Elegy for the ideal restaurant

If I were asked to construct the ideal restaurant , I’d make sure it had the following crucial features:

In the first place, there would be a long bar just inside the door, long enough so that groups of two or three people could gather over a drink as they wait for their table, with a curve at one end so that solo drinkers and diners could sit quietly with a book and feel that gloriously metropolitan sensation of being alone in a crowd.

The bartenders, of course, would be gruffly professional, but when one of the customers at the bar was overheard saying something ludicrous or stupid, you could catch the eye of the bartender and share a barely perceptible get a load of that clown eye raise. And there would be a plainclothes cop or two, who you wouldn’t notice until one of them laughed and leaned back from the bar and you’d see the flash of the badge on the belt and maybe the worn leather holster at the hip.

You wouldn’t go to my ideal restaurant for the food . The menu would stick to the classics: steaks, broiled fish, sides of buttered broccoli and baked potatoes. There would be a salad, heavy on the iceberg lettuce, with a choice of dressings with names you recognize from the bottles at a high-end grocery store. But, again, you wouldn’t go there for the food. You’d go there for the feeling of perching on a bar stool or sliding into a booth and feeling at home, taken care of, briefly safe from whatever chaos or bad news was waiting for you outside. In the world of my ideal restaurant, the heartbreak or bad mood or city fatigue could wait politely on the street as you fortified yourself with prime rib, baked potato (extra butter), and a perfectly unfussy martini.

My ideal restaurant, in other words, would be more than a place to eat and drink. It would be someone’s place and bear the unmistakable imprint of its owner and impresario. The walls would be festooned with pictures of the proprietor with local celebrities and politicians. There would be some family memorabilia, framed testimonial letters, and an American flag somewhere. It wouldn’t be decorated. It would be lived.

Here’s the good news: My ideal restaurant actually exists. It’s called Neary’s, and you can find it on 57th Street in Manhattan, between 1st and 2nd avenues. Named after its longtime owner, Jimmy Neary, who died in 2021, the place has been everything you want a restaurant to be and, maybe more importantly, absolutely nothing you don’t want a restaurant to be since it opened on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1967.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

The gimlet-eyed Jimmy Neary ran the place with charm and laughter. Born in Sligo, Ireland, his life is one of those classic American folk tales — an immigrant story about the big city, hard work, faith, family, and civic pride. The walls are, in fact, festooned with pictures and letters and city proclamations, but the true measure of Neary’s accomplishments are the customers who fill the place every night looking for a little cheer in a tough city, looking to get a seat at Neary’s welcome table. Oh, and here’s a wonderful piece of Neary’s atmosphere: Men are asked to wear jackets in the dining room. Trust me — it makes a difference.

That, as I said, is the good news. The bad news is Neary’s is closing in a couple of weeks. I’m not sure why, exactly. It’s tempting to come up with all sorts of theories about taxes and inflation and COVID-19 and pick-your-favorite-social-ill, but it’s also possible that it’s just the way it is with family businesses . Neary’s has been ably and deftly led by Jimmy Neary’s daughter Una and the rest of the family. But you know how it goes: The first-generation immigrant builds a business so the subsequent generations can go to law school and medical school and live a different part of the American dream. Jimmy Neary built a business and a family and a place for New Yorkers to go when they wanted to go home but home was too far away. I’ll miss sitting at the corner of the bar — to the right, just inside the door — and tucking into a prime rib and a drink before heading out to face the world.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.