Fare Hopping: Basic Fare, on a Hot Evening in Chelsea
Early evening of a recent day during last week's premature summer, and on 23rd St. the sun-blistered heat's transformed itself into colorless humidity. Off 7th Ave., near the Chelsea Hotel, the sidewalk's full of girls with bare shoulders, the air's mildly humid and Basic Fare, a pretty good, inexpensive new lounge/restaurant, has thrown the door wide open. Warm wind floods the un-air-conditioned dining room. The soft lights over the windowed front wall throb pale orange, like most of Basic Fare's decor. Creamy walls and peach tile floors; bright orange napkins; beige, angular couches; slick, pale chairs. Squares of brown paper cover part of the turquoise tablecloths. Funky lights hang from the low ceiling, fused silver cylinders, and the ceiling itself is kind of odd, cut strangely so that it looks like random rectangular chunks have been gouged out of the structure. In the back, the floor slopes up on one side, to the bar, and down on the other, toward the tables, each of which bears on it a tiny green candle and a small fishbowl. The fish bump their heads against their prisons and their corpse-like eyes grow huge under the distortion of the glass.
Immediately to the left a sheet hangs over the wall, a projection of a martini glass cast haphazardly across the fabric. On the other side of the room, a few tables offer a view of the street. The bar's in the back, and tucked off to the right is a cluster of couches?those beige couches and some turquoise chairs and tree-stump-looking furniture that could be either footrests or more chairs. They all have square orange pillows and they're arranged around green coffee tables. A plant is positioned on one of the tables, looking absolutely dead except for sprigs of green that shoot off the mass of crippled brown branches. Candles flicker at empty tables, casting circle-shadows that shake on the wall.
No one seems to show up at Basic Fare on a weeknight. The bartender and waitress both made beelines at me when I walked in the door, led me to the couch, brought me menus. I sat back on the flaming orange pillow, feeling taken care of, and ordered a martini from the bartender. He stepped behind the bar, then called casually over his shoulder, "You're 21, right?" I assured him that I was, and he poured me something wildly green, sweet with an almost minty burn that I could barely taste.
I sat in the couch corner and drank and looked out the open door at the string of lights hanging from the fire escape across the street, the purple light leaking from an apartment window, the gay couples on the sidewalk. If the place were crowded, if the bar were noisy, the couch would be a nice place in which to hang back and stay tucked away, as if you were looking out from a cave. As it was, it was just a vantage point from which to watch an empty room.
For dinner, my friend Nick and I were seated at a table next to the door. A waiter with a shaved head and Chinese characters tattooed on his upper arm brought us food menus and drink menus and nonalcoholic drink menus, which we perused to the accompaniment of some sort of pulsing, electric background music.
Appetizers, like most everything else here, were fine, if not great. We ordered mussels and were served an enormous plate of shells swimming in wine and butter, spotted with flecks of a green herb that I didn't recognize. The mussels popped from their shells when we twisted our forks, little nickel-sized steamed circles of a fleshy gray color. They had that soft, slick mussel-texture, veering toward the slimy but in the end staying clear of it. Well-groomed boys wandered in and out of the place, and a few seats at the bar filled, while I emptied my first glass of wine.
The grilled vegetable salad came covered in a vinegar/garlic/lemon dressing, greens piled over hot strips of eggplant, squash, zucchini and peppers. Spinach leaves tasted like strong, nutty garlic. Two pieces of toasted white bread accompanied the salad, flanking the greens on either side, slathered with a substance that I couldn't identify and haven't figured out yet: brown in color, bumpy, sort of sweet. I thought it tasted vaguely like rosemary, but now I'm not sure I really know what rosemary tastes like, so I'm no closer to an answer. It was weird that it came facedown, with the schmear on the bottom.
Our entrees?which, like the appetizers, were satisfying, and the fact that they were priced below $20 didn't hurt?came on identically enormous black and white plates. Nick ordered fettuccine with artichoke and pesto cream sauce, which was thick and speckled green, the way you'd imagine pesto cream sauce should be. The artichokes?cut thin, mixed with slivers of mushrooms?tasted vaguely of vinegar. My grilled chicken with lemon caper sauce came cut in strips that reclined in a thin, sweet sauce and were black only in spots?mostly good, juicy meat, evincing only occasionally the bitter taste of a carcinogenic burn. Next to the strips of meat were strips of squash and zucchini, soaking up the caper sauce and already sweet, the seedy meat of the vegetables dissolving in my mouth. The orzo was my favorite. I didn't even know what orzo was?I was just feeling adventurous. Orzo isn't much of an adventure, just something that looks like big grains of rice, but I was satisfied. It was strangely sweet, cooked in heavy butter, and had a soft, smooth texture.
The restaurant never really filled up. Halfway through our dinner, two college boys walked through the door, past our table, to the midpoint of the restaurant, where the floor veered up on the right and down on the left. They descended into a corner and briefly made out at a table. A group of four people?three guys and a girl?took a table next to ours. Nick and I watched the streets darken, the lights flicker over stores. Our waiter, his hairy stomach protruding over the waistband of his black pants, kept a full glass of wine in front of me at all times. When he forgot Nick's couscous?the evening's only disappointment, a half-sphere of bland, dry couscous on one of those ridiculously large plates?he gave Nick a free drink.
The place was nearly empty when we looked at the dessert tray. Someone sat at the bar, legs crossed, back to the window up front. Street noise flooded in through the open door. Nick and I split a fluffy cake layered with strawberries and cream, something our waiter described as "kind of like cheesecake." Actually it was nothing like cheesecake, it was more like strawberry shortcake, with cream between layers of spongy white cake. Whatever it technically was, it pleased us. Swirls of tangy orange and red sauce painted the edge of the plate. Still unwilling to move, slowed by the humidity, we kept drinking (or I kept drinking and Nick bore with me). I stirred a mint julep with a thin red straw, but didn't stir it enough and the first sip was appalling?thick and sweet, the sugary peppermint syrup at the bottom exploding in my mouth. Stirred it again and got to the bourbon while the restaurant's lights dimmed and the place shadowed over; it was nighttime now and I was drunk and I could feel a warm, happy flush on my cheeks.
When we left?we'd been there two hours, maybe more?Basic Fare still hadn't seen more than a dozen customers. Possibly this was because it was Tuesday, and possibly because 23rd St., to the west of 7th Ave., sprawls wide and sooty and charmless, and doesn't make the greatest destination neighborhood when you're going out to eat in the evening, especially when the evening is a weird premature summer evening like last Tuesday's. The wind was heavy and warm, wiping a McDonald's bag across the street. I slipped into the subway, well-fed, tired, cold in the sudden air-conditioning of the train, and watched mosaic station signs creeping uptown.