By A.C. Devlin
Senior Food Critic at New Yawk Squawk
It was a cold day in 1994 when Bertolucci Yves and Grant Thambastion III opened the doors of Singyul-Heir, an avant-garde affair in the heart of New York’s East Village. It may have been cold outside, but everything was ablaze inside Singyul-Heir’s four stuccoed walls.
The eatery, a slender dice of nineteenth century masonry poised between a Kurdish cartographer’s studio and a long forgotten coopery, was a short jaunt from the esteemed – and now defunct – osteria Shell Shock. At the time of Singyul-Heir’s opening, Shell Shock was run by Thambastion’s adopted brother, Giuseppelito, and his blind father, Grant Thambastion II.
Singyul-Heir was Yves’s – an Italian immigrant who once described Prosseco as “structured piss, limestone, and a jigger of alcohol” – first stint as executive chef of a three-star hopeful. The younger and more experienced Thambastion had had moderate success with Sylenzyllo (pronounce see-len-SEE-o) – a Francisco Franco inspired Iberian affair in which customers were allowed neither to speak to their waiters nor to each other. Customers were frequently bound and gagged and occasionally spanked with oversized wooden ladles. Yelps and muffled howls from the “spooning” were dictatorially penalized with a final “decibel charge” ranging anywhere from $50 to $200. The restaurant, hailed by sado-masochists and closet fascists, was closed voluntarily by Thambastion after its chef, Doolittle Flaxborgnovitz, was deported to Kosovo after the IRS caught him writing off emolliated cheeses on his tax returns.
Yves and Thambastion’s Singyul-Heir was an adventurous restaurant to say the least. Inspired by their love for American-Irish novelist J.P. Donleavy’s tale A Singular Man, Singyul-Heir, like Sylenzyllo, was not the least bit shy in force-feeding the masses is crafted brio and brilliance. The restaurant indignantly sat only tables of one. Thambastion, always the more philosophical and astral-leaning of the two, was quoted as saying that in splitting up parties and seating customers alone he allowed the diner and the food to “frolic in lengthy solipsism.” Pundits precipitated its failure before it even opened, even going so far as to label it an “Icarian disaster” guaranteed to “burn up in the quagmire of its own blazing hubris.” But the pundits were wrong; Singyul-Heir was a hit.
And though sales from Singyul-Heir surpassed $3,000,000 by its sixtieth day of operation and reservations had to be made months in advance, the restaurant continued to be harshly spoken of. Bertrand Guillesh-Q’eshez, assistant editor of the Michelin Guide: From Surrealist Steak’ums and Dada Duck and Daikon, said of Singyul-Heir’s Mongolian and Andean-fused cuisine, “Though Yves’s preparations are Steppe-raised, atmospherically cherubic, and as macho as Machu Pichu, there is something altogether off-putting in treating food as company and a meal; the prospect is slightly cannibalistic.” An unnamed reviewer for the Manhattan Filibuster gurgled, “The solitude at Singyul-Heir became so unbearable I would have gladly shared my table with an unfashionable straight couple from Newark.” Nevertheless, Guillesh-Q’eshez, who was blindfolded during his meal to even further eliminate the menace of visual stimulus, said the food, especially the llama lung tartare with glutinous manioc hash and smoked pomegranate rind, was “so otherworldly I nearly mistook the experience for an extra terrestrial probing.”
Yves, usually regarded as taciturn and level-headed by those who know him best, became a beast under the burden of running Singyul-Heir’s kitchen. Eyewitness accounts confirm that he once told Faye Dunaway, who commented on how eating alone can lead to indigestion, “You sure as hell die alone, and so you shall eat alone.” When Dunaway politely argued that her psychic predicted she would die in a mudslide with 12 close friends, Yves slapped her with a raw mullet and then made her eat it, scales and all. Dunaway never spoke publicly of the incident but announced in Debonair Flare that she no longer supported the National Aquarium, to which she had been very generous in the past.
Singyul-Heir was consistently ranked “Worst Date Restaurant in the New York” by Gastro-Intestinal Tract, but the coup of a daily patronage exceeding 350 persons, many of whom ate until they bled from the eyes, kept the restaurant open for more than six years. Bathroom sex between socially-deprived diners was routine, expected and, in jest, listed on the menu as a “market value” daily special.
As is often the case between successful restaurateurs, Thambastion and Yves began butting heads early on regarding their dynastical follow-up to Singyul-Heir: Goosh Goosh. The name of the establishment was agreed upon even before the pair had an inkling of what the decor or menu would entail. Thambastion, always the theorist, believed the onomatopoeic name dictated everything on the menu be of low viscosity; The foreign Yves, misunderstanding “goosh” as “goose,” thought the menu should exclusively host a selection of migratory birds and benedicts. Though Thambastion never admitted it to Yves, a goose attack in Central Park at the age of seven had left him emotionally scarred and therefore unwilling to devote a restaurant to the honking hordes of flying fowl.
After months of spitfire negotiations and professional consults Goosh Goosh was scrapped. The duo failed to combine their and Yves grew increasingly frustrated with with Thambastion’s demands: the gas range in the kitchen must be powered by a diesel engine; the bathrooms – sinks, commode and all – must be made entirely of ice and kept at a glacial -15 degrees Celsius; desserts must be eaten in a public bath. Yves felt that Thambastion's notions detracted from the food and became nothing more than a satire of fine dining. In 2000 Singyul-Heir was closed and its owners went their separate ways. The space was sold to Erin Shamrock, who gutted the restaurant and turned it into a standing-room-only Scottish tapas bar. The name was changed to Le Petite Haggis. Singyul-Heir was all but forgotten.
In recent years, Yves has been surprisingly absent from the New York culinary scene. In 2002, he helped design the spring menu at Cincinnati’s I Will Eat Your Face and Tears but he disappeared soon thereafter. Rumors abound speculated that his fugue led him to East Timor where he lived in an abandoned submarine hull with Bobby Fisher and a dozen teenage courtesans. A New York Limes article had it on good authority that Yves retreated to the slopes of Finland where he spent his days tobogganing with Faye Dunaway and hunting caribou with an industrial slingshot and an endless supply of Rubik’s Cubes. But the most damning report of Yves’s behavior came firsthand. This reporter spotted a man closely resembling Yves – cum unkempt bear, a yellow seersucker suit and a sullied Chicago Cubs cap – under a parasol at Café Toothache in Sardinia. As coolly Yves sipped an espresso, a masculine shriek in the distance caught his attention. He cocked his head and, hearing the shriek again, leapt to his feet and seized a baguette from a nearby basket. Within a few moments he was violently embroiled in a swordfight with a man I later identified as the Turkish Ambassador to Oman, the very face behind the war cry. The Turk too jabbed and parried with crusty bread. Never before had I scene a more terrifying scene than one involving a man in a ebony sheik’s robes wielding bread perilously charge through a civilian piazza to suddenly clash carbohydrates with a Windy City panhandler. Both men fought viciously, and with exemplary skill, and through an accent laden with Arabic inflections I head the Turk call Yves a “mad Dionysian starch hound” before hurling a roll at his foe and retreating into the recesses of a nearby alley. The supposed Yves followed quickly on the ‘slamic scofflaws heels after getting a lengthy shoeshine and then purchasing a watermelon gelato from a passing vendor. As he was evidently in a hurry, I didn’t pursue an explanation for the horrific scene that had just unfolded before my eyes.
But while Yves’s presence in foreign affairs could be only speculated upon, Thambastion was hard at work. In 2001 he opened Nude and Nudest, skipping the intermediary Nuder altogether for fear the double-entendre would prematurely bias masculine diners against the establishment while making it exclusively popular with mutton-chopped lesbians. The gimmick of Thambastion’s bare-ass duo, as most New Yorkers are well aware, is the undeniable similarity in fashion sense between the service staff and the title character from “The Emperor’s New Clothes”; both are utterly and unequivocally naked. Bartenders, El Salvadoran busboys, and failed actor/model waiters/waitresses are, crudely, in the buck to make a buck. Despite lengthy battles with both the FDA and the NYC Police Commissioner, and a papal denunciation, Thambastion’s Nude and Nudest opened to protestors of indecency and lines of hungry diners waiting from around the block.
Amidst initial controversy regarding moral sentimentality, sanitization and the painfully uncouth sloganeering Thambastion used during promotional radio and television spots – “Nude and Nudest: where the customer is always correct and the maitre’d erect” – Thambastion also endured a lengthy legal battle with the NAACP, as he made no qualms about hiding his hiring policy: “ ‘Lesser equipped’ waiters are desired,” he said in court, “so as not to emasculate the male patronage and the chorizo dishes.” In a March 2002 article published in Sharper’s Bizarre, titled “The Bouillabrazen Playboy,” Thambastion again made sparks fly after expressing his preference for waiters with “trimmed totems”: “When carving meats tableside,” he said, “I want the customers to know that even the wait staff has been flayed.” Nevertheless, Thambastion’s gamble in promoting Nude and Nudest’s orthodox hygiene code paid off; in the six months following the article’s publication, Nude and Nudest’s Semitic patronage increased by 35 percent over the same period of the previous year.
But while Thambastion continued to grow wealthy from the spoils of Nude and Nudest, the question on people’s minds remained: “What happened to that chef you used to work with? That Italian guy who smacked Faye Dunaway with a fish?”
Finally the answer: After being absent for nearly six years, Bertolucci Yves has chartered his way back into the culinary waters and is waging war against Thambastion’s vessels. The intensity of the friends-turned-rivals has in no way subsided. Yves’s new restaurant, only his second in a career made celebrity by the unexpected success of Singyul-Heir and his public falling out with Thambastion, goes by the name of Naked Esther. Naked Esther is an attack on Thambastion’s projects in several regards. The establishment is directly across the street from the first-floor Nudest, surpassing Nudest in stature by occupying the second and third stories of the opposite building. Even more of a slight to Thambastion is that Naked Esther boast’s not only nude servers, but also “living platters.” Every dish in Naked Esther is served on and eaten off of the body of an unflappably stoic, though perfectly conscious and alive, naked woman. Says Yves, “The Greeks and Romans understood there to be nothing more pleasing than the naked human form. Food is the second most pleasing form. Combining the two cannot fail.”
There are no plates, bowls, or ceramic dishes of any kind in Naked Esther. Neither are there sharp knives. Even the napkins are cut to resemble lacy panties. Fortunately for those panting over their plate, Yves allows beverage glasses, but aside from the sippy cups, everything is eaten directly off of perfectly nubile skin. When questioned about the state of mind of the plate during dinner, Yves became visibly agitated at by the suggestion that the tables/women were drugged into a state of obliviousness: “No narcotics, no sedatives, no alcohol! The table is sober!”
“But how can they be so still for so long?” this reporter asked.
“Do you ask the magician where the rabbit came from or do you clap and smile?” he responded.
Upon entering Naked Esther one is first struck by how bustling the restaurant is. The illusion of this impression quickly falters: no less than fifty mannequins have been arranged to mimic patrons waiting for tables in the restaurant’s spacious lounge.
After being seated on low stools, customers must choose whether they desire a “face” (supine) or a “tail” (prostrated) table. Each table sports a distinct, ergonomically designed menu. The “face” menu tends to be lighter fare and more finger foods; the “tail” menu is richer and offers more meat dishes. The two obviously appeal to different temperaments. For diners interested in sauce-heavy items, the author recommends the “tail” menu, as the small of the back provides a suitable gravy boat.
Despite Naked Esther’s histrionics and soap-operatic attack on Nude and Nudest – a beef that will surely prove effective in corralling the herds – Yves’s food will guarantee repeat customers. Proof of the food’s ascendancy was demonstrated by several middle-aged men so ravenously enamored with the food they licked their plates clean. Regardless of whether Yves spent the last five years celebrity sledding in Scandinavia, priming Polynesian pawns for castling conquests, or fighting the Ottomans with high-fiber focaccia, he has not lost his command in the kitchen; nearly everything on the menu is worthwhile. Items not to be missed are the aspic terrine of little neck clams, caramelized pumpkin, and pickled coconut, the jackalope sweetbreads with blue corn gluten blinis, and the Mr. PotatoSalad Head, a design-oriented refresher in which various vegetables are cut and superimposed on the table’s face (not available with “tail” tables, though the Butt-ered artichoke hearts with frissee tempura is a worthy substitute). Avoid the feathered calf’s brain moussline (available on the “face” menu only) and the mudskipper sashimi with caviar panna cotta and mesclun threads, as they both tend to tickle the table and are consequently difficult to eat.
The food at Nude Esther is both more engaging and more reasonably priced than Nude and Nudest, and the experience in its entirely is more dynamic. The only shortcoming of Naked Esther is the lack of soups of any kind for obvious reasons (where would you put it?). If Mexican is your thing, hurry! Rumor has it Yves is considering removing the black bear and cockscomb fajitas from the menu as the employee health benefits plan does not cover “skin grafts resulting from the dermal application of hot meats and peppers.”
