Cafe 82
THE CITY ACCORDING TO HOT LITERATI
Over pancakes and coffee at Café 82, Ananya, Anderson II, and Nwakaego brought their perspectives to the table at Cafe 82. These three writers turned a casual brunch into a thoughtful exchange on creativity, storytelling, and the city that inspires it all.
Located in the heart of the Upper West Side, Café 82 is a cozy diner known for its classic menu and iconic NYC charm—it even made an appearance in an episode of Sex and the City! Next time you visit, say hi from Hot Literati and soak in the quintessential New York vibes.
ANDERSON
The moon is a newborn again and all of New York shivers underneath it. We three are no different, A. and N. and I; we’re all still reeling from the night before in which I soundtracked a Gatsby-esque party immersed in a Dante-esque labyrinth of sin and sensation. The other night was warm enough to sweat and tonight we’re down to single digits Celcius. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything anymore.
Scaffolding foreshadows the opening of my destination like the maw to Plato’s cave – chrome over chrome over epiphany and mystery. I circle the block three times to make sure this is where I’m supposed to be. There’s a generous sidewalk terrace with empty tables. At this time of night, if I squint hard enough, I can see all the ghosts enjoying the Halloweekend raising champagne glasses to me with a toast and a cheer.
We meet here in Cafe Eighty-Two, all three of us, and we each walk in expecting paparazzi. We stick out so much it only feels natural. Here there are no niche style inspirations, no couture, no expensive designer furniture; rather you’ll find vinyl booths and middle-aged men in starched white aprons and bleached linoleum tiles underneath you.
In any case, we stand out immediately. The waiter by the front already knows who we are and what we’re here for. He ushers me to our table – if it weren’t a booth he’d definitely have pulled my chair out for me. The service does a great job making one feel important!
We didn’t ask any questions or meet any of the owners. The joint was empty as a battlefield when I came in and like any good battlefield it filled before we knew it. There was no time really to chatter with the staff or take a good look around the place. It’s warm inside, warmer than a womb, which might have been unpleasant just forty-eight hours before, but was more than appropriate with the sudden gust of cold.
We sat at a table of green and white marble. The waiters were feverishly polite, eager to please. I shift in my fur and my black turtleneck, N. never took off the shades from last night, A. sported those sharp eagle eyes which continually go back and forth, searching, but for what…
Eighty-Two is truly vanilla, in other words, a place so quintessentially normal that it truly shines for those enthusiastic about the classics. Who doesn’t appreciate an old Americana diner? Where the retired sip macchiatos and pick at pancake stacks from 11 to 1; am or pm both apply. The night was truly a refreshing change of pace, its quaint timelessness both comforting and encouraging.
It’s an exciting experience to lounge amongst those who don’t recognize or understand you. And you never know who might stroll in that surprises even your niche sensibilities. Nothing’s more American than a melting pot, a surreal liminal diner, coffee smelling of a burnt reusable filter, laughing youth with hoodlum baggy pants asking if you take Apple Pay. It’s much too early for the drunkards to stagger in, but it’s too late for any normal dinner guest to pick a place like this, especially on a Friday night. No, Eighty-Two seems the sort of place you frequent on a Monday or Tuesday, maybe a Sunday early evening, when the last of the orange sunlight reflects off your coffee spoon, perhaps you’re alone and you’ve got deadlines and deliverables or your dead grandmother on your mind; she enjoyed places like this, didn’t she?
There is an arresting quality to sheer normalcy. Our being here, for everyone involved, seems to resemble Playboi Carti being invited to perform at the Met Opera House. Copious mirrors reflect our individuality in a space seemingly designed to be ubiquitous, inoffensive, hospitable in the way of a hospital. We could all be the stars here, if we wanted. Everyone is welcome, no one is home. It would surely revitalize the niche of this liminal space if we all grew more comfortable frequenting where no one seems to favor.
The website for the space confronts you with a macro photograph of a burger, zoomed-in lettuce on meat, a vivisection of a sandwich. As if to say: look at what you want. If you’re here you’re desiring, you’re hungry, aren’t you? We have what you want. You have what we want. What more is there to discuss? (Their hand is around your chin, holding your head still, and you’re starting to sweat a little.) Look at yourself. Do you like what you see? Do you know who you are?
“You can’t go somewhere in the scene after a night out,” A. declares. She’s the type of person to make a spirited declaration that you nod along to before you hear her justification for the statement. If there even is any. Indeed we nod, remembering our individual experiences at dimly lit dive bars, gimmick-y restaurants, often too loud or dark or expensive or crowded. Eighty-Two is none of that – we’re the stars this time and we’re the ones giving the older couples something to scoff about. One elder in particular sits across from his wife and keeps sneaking glances at N. and A. I wonder what he thinks of them.
Sometimes I watch gears churning in A.’s head as she tries to find the path that leads to her aesthetic and intellectual destinations. Later in the night, after she informs us that the Age of Aquarius is looming for the first time since the French Revolution, I remember a line from the Robert Lowell poem about the woes of marriage and ritualized, commercialized relationships: “Life begins to happen.”
All of us write because we suffer. We already know who killed us.
There’s little on the menu of Cafe Eighty-Two that will surprise you. There are the usual American suspects: egg dishes, waffles and pancakes, all kinds of bacon and burgers, soft drinks, various coffee variants. Seafood says hello, mimosas and bellinis wink tantalizingly from the back of the last page. The clam chowder was warm and excellent, I am elated to report. The spinach in our appetizers, I was less enthusiastic about, but that’s more of a me problem than the chef’s. I hadn’t ever heard of the matzo ball soup that N. ordered, but A. said it looked great, and I suppose I had no choice but to agree. Our waiter had a mischievous glint in his eye or something like it when he saw me nod in approval at the taste of my merlot. I only barely had to be convinced to go for a second glass, but the third was all his choice, and I was glad to bend under his will. The salmon was tender enough to collapse if you looked at it hard enough, thank God, and A.’s eyes rolled back in her head tasting her chicken portobello over linguini after drowning it in hot sauce.
“That’s what it’s like,” I said right then, snapping my fingers and pointing to A. and her wide, confused eyes. “Being in love. Right there. That moment.” We had been discussing our relations (or lack thereof) at this point, and N. – certified romantic skeptic – had asked me about my experience being in love all the time. “It’s so overwhelming you can’t help but shiver or breathe differently. You know someone might be looking at you funny but you don’t care. The feeling just takes over. And you begin to seek it over and over again.”
“Sounds terrible,” N. answers, laughing. By her claims, N. has never been in love. She doesn’t feel like a full person unless she’s wearing at least two or three clashing patterns. When she’s stressed out, her eyes swell and the sunglasses go on, regardless of the actual presence of sunlight. She wanted to make out with a stranger last night, she confessed upon arriving, but there was no one up to her standards worth being foolish for.
A. agrees and knits her thick eyebrows. “I don’t know if that’s how I would describe it either.” A. has been agonizing recently trying to heal from a heart wound without any anesthetic. Once, she was proud of her explosive temper.
I just shrug. I can be a player and I know it. “No one has the same experience as anyone else. Some people love it, some people fear and never want to feel it again. But wars have been fought over spices and lovers. They surely have something in common.”
Love, spice, food, God: the four horsemen of mankind’s violent urges. Maybe that Lowell piece came to me for a reason, I am thinking as I write this under the blanket of the night, still digesting my exquisite baked potato. The wife in that piece seemed subtly conflicted about her mission of life being to keep her husband comfortable and alive. I distinctly remember: “...the monotonous meanness of his lust.” I also remember my years of working in food service. Would our waiter Tenzin have described his job as being monotonous? Did his customers ever seem mean? Spend a day behind a register or waiting a table and you’ll have seen the depths of the human heart and its capacity for avarice and apathy. I told him ‘thank you’ so many times I think he stopped listening. When we offered a cash tip he was giddy. Does he look at himself in the mirror the whole time when no one needs his help? Or am I projecting my own vanity over Eighty-Two’s thin skeleton?
Vain or not, there is beauty in the mundane. The longer I spend here, the more I feel a space such as Eighty-Two is vital. Every town needs a diner. Every borough needs a neutral space.
A portal opened overhead at some point. We debriefed our various relationships and juggled concerns about the tenuous future. Before we knew it, we were stuffed. I went on a spirited rant about the hopeless depravity of the MTA and N. read our tarot cards. The Moon for me, the Sun for A. Mystical messages manifest which implore us to slow down, taste the air, have faith in our creativity. We digested the physical and the spiritual. A. rubbed her hands together and hemmed over her centrist opinions of A.I. All of us bemoaned our usual responsibilities, lack of progress towards our ambitions, and the ruthless velocity of time.
The world is changing fast, clearly, but there are still spaces like Eighty-Two which exist in the pocket of our cities, places where we can poke our heads out of the unusual whirlwind of culture and its many faces, spaces in which we can stand out and be gawked at instead of the usual inverse. There must be. We are in dire need of our sanctuaries. Long live the normal and may 82nd Street remain even after the apocalypse. One day our America will be ancient but the diner and its aesthetic will live forever and ever. Amen.
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