Salon and the City

These days, the word salon is often associated with shampoo and color treatments, manicures and massages. But there was a time--namely, the 1920s and 30s--when the word conjured up an image of a smoky lounge filled with artists and 'intellectuals' debating the depiction of Spanish bullfighting in Hemingway's "Death in the Afternoon" or Picasso's Surrealist, Bataillean revisions of classical art.
It's the last definition that the three co-owners of a two-story space on the far west fringes of the Village hope to recapture. Housed below the Riverview Hotel (where sailors from the Titanic,once stayed after the ocean liner sunk in the Atlantic), Salon audaciously bills itself, as "a restaurant and lounge for people of social, artistic and intellectual distinction."
I'd like to think that's why I received an invitation to attend a tasting there, and later the opening. But I think it has a lot more to do with my media affiliation.
Nonetheless, I took them up on the invites, bringing my foodie friend, aka Vittles Vamp, to the three-course tasting last week. I sampled squid over chicory salad with chorizo and roasted yellow tomato sauce, and a grilled salmon entree. She had a roasted beet and goat cheese terrine salad on baby greens and a steak (if I remember correctly--I'd had a couple cocktails before the entree arrived). The bartender was serving up an array of impressive concoctions, including a lychee and champagne cocktail called the White Star, a tribute either to the company that owned the tragically-fated trans-Atlantic steamship or the pier across the street where the ship would have docked--had it not sunk en route.
We ate downstairs, in a high-backed velvet booth. After dinner, our German waiter "Fritz" set down a mille-feuilles pastry filled with a thick vanilla custard (delicious) and a round plate with three scoops of sorbet (I can only recall the watermelon flavor) surrounded by crescent-shaped cookies. Two of the three owners wandered by during dinner, asking us what we thought of the menu. The Vamp pronounced it "well done"--with the exception of the sorbet, which she said lacked the flavor apparent in the other dishes. (We later learned it was the one item on the menu not prepared by the chef--but imported from a generations-old eatery in Queens).
After dinner, we ventured upstairs to the "lounge." Velvet curtains and settees, 20-foot ceilings and 10-foot-high windows with views of...the West Side Highway. And, beyond, the Hudson. And then, New Jersey. Still, when you sat in the booths, only the tops of trucks were visible through the window, and you could almost pretend, as the sun slipped below the horizon and the lights twinkled across the river, that you were sitting in a cafe along the Seine in Paris.
An 18-foot-long mural stretched along the wall behind the bar upstairs, inspired, according to the press materials, by Otto Dix (read: transparent flapper dresses, exposed nipples, and splay-legged, big-breasted women dangling from red-faced, cigar-chomping men). We preferred to look at the Art Deco clock, which, one of the owners confided, cost just $40. Money well spent, I think--though last night, when I returned with my husband for the opening, the clock was behind by about an hour and five minutes.
Last night's official opening bash ran from "9:3o till ?" according to the invite. (Code for: no one shows up before 11 but the hosts, the band, the PR people, and media types with day jobs). My husband and I arrived before 10. The band was still warming up. There were open spots at the bar and even empty booths. We slipped into one of the velvet booths upstairs that was built for six (at least). But as the place started to fill up, we felt a bit guilty monopolizing it and found two seats at the bar. We stayed about an hour--just enough time for Victor to down three vodka drinks (a martini and two vodka tonics) and for me to sip a cocktail (White Star) and a kir (which I enjoyed, Victor, really). The drinks were free, but we tipped generously.
When we went to collect our jackets and bag, the coat check girl (who was probably a decade younger than us, and was reading an inch-thick biography of Miles Davis) asked: "Did you not have a good time?"
"We did," we assured her. "But we're married," we said, as if that explained our unwillingness to stay out late. She looked at us blankly, so I added, "And we have to go to work early in the morning."
Truth is, we were hoping to get the L train before it switched to one track at 11 pm (of course, we missed it) and to catch the last half of "The Daily Show." We did see the last two minutes of Jon Stewart's interview with Tracy Ullman, who was hysterical. But that was the closest we got last night to any celebrity sightings.