From the Odeon and Nell’s to Balthazar and Minetta Tavern, Keith McNally is the most famous restaurateur in a city full of them. But when he arrived in New York in 1975, he came with almost nothing: $300 and no papers. What he had was ambition and a willingness to work hard. He’s just like hundreds of people he’s employed over the years, and it’s why he cares so much about the staff at his restaurants. And they care about him, as Balthazar busboy Cheikhou Niane explains in his companion essay chronicling his four decades of immigrant hustle since he came to New York City from Senegal. Today, we’re proud to publish these two very different immigrant stories together—the busboy and the boss—united by pride in their work, and by the American dream. —The Editors
I grew up in London and came to New York on a tourist visa in October 1975. I was 24 and had vague plans of making films. After running out of money in my second week, I found a job at an ice cream parlor on East 60th Street called Serendipity. I was a busboy and working illegally.
While I was stacking chairs onto tables after my shift one night, a group of the waiters offered to take me to a place they called the Village. It was after midnight when the five of us squeezed into a Checker Cab. The taxi sped down Fifth Avenue more than 50 blocks to Washington Square without stopping at a single light. Each time we approached a red stoplight, it effortlessly gave way to green. This seemed to me, a young, working-class Englishman, a small miracle and to represent a world denied to me in England. The world of easy access and equal opportunity, where success was the result of ambition and hard work and not—as it was in England—of class and the right accent. It was the world of liberty, freedom, and blissful unencumberedness. It was America. The land where anything could happen.
After stepping out of the cab into the Village that night, I was shocked by the number of people still out. At this hour in London the streets would be deserted. As Bette Midler once said: “When it’s 3 o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London.”
Like many immigrants, my desire to live in New York came from watching films. In my case, it was one film in particular: Klute. There’s a terrific scene early on in which the two leads, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, are out past midnight buying fruit from a sidewalk produce stand. As Sutherland reaches for some luscious-looking peaches, Fonda’s sexual desire for him explodes onto the screen. This was the exact moment when I longed to live in New York City. But it wasn’t the scene’s eroticism that prompted the longing. It was the idea that you could buy fresh fruit in Manhattan after midnight.
