Union Square Cafe

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-02/danny-meyer-on-the-business-of-bar-dining-at-the-new-union-square-caf

Anyone here been to the USC yet?

Not open yet. USC is aiming for this Tuesday.
I am having a big dinner there on December 16.

was there the last 2 nights of its prior incarnation
will be going back in next 2 weeks for sure
really just want to see if he can replicate that bar vibe

The gas service has been activated, and friends-and-family service has begun.
Much of the old vibe has been transplanted.

Very slightly OT, but I’m in the middle of reading Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler. It is a novel about her experiences as a backwaiter at USC, and it reads like it’s just barely on the fiction side of the memoir/fiction spectrum. In any event, she’s an astute observer and a good writer. I would recommend it to anyone, but especially to those who remember the old USC fondly and are awaiting the opening of the new one - as long as they don’t have such a romanticized view of the place that they don’t want it spoiled by hearing the nitty gritty details of what goes on in the back of the house.

My romanticized view of USC dates back to taking Ford & Wilhelmina models there during med school. Always tapped out my limited budget!

Ah, even the finest wedding cake has a few stray hairs.

Great memories. Going there in the mid-late '80s. A colleague had gone to college with Danny Meyer, and every time we ate there he would come over to the table, bring some bottles of wine for us to taste, etc. Great experience, great food. And everyone was so young then. And the neighborhood was very, very sketchy (no more!)

It’s funny but coming from Brooklyn I never thought that neighborhood was the least bit dangerous.

An e-mail just announced that this Thursday is its re-opening date, at the new location.

Steel and I have very little in common, even in those days. Back in the 80s if you thought 14th St was rough well, I could’ve shown you some places!

Union Square was needle park back then… I’d go down there but one would circle the park… not cross it.

Indeed. I frequently stayed with a friend on Astor Place when I visited in the 1980s and avoided the park except to duck in and out of the subway when necessary.

By 1993, things had changed dramatically. On a visit that April, I emerged from the Union Square subway station warily. It was dusk and I was tugging a suitcase behind me. I looked around to see middle-class white people sitting on the benches. “Something’s changed here,” I thought. As so often happens in NY, the neighborhood had flipped in just a couple of years.

The same thing happened with Tomkins Square Park on the Lower East Side in the early 2000s. I discovered that in a similar way, heading to one of the many winebars that had sprung up there. It was dusk, and I’d figured I would skirt the edges of the park. But I quickly saw that it was filled with hipsters and 40-somethings walking their dogs, some with kids in tow.

Should’ve hung out in Tompkins Sq in the 80s. I witnessed two shootings, declared one in the field but they packed him up anyway in an ambulance.

Now that is medical resources wasted!

I remember the far east village of the late 80’s early 90’s. Had a GF that was pretty hip back then… we were at one bar on the corner of the park (The Horseshoe Bar???) The two of us may have been the only non junkies in the place… certainly the two healthiest…

In the early 80s I worked in a factory on Spring and Mercer in the summers (yeah, back then SOHO was still mostly industrial… galleries were just starting to open) a bit west of the place was fine (a few blocks from Ben’s famous pizza and the paddleball courts that were in a scene in “Big” (even though they are too far from where the toy company offices supposedly were)… but east of there on Spring they found dead bodies in dumpsters… not too infrequently

I think this thread has drifted a bit… anyway, looking forward to my first bar meal at the new USq Cafe

sat at the bar last night for champagne and a couple of appetizers. solid food and a bunch of opening night stress for the staff, but the room is pretty. the bar is gonna take some getting used to for those that spent some time at the old one. not that there’s necessarily anything wrong, just different and a lot more open due to high ceilings and a lot of windows facing park.
cheers