Teresa Nielsen Hayden (an editor who’s hacked everything from comic books to erotica to science fiction and fantasy) works at Tor Books in midtown New York, in the grand old Flatiron Building, New York’s first skyscraper. She’s produced a love-poem to the eats in the neighborhood, something that is both lyrical and screamingly funny, and is very, very hunger-inducing:
Why I decided I liked the Old Town: Back before computers, before Selectrics with their swappable type balls, when an Underwood Electric Typewriter was about as good as you got, copy typists learned all kinds of little tricks, protocols, and maneuvers to make documents look as good as possible.
The first time I went to the Old Town, I opened their hand-typed menu and realized that (a.) it had no typos in it whatsoever, and (b.) the person who’d typed it–on a machine with nice clean keys and a new cloth ribbon–had used all those old-fashioned copy typist’s moves, the likes of which I hadn’t seen in thirty years. I immediately conceived a good opinion of the place, and it’s never given me any reason to change my mind.
Where it is: You know the big Barnes & Noble on Union Square? Okay, imagine you’ve set up a cannon facing it. If you fired a shot that crashed through the front wall of the B&N, flew across the store, and punched through the back wall, your cannonball would come to rest on the sidewalk in front of the Old Town. Which is convenient, because by then you’d really need to sit down and have a drink.