PhotographbyVictorLlorentelast year,” he says. “Now we have 15, but only
five can be occupied. We’re optimists in the
restaurant business, and you have to start
somewhere, but if we don’t get more indoor
capacity soon, it will be difficult to survive.”
Up on the sun-splashed corner of 44th
Street and Sixth Avenue, serving his Vendy-
winning $7 piles of tender, spicy chicken
tikka over mounds of rice, MD Alam is
doing his best to suppress similar dark
thoughts. “We need 200 customers per day
to survive. Now we’re only getting 50 or 60,”
says Alam, who arrived in the city from
Bangladesh 22 years ago and has been do-
ing a brisk business on this corner since
- He remembers the big crash of ’08,
he says, but the streets weren’t empty back
then, as they are now, although he has no-
ticed that in the past few weeks, the city has
been slowly filling up. Most of his customers
these days are essential workers—parking
guys, cops, and construction workers—but
he’s hopeful for the return of the corporate
armies: the office assistants and the execu-
tives with their impressive gold wristwatch-
es who used to wait patiently in lines
stretching around the block for this classic
brand of street-cart cooking.
Back at Le Rivage, Chef Denamiel is wait-
ing too. He heard rumors that Broadway
will be opening up in January, but he doesn’t
believe them. On this formerly packed
matinee-Wednesday afternoon, the tables
are mostly empty indoors and outside, andas I enjoy a crock of steamy, unexpectedly
delicious onion soup, he greets characters
from the neighborhood as they pass by.
There’s the UPS guy, and the dim sum chef
from next door, and presently someone
from the Hourglass Tavern down the street,
who comes by with the grim news that, after
30 years, the owners are closing down and
everything inside is for sale. The dim sum
chef wanders off to have a look, but Chef
Denamiel turns his head away and waves his
hands in the air like he’s warding off an ap-
parition. In France, it’s “bad juju” to take
anything from a closing restaurant, he says,
and the last thing they need on this little
stretch of 46th Street in this cursed year of
2020 is more bad luck. ■Preparing for the dinner rush at Benjamin Steakhouse on the first day of indoor dining since the pandemic began.