Friday night Jazz in the Village
GAA mafia, jazz in Mezzrow, dinner in the Noortwyck
I’d like to begin this week with a special shout out to the GAA in New York city. I’m not a member of any club, I've never played and I’d never even been to a match. But the GAA, specifically, the O’Donovan Rossa club in Queens, is the provider of an unending supply of reliable babysitters and for that, I am so deeply grateful. If our regular babysitter is not available, she’ll always text something along the lines of: “I can't make it but my friend, Ciara can. She’s 24 and from Kilkenny”. And that seems to be all the information we need because the sum total of our screening (of a carer to the most important things to us in the world) is to look at each other and say “Good enough for me, send her in!”.
For me, I'm increasingly aware that Irish people must have been top of the line the day that God was doling out cop-on. We have very healthy doses of it and it’s something you take completely for granted until you notice its absence in day to day interactions once you leave the country. And for that reason, I'm just pretty confident that Ciara, 24 and from Kilkenny, is more likely than not, a solid pair of hands.
My husband takes a different but similarly less scientific approach. He’s of the opinion that someone from Ireland will be motivated to be a great babysitter because we almost certainly know someone who knows them. Yes, that’s the “Don’t shame your parents or the parish” school of behaviour.
With Ciara (24 and from Kilkenny) in situ this Friday night, we took the number 1 train eight stops south to Christopher Street and walked the short walk to the jazz club, Mezzrow, where for just $40 per person, we got to experience an hour of absolutely sublime music. Except for the absence of cigarette smoke, Mezzrow is everything you imagine when you picture a jazz club. Down three steps from the street, into an atmospherically-lit basement, you are immediately hit with the very welcome smell of stale alcohol before being led down the long and narrow stone-wall room. Intimate is not the word. If you spread your arms, you could almost touch both walls. The tables are close to each other with a small (real) candle burning on each. Though packed tight, the staff is deft and cheese platters, cocktails, glasses of wine and bottles of Guinness are served, replaced and topped up with unimaginable ease.
We were treated on this night to New Yorker, Jonny King on the piano, Dezron Douglas on double bass and the nominatively determined, Billy Drummond on drums. From the moment the first brush swept a drum, it was clear that this was going to to be an experience rather than a performance. Neither the bassist or drummer opened their eyes once throughout and the bassist had an anguished look on his face at all times as though he was either in excruciating pain or on the cusp of extreme pleasure. The set finished off with a twist on Rainbow Connection by Kermit the Frog which felt like a hometown dedication for us because we live on Sesame Street and no, I don't mean our kids watch it a lot, I mean the street we live on is called Sesame Street.
When the jazz was over, we exited onto 7th Avenue and turned left onto Bleecker Street for dinner in a restaurant called The Noortwyck. The decor was mid-century: brown tables and chairs, panelling on the walls and little else by way of decoration so that it looked like one of the very rare old Irish hotels that the Celtic Tiger miraculously left unscathed. A hotel your grandparents would bring you into for a bowl of soup and you knew it looked the same as it did when they were your age and probably looks the same today. The Noortwyck looked like that. But cooler and without the smell of boiled parsnip. Between four of us, we had the savoury beignets, fluke crudo, Autumn chickories and duck cooked inside a bun with a side of foie gras butter to start. One of our party nabbed the last remaining beef wellington for main which was as beautiful as it was delicious. We finished off the meal with a banana and stout caramel mille-feuille and a Korean sweet potato cake before stepping out onto a (now rainy) Bleecker Street.
Small fact about New York city which sounds improbable but is 100% true is that it only rains on the weekend. And at 11pm on a Friday night, it was arriving more or less right on time.
If we turned our heads left, we could see John’s of Bleecker Street, home of the (much-debated) best slice of pizza in New York. If we turned our heads right, we could see the Garret, a not-so-secret secret bar above a Five Guys restaurant in the West Village, which was at that very moment, visibly heaving. And if we dropped our eyes to ground level, we could see an abandoned zimmer frame wrapped in pink cotton wool, raising more questions than it answered but largely going completely unnoticed in the middle of the Village of a Friday night.
I have a theory that there is no part of the city we can visit around midnight that won’t cause my husband to say “Do you know what we are actually very close to? Your brother’s bar”. As predictably as night follows day, those very words flowed from his mouth and so we ran, as fast as our heels and weather conditions would allow, round to the Grisly Pear on MacDougall Street, a bar that once received a Tripadvisor review that read “The worst bar I have ever been in” and a member of staff had the review printed on t-shirts for them all to wear.
To finish off my tour of this small part of New York, I'll say that the Grisly Pear is directly opposite a bar called The Up & Up which was used to film scenes in the Gaslight Cafe, the comedy bar in Marvelous Mrs Maisel where Midge gets her original break! You've been a wonderful crowd. Thank you and good night!