Changes beginning to reshape Chelsea

Nation's Restaurant News, June 3, 1985 by Howard Riell

NEW YORK -- It's 3:30 a.m., and there's a guy sitting alone in the far corner of the Empire Diner, wearing a tuxedo, mirrored sunglasses and green Day-Glo socks. His hair is long, though some is shaved to the skull. He is blowing smoke rings.

Out on 10th Avenue traffic is brisk. It's Saturday night and hot, and everyone is out. The stretch limos with the tinted windows and the open-windowed cabs are still on the prowl. The derelicts and the Yuppies, the flower children and the young executives and the punks. Sometimes a cop. Middle-aged couples with walking sticks and packs of teenagers with sharpened sticks. All out, all breathing the same air, all vying for something. In the distance a siren wails, and back in the diner the guy in the corner is ordering champagne and a chili burger.

Hey, it's Chelsea.

No longer, though, the Chelsea of Thomas Wolfe, Arthur Miller or O. Henry. Not even the Chelsea of Bob Dylan, staying for days at the Chelsea Hotel, "singing sad-eyed lady of the lowlands for you."

Chelsea today is Nirvana for real-estate agents as property values soar. It's where Greenwich Village is shifting to, they say. It's 11th Avenue leather bars, renovated warehouses and $1,000-a-month railroad flats. It's where the late Sex Pistol, Sid Vicious, made the front pages by stabbing his girlfriend to death in the self-same Chelsea Hotel.

It's also restaurants. Lots of them, especially along Eighth Avenue, opening all the time. Fine dining restaurants, like Roxanne's; Tex-Mex restaurants, like Mary Ann's; Cajun restaurants, like, well, Cajun.

It's the stylish Rogers & Barbero and the Blue Fox. It's the decidedly upscale Chelsea Foods, both a cafe and retail shop offering gourmet items by the pound. It's the cool, ice-blue ambience of Q, with its continental cuisine.

It's Miss Ruby's Cafe, where menus change every two weeks to highlight various American regional cuisines. It's the stainless steel, Art Deco glitz of the Empire Diner and the greasy-spoon charm of Mi Chinita, where the bill of fare includes moo goo gai pan and sopa de fideos Chino con puerco ahumado.

Hey, it's Chelsea.

Why all the restaurants? Simple: the big-time city planners have targeted Chelsea as the next hot community. They've looked at the city's other gentrification-chic areas, most noticeably the Upper West Side, and see the same thing happening here. "The money starts to move," noted a local pundit, "when the elite folk meet the street folk."

Only, Herb Maslin doesn't believe it.

"People come here with the assumption that it's going to be another Columbus Avenue," said Maslin, crusty owner of the six-year-old Cajun and self-proclaimed "Cajun Maven from Brooklyn." It'll be another Columbus Avenue when you have hair on your palms. There aren't enough people in Chelsea to support the merchants. If I had to depend on the neighborhood, I'd close the restaurant."

Far from the verge of closing, the 100-seat restaurant is pulling sales of more than $500,000 a year, serving lunch (average per-person check $9), dinner (average check $15) and a Sunday champagne brunch.

Cajun's menu offers such French Quarter favorites as jambalaya, for $5.95, gumbo, $6.95, fried catfish, $7.95, and barbecued chicken and ribs, $8.95. Desserts include Creole bread pudding, for $1.95, and French roast chickory blended coffee, 75^. A live jazz band plays four nights a week and Sunday afternoon.

"Growth has to come from someplace," Maslin said. "There's no density here to grow. Zoning doesn't allow tall buildings. You cannot make a living here. All the other store owners have got their arms folded, waiting for the neighborhood to get better. But everyone knows that if you want marijuana, you go to 16th Street and Eighth Avenue."

So to survive, Maslin, as well as others like Artie Koretz, owner of Artie's Warehouses, depend on outsiders--the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, the Upper West Siders, the Wall Street people. "Absolutely nobody from Chelsea comes here," says Koretz, another Brooklyn native. "They're looking for more of a glamorous, 'kicky-type' place. Ninety-nine per cent of my customers come from outside, out of town, out of the country, but not from here. Psychologically it's not their kind of place, not a hangout for them. Maybe they're too sophisticated."

Set in the forbidding warehouse district, the restaurant opened six years ago and is still thriving, going under the title of "the best little warehouse in Chelsea."

A 3.500-sq.-ft. dining room-bar area features polished wood floors, walls that are either painted cafe au lait, covered with mirrors, exposed brick, theater lights and candles. The restaurant's entrance is a loading dock bay. Artie's menu reflects an electic mix of American, Continental and fresh seafood items.

"You can't bank on Chelsea," noted Koretz. "The people here are very intellectual, they drink coffee, eat a little salad, read the paper . . . they're not the kind of people we want, are they? We want people who come in to eat a full meal, have a few drinks."