when you want, where you want.
Erik Piepenburg Used to Man-hunt at Veselka
Illustration: Sarah Kilcoyne
Times veteran Erik Piepenburg came of age — and came out — in the ’90s, a time when, he says, gay restaurants were “everywhere” in New York, particularly in neighborhoods like Chelsea and the East Village. That’s since changed, but, in his book Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants, Piepenburg sought to revisit those memories (and more), exploring, as he put it, “where gay people were eating and why, going back over a hundred years.” From Hell’s Kitchen, he’s able to live that history daily — reminiscing over secretly queer automats on Broadway, spotting gay teenagers in the dining room of what used to be the lesbian bar Pony Stable Inn, and, a self-proclaimed “diner gay,” paying homage to the West Village’s gay golden era at Chelsea Square.
Wednesday, May 21
It’s Whopper Wednesday, bitch.
Actually, it’s Impossible Whopper Wednesday — I’ve been a vegetarian since the Reagan Administration — and it’s the reason I’m at the Burger King on 42nd Street across from Port Authority. Me and other BK-app hoes ordered ahead for our weekly fix of a $3.99 Whopper, about $5 off the regular price. (I get mine with extra pickles and no onions and ask for it to be cut in half.) It’s a culinary orgasm for me to go to a fast-food restaurant and get a veggie burger this good — the stuff of science fiction when I worked a miserable week at Burger King in high school.
Today, I added a small order of Have-sies — half fries, half onion rings — and brought my own can of Peach Bellini sparkling water from Target. I dined in the BK Lounge, reading Lauren Cook’s coltish novella I Love Shopping.
I’m a freelance journalist and mostly work from my Hell’s Kitchen apartment (where I rarely eat breakfast). I spend the afternoon screening movies for the monthly horror column I write for the Times. (Why is nobody talking about Ben Foster in Sharp Corner?) Tonight I go old-school and catch Final Destination: Bloodlines at the Village East.
I have mixed feelings when I eat in the East Village. The kinds of queer restaurants that once defined the neighborhood as a culinary moshpit — Stingy Lulu’s, Life Cafe, Café Orlin, Papi Luis — are long gone. Now, so many of the TikTok-era eateries there feel more welcoming and tailored to straight Trumpista tech bros and trust-fund brand ambassadors than to queerdos.
After the film, I eat solo at one of the spots that still has traces of my old-school East Village: Veselka. I always get the Deluxe Vegetarian Plate, which comes with scrumptious pierogi (cheese, potato, mushroom), stuffed cabbage (rice with sauerkraut and mushrooms), and sides of kasha and (never enough) sour cream. The dining room isn’t as gay as when I ended a night of manhunting there in the ‘90s, but whatever.
Thursday, May 22
I make an excellent homemade cold brew. When I’m back home in Cleveland, which is often, I stock up on beans from my favorite local roasters: duck rabbit, Rising Star, Ready Set. Today, my Baratza Encore burr grinder is loaded up with Peristyle’s Ethiopia Limu, roasted by my friend Charlie Eisenstat. Before bed, I’d ground 60 grams of those puppies and let them soak in my Le Creuset French press. This morning I filter the coffee through my Aeropress and directly into my favorite iced coffee glass.
My partner, David, is working from home today, and that means we indulge in our lunchtime routine: playing along to reruns of the game show 25 Words or Less on Pluto TV and eating Trader Joe’s frozen ravioli, which David serves bathed in brown butter. The porcini-mushroom-and-truffle-are knockouts. We accompany that with fresh bread from the nearby Sullivan Street Bakery (the tangy Community loaf is our favorite), served with olive oil and salt (him) and Miyoko’s Creamery oat milk butter (me).
Date-night dinner is at Tulcingo del Valle, a Mexican restaurant where Jesus Verdejo and his wife, Irma, have been serving antojitos in the style of their native Puebla, Mexico, since 2001. We split our always-fantastic usual: nachos on tortilla chips served in the round like a pizza and white Oaxacan cheese enchiladas with a lip-puckering salsa verde.
For Mexican food in Hell’s Kitchen, other gays prefer Arriba Arriba — but less for the food and more to get wasted on cheap frozen margaritas and flirt with bubble-butt chorus boys. I’ll give it this much: Arriba Arriba opened in 1984, qualifying it as one of Manhattan’s legacy gay restaurants.
Friday, May 23
There are some good things that come with the bouge-ification of the West Village. One is the Christopher Street location of the pizzeria L’Industrie, doors down from the old Christopher Street Pizza, a hangout for leathermen in the ’70s. It’s a short walk to L’Industrie from my doctor’s office, and thankfully this afternoon the line isn’t as long as it is on the weekends. I scarf down a phenomenal slice with a fat dollop of milky burrata.
I’m too young to have experienced the West Village gay restaurant heyday, which started in earnest in the ’60s and peaked in the ’70s and ’80s. This afternoon, though, I step out of a time machine when I stop for coffee and rice pudding at the Washington Square Diner on West 4th, which was once home to the lesbian bar Pony Stable Inn. Today, the dining room is mostly empty, save for a booth of three teenagers, maybe high-school seniors, one in a denim jacket adorned with Pride buttons over his heart.
Gay teens used to hang out at the nearby, short-lived, and mafia-run Tenth of Always, close to West Third and Thompson. As the historian David Carter once put it, “The drag queens just looked like regular high school girls and the hustlers looked like regular high school boys.” A 1969 gay guidebook recommended going there between midnight and 9 a.m.
Back at home, David continues his yearslong experiment with different kinds of masa for homemade tacos. For dinner, he uses half Masienda heirloom white corn masa harina and half Maseca nixta masa. (He uses a Pyrex pie plate as his tortilla press, which means every tortilla has the word Pyrex on it.) He cooks them using a two-burner method to get a lofty puff: a comal on low heat and a cast-iron skillet for high heat.
We top our tortillas with browned Trader Joe’s soy chorizo, crema, sautéed onions, and generous squeezes of lime, which we eat alongside Jeopardy! and two episodes of Golden Girls.
Saturday, May 24
I am in Chelsea to interview someone for a story, and afterward I have one of my favorite New York slices: the Grandma from Nicola Accardi’s pizzeria Rocco’s. The San Marzano tomatoes and fresh basil pleasure each other atop a crust elegantly balanced between tenderness and crunch.
The ’90s, were the gay Golden Age in Chelsea. On a Saturday like this, a gay could have a meh latte on a couch at the gay coffee shop Big Cup, buy gay greeting cards at the homo emporium Rainbows and Triangles, meet friends for a white-tablecloth dinner and a house Pinot at the bistro East of Eighth, and still get home for a disco nap and a clean-out before a sweaty, poppered-up night at the Roxy. For me and other Gen-X queens — some battered by AIDS, others who lived on the cusp of its horrors — gay ghosts still promenade Eighth Avenue from 14th Street to 23rd, invisibly pushing past strollers clogging once-hallowed turf.
I spend the afternoon writing and nursing a cup of coffee and a heavy scoop of tiramisu at Chelsea Square, a Chelsea diner that turns 45 this summer. I’m a diner gay, and I love mom-and-pop diners, the kind where gay people can eat, dish, cry, debate, and otherwise engage with one another in ways that you often can’t, or shouldn’t, at a gay bar. (David and I had our first date at the Skylight Diner on 34th Street east of Ninth Avenue.) My favorites — the Dish, Venus, Rail Line — are gone, but thankfully Chelsea Square endures.
For dinner, David and I order the spectacular pad see ew and peanut curry (both with mock duck), plus bouncy chive pancakes, from the family-run Kare Thai, one of our favorite Hell’s Kitchen restaurants.
Sunday, May 25
I started this diary with an Impossible burger, and I’m ending with one too. This time, it is my lunch at Fat Boys Burgers, which opened last year up the street from the Alvin Ailey rehearsal studio on Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. A bargain at just $10, it’s seared and perfectly proportioned on a soft brioche bun. The hunger demon has possessed me so I add a side of fat mozzarella sticks. I spend the afternoon working from the window-facing counter at the Drama Bookshop, where I get an oat-milk latte named for the legendary Broadway belter Carolee Carmello.
To celebrate a friend’s birthday, David and I take him for dinner to Le Basque, Guy Vaknin’s stellar vegan (and kosher) restaurant, which opened last November just off Union Square. Under a dramatic skylight, we take a tour of France and Spain with some of the meatiest looking and tasting vegan dishes I’ve ever had. I go nuts over the grilled “lamb” pintxo with a pistachio-mint crust and the grilled Chunk Foods–brand “steak” with a mojo kalamata sauce.
On our way back to Hell’s Kitchen, we walk by 1557 Broadway, once the location of a Horn & Hardart Automat — an extravagant temple to proto-fast casual dining, where you’d drop a coin into a slot, open a window, and retrieve your food, from plates of hot roast beef with buttered carrots to cups of chocolate pudding. In the 1930s, gay men surreptitiously queered Automats by cruising the expansive and anonymous dining rooms, using benign inquiries — “Might this seat be available?” — as an excuse to chat up a stranger. Like “sup” on Grindr, but with huckleberry pie.
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