The Jean's on Lafayette team bought a Hamptons institution.
"My Dad and I used to go there when I was a kid, and we heard legends of celebrities playing piano into the night, and JFK Jr. sightings.”
Good afternoon, everyone.
Writing to you again today from sunny California. Reminder to anyone with a @yahoo.com email address that today is your last day to redeem an annual subscription discount.
Today’s letter includes: The Jean’s team bought a restaurant in the Hamptons, a Dimes Square restaurant is cracking down on holding court, a question for the partnerships team at Hotel Chelsea, and you should snag a $5 ticket to Graydon Carter’s talk tonight.
Chicken noodle soup with Ruthie Rogers.
On a rainy afternoon last week, I ate chicken soup out of a porcelain bowl at Dowling’s at the Carlyle with Ruthie Rogers. It’s exciting to be in a restaurant for the first time in New York City. To our left was a couple having a lunchtime dessert, being assembled under a flame on a flambé cart. Behind us, a woman who couldn’t have been younger than 80, reading a printed copy of the New York Post in a fur coat. As Ruthie, the owner of London’s iconic River Cafe, tore pieces of baguette and dropped them into her soup, I followed.
We were there to talk about Table 4 at The River Cafe, Ruthie’s new book that came out this week. I had received a copy in the mail the week before, and opened it while putting on my coat to leave my office. I ended up sitting down at my desk in my coat, and staying in my office an extra thirty minutes to flip through the pages. It’s not a cookbook (though she did make one of those with Ed Ruscha), but instead a compilation of transcripts from her podcast, Ruthie’s Table 4. In fact, some Americans have gotten to know Ruthie not through the hot pink pizza oven at her legendary blue-carpeted restaurant, The River Cafe, but through the podcast she started during COVID. (Earlier that day, someone in Blank Street Coffee recognized her from the podcast.)
“If you asked David Beckham to talk about football and Paul McCartney to talk about The Beatles and Nancy Pelosi to talk about impeachment, they’d say: Been there, done that.”
