On Friday, beloved vegan restaurant and farm-to-table early adopter Angelica Kitchen will close, concluding a 40-year run in the East Village. We recently spoke with owner Leslie McEachern about Angelica's history and watching the neighborhood change through the restaurant's large glass windows. Now a former employee has penned an essay for The New Yorker recalling the restaurant's employees and celebrity clientele, as well as meditating on the "walking graveyard" that's become the East Village.
"If C.B.G.B.’s was the sour rock-and-roll heart of the neighborhood, Angelica Kitchen was its weird and wonderful and slightly embarrassing hippie soul," declares Jay Sacher in the very touching piece.
Sacher worked for Angelica Kitchen in the mid-90's as a delivery guy schlepping juices and food to the likes of Joey Ramone. Celebrities were a regular fixture, Sacher recalls. "Willem Dafoe, who’d come in with his yoga mat and his curly-haired teen-age son, who looked like the kid from 'The Blue Lagoon,' both of them setting the waitresses’ hearts aflutter. I once got into an inadvertent bike race with Mike D from the Beastie Boys, another genial regular."
Sacher once told Anthony Kiedis's "people": "When Anthony gets here, he can come put his name on the list. It’s about a half-hour wait for a table right now," which is very charming—though he admits to giving Madonna special treatment. You don't keep royalty waiting.
It's Sacher's reflections on the people with whom he worked that paint the clearest picture of Angelica's spirit, which began with a bartering model in the restaurant's early days that seems to have set the tone.
Spencer, always walking into work with a purple plastic Kim’s Video bag in one hand, stuffed full of records—a man of obscure and eclectic musical tastes who was prone to saying things like, “The only good Beatles song is ‘Norwegian Wood.’ ” There was Dexter, a tall Trinidadian with a beaming smile, who unofficially ran the kitchen. Somehow, in between working at the restaurant seemingly 24/7, caring for his young daughter, and waking up at 5 a.m. to do yoga, he had the time to be on a first-name basis with every attractive woman who came in the door. Genuine supermodels would peek their heads into the juice bar, all with the same question: “Is Dexter working?” Last I heard, Dexter was Erykah Badu’s personal chef.
Recollections of McEachern include the early "suspicion of the boss [that] runs deep, especially in restaurant work," but ultimately, Sacher declares her a "glorious hero" with unwavering "commitment to sustainable food and farmers."
Sacher shares a similarly disheartening vision of the future of the East Village with McEachern. "After April 7th, I don’t think I will want to walk down East Twelfth Street and see paper over those plate-glass windows, awaiting a bank or a CVS, or, like St. Mark’s Bookshop down the street, probably an empty storefront for months on end," he writes. "The East Village has been a walking graveyard for years now, sputtering along as a cover-band version of itself."
On a lighter note, if there was any doubt about seitan, the rubbery wheat-gluten favored in fake meat communities, Sacher confirms we should be suspicious: "Just save yourself a step and throw it in the toilet."
