a waitress once has proven very convenient to me in my role as impatient customer, unwilling to be left waiting, because whenever I’m in a restaurant and the waitress is not hustling with sufficient skill or treating us, the lowly table sitters, with a minimum of civility, I feel fully justified in stage-whispering my professional criticisms — to my fellow diners, of course, not, by God, to her!