BOOK REVIEW : Behind the Scenes at a Chichi Restaurant : FLASH IN THE PAN: The Life and Death of an American Restaurant <i> by David Blum</i> , Simon and Schuster $21; 302 pages
You know how you feel when you return from a trip after too many meals in too many restaurants? It seems a wonderful luxury to walk to your own refrigerator and pull out a yogurt and a carrot stick. That’s the way you feel after “Flash in the Pan.”
It’s possible to read “Airport” without feeling you’ve spent too much time in airports because Arthur Hailey, hokey though he can be, lures you along with a story and provides some likable characters. In “Flash in the Pan,” you’ve experienced some of the grind of restaurant life, but without the leavening of a story to follow or a character to love. What story there is consists of a dying fall.
“Flash in the Pan” follows The Falls, named for an old John Coltrane tune and located on the outer edges of Manhattan’s trendy TriBeCa, through its one-year life span, 1990-91. Opening a restaurant is, as Blum writes, a “perilously fragile enterprise,” only one in four New York City restaurants lives beyond five years.
“Flash in the Pan” is a wonderful title, and Blum can be a stylish and entertaining writer. But the two characters he follows closely--owner-managers Bruce Goldstein and Terry Quinn--are neither particularly likable nor interestingly canny. Goldstein, from Pawtucket, R.I., had run successful restaurants in the Caribbean and, for 10 years, a thriving SoHo restaurant called Central Falls, forced out when West Broadway rents soared.
Quinn, one of 13 kids, was looking for something more glamorous than his work as a firefighter. The fact that he looks a lot like his friend and financial backer, actor Matt Dillon, helped him attract models and actresses into his private life and into The Falls.
Goldstein was always on the premises fiddling with the background music and making the staff miserable. He was a bad manager and a poor accountant, but very good at the initial deal-making. As Blum explains it, “Bruce has been blessed with pretty good teeth, maybe not perfect, but as the front end of a smile they work well. It is not uncommon for people with a broad, healthy smile to be perceived as charming, and Bruce falls squarely into this category.”
Along with Dillon, Goldstein’s charm attracted celebrity investors, including Alan Parker, director of “Mississippi Burning,” and Edie Baskin, ice cream heiress and art director for “Saturday Night Live.” Goldstein told these investors the restaurant would gross $300,000 in the first year. (When The Falls later wound up $100,000 in debt, he was in Thailand.)
Waiters and bartenders keep getting fired or quitting, giving the reader too many secondary characters to keep track of. It’s the result of Goldstein’s management style, which is stubborn, stingy and humiliating. Goldstein and Quinn insisted on hiring only the beautiful. Even Brian Moores, the chef and one of the few in the story with any sense of mission, was infected.
“You go to a restaurant and you want to be around good-looking people,” Moores said. “You’re putting things in your mouth that they’re giving you. It’s easier that they’re good-looking.” Though the waitresses were beautiful and the waiters handsome, the food was just a little better than OK and the service was terrible.
When New York magazine praised The Falls for being reasonable, Goldstein raised the prices. For a while people did come because it was full of good-looking people who wanted to be seen at someplace hip. “Let’s face facts,” Blum writes, “The Falls is crowded primarily with three types of people: beautiful women, the kind of men who either date or hang around with beautiful women, and the kind of men who like to eat near beautiful women.”
Why was The Falls a flop? It was Goldstein’s fault, says everyone else involved. Most readers will find the reason even more simple: Customers had to wait an hour and 15 minutes for appetizers, two hours and 10 minutes for the main course. A restaurant can be a work of art. Someone involved has to have a sense of mission beyond the hectic need to be hip.
What “Flash in the Pan” has going for it is the voice of the author--cynical, knowing, very Downtown. “All restaurants adhere to an important economic principle,” he explains, “which is simply, ‘How much can I get away with charging for this crap?’ ”
Blum has a feeling for the music of words, as in, “It is a leggy crowd, with women of stature at every table.” He also has a lot of sympathy for the employees and appreciates the rich possibilities of a restaurant as a metaphor for any business. As he observes of Bruce’s administrative style: “A pattern is beginning to emerge. He does not like to fire people. He prefers to make their lives miserable. He can do that very well.”
What a ton of work it must have been to write this book--the mind reels at the number of nights Blum spent at The Falls. The waiters and bartenders could go home and sleep; Blum had to go home and write about it. “Flash in the Pan” is a misuse of a bright talent.
