Delancey

by Molly Wizenberg

  Between pizza trials, Brandon worked on his business plan. First, the restaurant needed a name. He wanted the name to evoke New York, since his pizza sensibility is rooted there, but choosing the right word, or words, wasn’t straightforward. Initially, he wanted a name that nodded quietly to Di Fara: maybe Avenue J (the street where Di Fara is located), or Midwood (its neighborhood in Brooklyn), or something related to the letter Q (the subway line that we took to get there). But this was when Avenue Q, the musical, was tearing up Broadway, and Avenue J was too similar. And Midwood made our friends snicker, because our friends all have the sense of humor of a pubescent boy. And he couldn’t think of anything interesting that involved the letter Q. One night after dinner, the two of us sat down in front of the computer and pored over a map of New York City, looking for the right word—a street, a subway stop, a neighborhood, anything. Brandon’s eye landed on the Delancey Street subway station. It’s not in a particularly picturesque part of Manhattan, but when Brandon was living in New York, it was a station that he particularly liked. It was always bustling, packed with people, and he passed through it often late at night, on his way home from visiting friends who lived on the Lower East Side. And we both liked the word Delancey itself: it felt classy and old-fashioned, like a pub lined with dark gleaming wood and frequented by old men with tweed suits and cigars. Not that the restaurant would include any of those things, but it felt right. (Though we do still quietly refer to Delancey by a couple of names that friends suggested: Mr. Pettiti’s Perfect Pizza Paradise and Grotto, and Brandono’s, for which Matthew wrote a catchy jingle—pizza the way it ought to be, BrandOH-no’s!)

  Now, with a name for the restaurant, Brandon began looking into funding. Without Carla as a partner, he would have to scale back. If the restaurant were smaller—say, 1,000 square feet instead of 2,000—he could likely get a cheaper lease, and he’d need less money to open it and less equipment to run it. With help from my brother David, he wrote a business plan for a smaller, more modest restaurant, one that would cost between $50,000 and $75,000. (To put this in perspective, the national average for startup money required to open a restaurant is about $500,000, a figure that encompasses both holes-in-the-wall and fine dining establishments.) He called more than a dozen banks to inquire about small business loans, but this was mid-2008, and the economy was in shambles. None of the banks he called were giving startup money to risky businesses like restaurants. Our friend Olaiya, whom Brandon had met when they cooked together at Boat Street, offered another approach. Years earlier, when she was newly out of college, Olaiya bought a taqueria in Rhode Island, and she did it, she shared, by cobbling together small amounts of money from a lot of different people. Brandon could try the same approach.

  This, of course, would mean going to our families and friends with his fantasy-slash-business proposition, a prospect that not only made the restaurant seem a lot more real but also made me very nervous. But I had to admit that I was proud of the work he was doing, and I trusted that David wouldn’t let him do something totally stupid, so what the hell: the worst that could happen, and it would inevitably happen, I figured, would be that the restaurant never opened and we spent a few years paying back our parents and a few friends. It would be embarrassing—mortifying—and very expensive, and it might very well happen. But it probably wouldn’t kill us. I might kill him, but it wouldn’t kill us.

  He went to our families first. His parents committed $5,000, and my mother threw in $3,000. A staggeringly generous friend offered the use of her credit card, which had a $24,000 limit. And after a lot of negotiating, our local credit union agreed to give him a $13,000 loan for the purchase of a wood-burning oven and a $15,000 line of credit. I was now in the awkward position of hoping that he would, in fact, open the restaurant, so that we wouldn’t have to eat our words (and beans and rice for the rest of our lives), while also privately wishing that he would just hurry up and move onto the Next Big Dream.

  It was June by this point, and I was busy revising the manuscript of my first book. The evening that I sent the final draft back to the publisher, we shared pizzas in Ruth’s backyard and toasted with beers. We were both getting somewhere. He was happy. And I was happily distracted by the seemingly impossible fact that I had just written a book and was managing to make a career out of doing work that I loved. Until Brandon moved on to the next project, I was content to enjoy the pizza.

  7

  Brandon’s first potential location for Delancey was an abandoned building with boarded-up windows on an overgrown lot underneath the I-5 Ship Canal Bridge. “It’s classic mid-century,” he breathed, “and it’s under a bridge! Like Grimaldi’s, in Brooklyn!” All of this is true, I can attest, though it would have probably needed half a million dollars in order to be inhabitable. Our budget was approximately a tenth of that. He went on to find and seriously consider three other spaces, two of which I toured with him and one of which I didn’t, partly because Brandon had to stage something like a stakeout in order to even get inside, and partly because he worried that if I saw it, I would wind up in the fetal position on the sidewalk out front.

  Some people can look at a house or commercial property and see potential beyond cobwebs and dark corners and stained ceilings; others, well, wind up in the fetal position on the sidewalk out front. I’ve worked hard on my potential-seeing capacity and have met with some success: a couple of years ago, I managed to fall in love with and now live contentedly in a small, bright 1958 house that Brandon found for us, with a deck that is partially rotting; a car-sized furnace that’s half a century old; lipstick-red carpet and faux wood paneling over most of the first floor; and peeling paint on the garage doors, one of which no longer opens. We’ll renovate someday, and that knowledge is somehow enough for me. But I am no Brandon. He’s already making sketches of the roof deck he wants to build, once we’ve redone the current deck, revamped the heating system, renovated the first floor, and replaced the garage doors. He has what I believe is called vision.

  In March of 2008, Brandon went on leave from his PhD program to work full-time on opening the restaurant. I greeted this decision with what might be described as pathological nonchalance. It made the prospect of the restaurant even more real, certainly, but there was still so much to do, so many problems to solve. It still might not happen. Anyway, I too am a PhD dropout, so who was I to question his decision? I knew what it was like to be staring down a future that you don’t want and to decide to veer hard away from it, even if you’re not entirely sure where you hope to go instead. I mean, I was supposed to be an anthropology professor, but here I was writing a book about food. Whether or not he finished school, I trusted that we would figure it out. Brandon would still teach at the conservatory on Saturday mornings and do catering and fill-in work for Boat Street, so our income wouldn’t be affected. We’d be all right.

  Brandon had just one requirement for his restaurant location: it had to be a one-story building. The pizza oven would require a chimney, and installing a chimney in a multi-story building would be prohibitively expensive. The first real potential location was in a neighborhood called Ravenna, just north of the University of Washington. On one of the main drags, there were two large adjoining storefronts for rent, with big windows facing a wide, shady sidewalk. We made arrangements to tour the units one afternoon, and our unnaturally helpful friend Susan, Brandon’s boss at Boat Street and his newly appointed Oracle for All Things Business, offered to come along. It was a nice space, with a roomy dining area and some kitchen equipment already in place, which could save us a lot of money. But, as Susan pointed out, none of the cars on the street out front seemed to be actually stopping; they were all going somewhere else. The sidewalk was quiet. In the five years since we looked at the space, at least one other restaurant has rented it, moved in, and then moved on or died. As of this writing, it’s for lease again. The Oracle knows.

  Next up was the former Enterprise Rent-A-Car building on Roosevelt Way, in the University District.
If you live in Seattle, you will know this building as the gray, graffiti-covered cube up the street from the former Giggles Comedy Nite Club (later, and also formerly, Jiggles Gentleman’s Club). It’s the place that’s been for lease for as long as you can remember. When we were considering it, it was new to the market and still innocent of the graffiti to come. It did not yet have a pall of indifference hanging over the front door. Susan came with us to see it, as she did every space we toured, and we were all pretty excited about it. The day was warm and sunny, a rarity that will get any Seattleite’s heart racing, but even I could see the potential.

  The building was roughly square, with a narrow entrance in front, a large garage door next to the entrance, and between them a tall window. In back were two more garage doors, which opened onto a paved alley. It doesn’t sound like much, because it wasn’t: it was an empty shell made of cinder blocks. Save for a small office area in front, most of the space had been a garage. It had no insulation, an uneven concrete floor, and cobwebs as thick as the cottony fake ones people stretch around their front doors at Halloween. And because it was constructed from cinder blocks—which, as we stood there, I imagined crumbling like shortbread in an earthquake—it would require retrofitting before it could be approved for use as a restaurant.

  Now, all that said, when you cranked open the garage doors in front and back and let the daylight in, the place suddenly started to look very different. There were a half-dozen skylights scattered around the space, most of them covered in dead leaves, but with the garage doors open, you got a real sense for how bright, and even warm, it could be in there. It was open, loft-like, rough but inviting. With a good deal of scrubbing, strategic lighting, a couple of rugs, and some plants, it might even be charming—in a rough-hewn way, like a reclaimed industrial workshop. I now realize this is a lot like saying, I could totally marry that guy, if only he had a job and didn’t live in his mother’s basement. But if the rent was cheap, and if the landlord agreed to contribute to the cost of the retrofitting—not an unreasonable expectation—this could be the restaurant. When we got home, Brandon started doing research online and discovered, oddly enough, that the land on which the building sat had been, in the early history of Seattle, part of a plot called Pettit’s University Addition. It was fate! Brandon Pettit was destined to rent this building!

  Except that he wasn’t. The landlord not only wasn’t interested in helping with a retrofit, he was asking a monthly rate more than double the price of comparably dodgy locations, and he refused to negotiate. You could probably weave a nice, cozy sweater from the cobwebs in that place today.

  But over the weeks during which the Enterprise space was slipping through his fingers—because it took a while to understand that the landlord really wasn’t going to budge—Brandon found another possibility, a location about a quarter of a mile from our apartment, in Ballard. It was a building on Northwest 65th Street, just east of 8th Avenue, on a block populated by small neighborhood bars, a tattoo parlor, a hair salon, and a sneaker shop. We’d walked by the building dozens of times, wondering at the sign outside that read COOKIE CONSPIRACY. At one end of the building’s face was a garage door, and at the other was a small storefront covered with signs: HOME STYLE COOKIES AND PASTRIES, CANDIE, and, in the window, C’EST MOO ICE CREAMS. The building was low-slung, mid-century, the lower half of its façade paved in long, narrow bricks and the top half a grid of rectangular windows trimmed in faded aquamarine paint. It looked like a small warehouse of some sort, but no one ever came or went, and the lights inside were rarely on.

  One afternoon in May, Brandon decided to do some detective work. He went to one of the bars across the street from the Cookie Conspiracy building, ordered a beer, positioned himself in a seat by the window, and waited. By some miracle, his strategy worked: he spied an older man get out of a car, walk to the front door of the building, and go inside. Brandon leaped from his seat and went after him.

  The man, it turned out, was the owner of the building, and within it, he operated a candy factory, making caramel corn and caramel apples. He also used the building to store an arsenal of equipment for making carnival food—funnel cakes, popcorn, and the like—which he rented out to other businesses. Actually, he didn’t seem to be renting the equipment; he seemed to be mostly hoarding it—along with boxes of ingredients, boxes of paper bags, boxes upon boxes upon boxes. One corner of the large main room was set up as a commercial kitchen, with a stove and a ventilation hood and a giant mixer, and the ceiling was mottled with stains—from smoke, caramel explosions, who knows what. It was Willy Wonka meets Blade Runner. For this reason, I never personally went inside the Cookie Conspiracy building, though Brandon showed me pictures.

  But if you could manage to look beyond the stacks of stuff, the stains, and the peeling paint, you could see that the candy factory would make a spectacular location for a restaurant: bright, airy, and with some of the most expensive parts of a commercial kitchen, like a stainless steel hood, already in place. It was walking distance from where we lived, on a busy neighborhood street with a loyal evening crowd. And as it happened, the owner had just purchased a large warehouse south of Seattle and planned to move his operation there in the fall, possibly via the Great Glass Elevator. The rent would be fair, and he told Brandon he would be out by October.

  Susan, however, had reservations. She liked the space, but she worried about the owner. He doesn’t look healthy, she told Brandon. What if he dies?

  Brandon pushed on. He took measurements of the building, and he began to make plans. Summer came and went, and so did October, and so did November. The owner was renovating his new warehouse, and it wasn’t ready yet. Brandon began to look at other locations. In early December, the building was still filled with stacks and piles. Brandon told the Cookie Conspiracy owner that he was moving on.

  Sometime the following summer, around the time that Delancey opened, Brandon went for a beer at the bar where he’d held his stakeout, and the bartender told him that the Cookie Conspiracy owner had suddenly died not long before, the building still full of his equipment. The Oracle knows.

  VIETNAMESE RICE NOODLE SALAD

  During Delancey’s gestation, and for a long time after it opened, we ate a lot of takeout. One of our favorite quick, cheap lunches was (and still is) a Vietnamese rice noodle salad called bún, and we like it enough that now, sometimes, we even make our own version at home. Don’t be put off by the number of steps. The dressing, a take on nuoc cham, can be made a few days ahead, and if you’ve got the ingredients on hand and the dressing prepared, you can bang this meal out in very little time.

  This salad is wide open to adaptations and a great vehicle for using up leftovers or odds and ends. Take the recipe and run with it, using whatever vegetables and cooked meats you have on hand. Here are some tips to help as you go:

  • Slivered raw carrots are a must, I think, as are sliced cucumbers. A small handful of each is about right. Another essential ingredient is salted peanuts. It’s a sad day when I go to make this salad and discover that we have no peanuts.

  • You’ll also want some sort of crunchy lettuce or raw cabbage-type vegetable. Thinly sliced romaine is nice, as are the smallest, crispest leaves of more tender green lettuces. Napa cabbage leaves, sliced crosswise, have a great watery crunch, and baby bok choy works beautifully, too. Whatever you use, a handful per person is a good bet.

  • Blanched snow peas, sliced thin, are always welcome. Start with a small handful.

  • Bean sprouts, the white ones that are about as wide as spaghetti, commonly show up in Vietnamese noodle salads, although I could do without them. It’s up to you.

  • Fresh herbs! Sliced basil or Thai basil is delicious here, as is chopped cilantro. A few sliced mint leaves isn’t a bad idea, either.

  • If you really want to do it up right, fry some shallots: Peel and thinly slice a few shallots, pour oil into a skillet to a depth of 1 inch, let it get nice and hot (between 275° and 325°F), and, working i
n small batches, fry the shallots until they’re light golden brown. Transfer to a paper towel to drain briefly; they’ll crisp as they cool. Fried shallots are one of the tastiest toppings for bún, albeit fiddly to make at home. I’ll tell you a secret: If you happen to have a can of French’s French Fried Onions in your pantry, try tossing some of those into the salad instead. Pretty tasty.

  • As for protein, it’s hard to mess up. One of my favorite meats for this salad is a leftover pork chop, sliced, but grilled or sautéed shrimp is a close second. Slices of cold steak are delicious, too, and for vegetarians, extra-firm tofu, cooked almost any way, is great. This salad is also a good place to use up leftover roasted chicken, although I recommend tasting a piece with the dressing before committing; not everyone likes the union of chicken and fish sauce.

  • And though it changes the whole concept, try substituting hot freshly cooked rice for the noodles. We do that often. I like to use Calrose, an inexpensive Japanese-style medium-grain rice that’s grown in California and commonly sold in Asian grocery stores. (Or if you live on the West Coast, you can probably find it in ordinary grocery stores, too.)

  Lastly, note that this recipe doubles nicely.

  FOR THE DRESSING