The Writing Room
We’ve lost a lot of great restaurants over the past two years. Once vibrant places of community that acted as the extended living rooms of NYC’s tiny apartments. A restaurant for a New Yorker isn’t just a place to go eat it’s a a place to make friends and build fond memories. The neighborhood restaurant fills that niche. The familiar spot around the corner. A place that you’ve been to many times and seen the same smiling faces greet you back again.
Here’s an ode to one that closed during the pandemic, the Writing Room. It served as an extension of the living rooms of hundreds if not thousands of Upper East Side apartments. It had an eclectic dining room adorned with memorabilia and thousands of books. You could get a comfortable nostalgic feeling as you sat waiting for your food to come.
The food too had something of a eclectic range. At it’s heart the Writing Room was a classic American restaurant that served comfort food. A giant burger dripping with cheese. Tomahawk steak dripping in butter and cut into bite sized pieces. Their most popular dish by far goey mac and cheese topped with crunchy bits of breaded goodness. But you could also find some odd flairs that don’t fit the mold of traditional American food. Seafood holds a prominent hold on the menu and even beyond the traditional salmon dish (Although their salmon is delightful). But the fluke crudo evokes a far different restaurant and something that you would never find on the menu of an American eatery in say Kansas City or Toledo. Perhaps that was a reflection of the neighborhood and the city that it resided in. People have come from all over the world to this tiny island called Manhattan to build a better life for themselves and their families. And because of that here isn’t just one definition of what it means to be a New Yorker but millions of individual stories. And some of those stories played out here at the Writing Room.
