When I first moved to New York I had been accepted into an internship with the Circle Repertory Company. I lived in an apartment on 122nd and Amsterdam because a friend from childhood who lived in New York who I'd contacted just happened to have a room opening up in her apartment when I needed to find a place to stay. Her father was a Professor at Columbia, and she had gone to Barnard, and he had bought her an apartment in one of the buildings that was newly renovated. It was a fifth floor walkup across the street from a school where hip hop Artists hung out and played music on their boomboxes constantly, but to me even with the noise booming on summer evenings I felt like I was in a very special world. My part of the rent was $350 per month. Eventually it went up to I think $390. I found out later that the friend I was renting from wasn't paying any part of that at all. Her father had bought the apartment at an insider discounted price for cash, and the amount she was charging me for rent was her Co-op maintenance. But even at that price it was a stretch in those days. My internship paid me $60 per week and I had to get a part time job just to scrape by. When the friend decided to move in with her boyfriend in another state she found a roommate for me to in her words cover the other half of the rent. That poor guy was a graduate student whose marriage was on the outs, and he not long after moving in decided he couldn't take New York any more. I don't know why my friend insisted that I get another roommate, but she did, and for a period of time I had several different people who came and went. One young actress who came to live with me was a friend of one of my fellow interns. He had met her in London at the London Academy of Dramatic Arts and when she was moving to New York and was looking for a place to stay he introduced us. He had lived with me for about a month or maybe more himself, before finding another roommate situation with a bunch of guys at NYU downtown. The young actress was very much of a party goer, and she had much more money than I did. She put her mind toward going out everywhere she could see and be seen, and one day she started telling me that she had gone to a restaurant all the way downtown on the outskirts of Soho called the Bell Caffe. She couldn't stop talking about the place because it was such an insider hotspot. Only the coolest of the cool went there, and late nights regularly turned into after hours. I forget which hot young actor she met there and shared a table with, maybe Matthew Broderick if my memory is correct. I'm not sure, but I think there may have been many. She was bound and determined for stardom and she found many connections at the Bell Caffe.
A number of years later, when I moved downtown and was beginning to write and produce plays and evenings of theater, I read in the Circle Rep LAB newsletter that Kurt Williams who owned the Belle Caffe was offering the restaurant as a place to host collaborative projects. I called him up and made an appointment and stopped by one afternoon. How to describe the Belle except that it was funky and fun, a vision he had lovingly created from his own Seattle coffee shop background combined with and LA vibe. He'd taken the abandoned garage and gutted it, working with friends to create a restaurant that was full of art and artwork down to the mosaics on parts of the walls. A skilled Chef he created a healthy and eclectic menu that always had something interesting and delicious that somehow was always exactly what you wanted. After meeting that day we planned some events and some evenings of theater, and over the next few years I almost lived there. I cast Kurt in my own plays and he introduced me to his friends, I had my birthdays there, I grieved my father's death there, and my heartbreaks found a place to heal through laughter, creativity, love and art.
After the Bell closed, Kurt and I remained friends. He worked at different restaurants for a time, inviting me to visit with him at places that have such a history in the city but for me have a personal one. His resume spanned some of the best, but whenever I hear their names I only remember visiting with him there. The food, though excellent, was somehow always secondary to the adventure of being with him. I visited him in East Berlin in the earlier days before it became an enjoyable place to live when he was helping a friend open a restaurant, and we spent days in New York City on rooftops, at Central Park Summerstage and one summer he took me to Brighton Beach, an introduction that started me journeying out there with an enjoyment that has lasted to this day.
How do I describe the Bell? When I first walked into Antique Bar & Bakery I felt like I was somehow thrown back in time, not just because of the vintage decor but because somehow it felt like the Bell. Chef Paul Gerard's sense of design and aesthetic are so perfectly put together with everything in its perfect place, but while the Bell had a feeling of bohemian abandon there is something somehow that it similar between the two. Maybe it's the decor, but maybe it's the heart that is in the two very different Chefs. They love to invite people into the spaces they've created and help them feel right at home.
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