The Alley View Grill
We really enjoy the Alley View Grill. Honest. We do. Whenever we get a late-night craving for goat-cheese pizza or a veal-and-pancetta burger with some tomato coulis, it’s almost the first place that comes to mind. Oh, sure, we know it’s a frenzied, schizoid place, with one foot in Mom’s kitchen back in bucolic Kansas and the other in New York’s arty SoHo, but what the heck, we’re probably a little schizy ourselves.
The décor — ah, the décor. Faux-zebra Formica, faux-tiger upholstery, faux-leopard carpeting, faux-peacock wallpaper. Our companion thought she had stumbled into an old Busby Berkeley musical — something like Decorators on Safari. But we like it. And since we’ve always favored gigantism in floral arrangements, we adore the Brobdingnagian bouquets. We don’t even blush at their showy sexuality, the way they flaunt their whopping pistils, their stupendous stamens. We keep an open mind. We tolerate lubricious vegetation in all its bizarre varieties. We don’t even blink at the gigantic buds of shell ginger, which seem to us so very like the spent and drooping members of enormous armadillos.
In a way, the Alley View Grill is a mom-and-pop eatery brought up to date: the décor is dada-deco, and the food is nouvelle Mom — a type that we have begun to see more and more in cutting-edge restaurants. Restaurateurs seem to be savoring anew their memories of Mom’s kitchen. Suddenly they’re nostalgic for the food they ate before they came to the city, learned to speak another language, began ridiculing their parents, and tried to hide their small-town naïveté. They don’t serve up their nostalgia straight, of course; it’s seasoned with the sophistication they’ve acquired away from home. So every remembered dish must be treated with face-saving contempt. Each is made the butt of an elegant, and sometimes quite delicious, joke. So the Alley View Grill offers Dad’s favorite — grilled sirloin — but it’s smothered in nasturtiums, not the onions Dad preferred. It arrives looking like a ritual sacrifice to Kong — grilled thigh of virgin, perhaps. There’s grilled pork tenderloin, too, but it’s served rare, flouting everything Mom said about pork. The apple pie is made with six varieties of apple (three American, one French, two Australian) and dusted with chopped macadamia nuts. There is even a burger, but it is the aforementioned veal-and-pancetta burger, with tomato coulis, about which Mom and Dad knew from nothin’, we bet. (Even Dad’s martini gets the snicker treatment. It’s just a frozen ginsicle, minus the touch of vermouth that would elevate it from an anesthetic to Nick and Nora’s favorite tipple.)
The service. Well. Our heart is warmed by the sight of waiters and waitresses enjoying themselves, and here they certainly do. On some evenings our heart has been so warmed by their happy chatting and chortling that we have scarcely noticed that they have scarcely noticed us. Apparently the owners have quite an enlightened attitude toward what in the old, benighted, classist days of dining used to be called “service.” Nor does the enlightenment end there. The Alley View Grill has, apparently, a hiring practice that favors waiters and waitresses with striking good looks and a total ignorance of food. We say bravo! These people have to start somewhere, don’t they? Let them practice on us! We can attest to the fact that the Alley View gang learns quickly. They’ve already mastered indolence, indifference, and ignorance, the three essentials of contemporary sophisticated service. But does the place have style! The waiters mispronounce the names of the foods with impressive panache, and the menu misspells them in handsome deco-revival type. The golden-tressed fellow who will tell you, when you phone for a reservation on a Friday or Saturday, that he can’t possibly fit you in for four weeks will be speaking to you over an old black telephone straight out of an uncolorized film noir (perhaps that should be a film noir-et-blanc). The neon sign over the entrance once flashed beside a motel somewhere on the banks of the Connecticut River, the Valley View. Rescued from a salvage yard, it flashes again, all but the first V. And the ne plus ultra: above the bar, in pale green neon script, is the single word Champagne. Now if that’s not style, we sure don’t know what is.
Of course we adore the ebullient, well-dressed clientele. They’re a vastly diverse group, representing every shade of sexual preference, sporting the latest garb smuggled in from New York. You’ll get to know them well, thanks to their indefatigable table hopping, the extravagance of their greetings (are they performing for hidden cameras?), and the fact that the management has had the foresight to put the tables close enough to one another so that your neighbor (soon your chum!) is nearer (soon dearer!) to you than your dinner companion. Beware, though, of the weekends, when the truly trendy are squeezed out by poseurs from the ’burbs, who have come in to see what they should be wearing and find out what arugula tastes like.
— BWB
The Alley View Grill
221 Rear Bartleby Street, 555-6100.
American Express, Visa, MasterCard. No checks.
Handicapped: handicapped restrooms.
Lunch 12–3, Tuesday–Saturday.
Brunch 12–3, Sunday.
Dinner 6–11 Tuesday–Sunday.
Reservations recommended weekdays, a must weekends.
In Topical Guide 429, Mark Dorset considers Personages, Historical: Busby Berkeley; Genres: Movie Musical; and Genres: Film Noir from this episode.
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🎧 429: The Alley View Grill