Manero's

Alleged pizza place @ 113 Mulberry St. New York 10013

I’ve been to Lola and I have been to Mehanata and I have been to Bella Ciao and surely there are others I am now forgetting.  These are locales at which Travis Bass has installed parties, only for a little while a piece, but the candle which burns twice as bright burns half as long.  Once the party turns stale (and this time always comes) then *poof* they’re gone.  The old shelter wanes silently, unobserved, until a few months or a season later a flier arrives in your DMs.  Occasionally this is pondered from the interior of the next host of this ongoing party organism; not grown too large for its shell, rather tires easily of its surroundings.  By this point the old is forgotten and you are in the basement of a restaurant on Mulberry you are fairly sure you’ve heard the name of but never actually been to.

“It’s called Bella Ciao.”  

“I thought it was Ciao Bella?”  

“No but there’s a place on 7th Ave called that but it’s just an Italian restaurant.”

“But this is just an Italian restaurant.”

“No, this is a party.”

Initially this feels a bit like your friend's parent’s house while they’re out of town; except in this case the venue is complicit in inciting the extra patronage.  The exact chronology of events isn’t so important, as it is iterative, but my experience of the last few forums goes as follows: first, there is cause for a happening.  Perhaps it is the fashion week party of a downtown arts/culture magazine or a particularly popular person in the nightlife milieu is having a birthday.  Either will work fine.  Concurrently you hear murmurings of a new club and even whispers of the name *travis*.  

“There’s a new club night on Mulberry.”  

“You mean Bella Ciao?”

“No Manero’s.”

“What’s Manero’s?”

“It’s an Italian place on Mulberry.”

“Bella Ciao?”

“No Manero’s.”

“I don’t know about Manero's.”  

A friend tells you to come to a party on a Tuesday or Wednesday, or maybe even a Thursday, for the inner sanctum of whichever group is relevant.  Maybe you are directly invited, by the progenitor, to which you RSVP as the hairs on the back of your texting hand stand straighter.  *if im not listed… will i get in?*  There may even be more than one of these ‘pre-opening’ events.  There are, after all, several different crowds to be courted.  For a week or two many birthdays and fliers of DJ’s will result.  Once each group is sure it has been let in before the laymans they will have forgotten there was a time they didn’t know there’s a party in a pizza place, just north of Canal on Mulberry, called Manero’s.  “There’s a party there again?  I can’t go twice in one week,” you say as you climb into the back seat of an Uber to Manero’s.

Manero’s has been in business since the summer of 2019, owed to the combined efforts of the two guys from JaJaJa (and Gelso & Grand also on Mulberry at Grand), and a guy from the Regina’s Grocery chain.  More recently, yet before my having been made awares, Manero’s expanded beyond a single storefront slice shop to a larger restaurant.  At the left side door you will find a fresh faced man of 22 checking IDs with a nonchalance such to make you question your own credentials.  Inside are four raised, cozy, wooden booths, on your left, with stained glass pendant light fixtures reminding you(me) of your(my) family kitchen in the 90’s.  Past those is a bar not all together large but ample in supply; including those red plastic water cups I remember sneaking Root Beer into at Straw Hat Pizza after little league games as a tween.  Behind this is a dining room outfitted for dancing, replete with booth for DJ and tables and chairs arranged looking onto the dance floor for pleasant chatting.  In some old interviews and profiles written about Travis Bass and his accomplices (links to which you can find on his website in his IG bio), I find several descriptions of the common base of ingredients to his curated festivities.  Often a quiet area where one can chat without screaming.  A dance floor of course where music “has to be amazing.”  Places that afford the opportunity of some third thing that’s unexpected are preferred.  In one venue years ago was a mirror wrapped karaoke room for instance.  Also he has, continually, reminded his interviewers of the importance of the crowd and, to paraphrase, a bit of everyone and a people from all walks of life, etc, variety is the spice of.  Behind the dance floor an outside smoking area (which closes early) and in the far back a little satellite bar in a tiny in-law unit of sorts that later in the night the operators of Manero’s seem to half forget about and I on more than one occasion have availed myself of their bar services sans a tender in attendance.

At some point the party, the place and the people become a perpetual motion machine.  Does the original host check in every week?  Surely not as I would assume he is a busy man with his obligations pulling him elsewhere.  What was their involvement in this endeavor to popularize partying at Manero’s?  I know not, but as his was the DM which first alerted me, I’ve taken license here to extrapolate.  The party continues with more or less the vibe fomented by those initial forays intact.  However, at some point something does change.  I don’t remember the last time I went to Manero’s.  I don’t mean the last time ever, although, now I am wondering if it has already happened.  Has the party there ended and I was just too distracted by the lovely spring-into-summer weather to have noticed?  The timing of this would make sense.  I have been present, at Manero’s, in each of the last three seasons, and my first visit was for my friend Mitch’s birthday and Mitch is a Scorpio.  Has the dancing there stopped?  If I am inclined to do so, where would I instead venture?  And don’t say Brooklyn.

It isn’t a negative upon Manero’s, nor Travis’s eptitude for temporary clubs of a similar flair, that it should shoulder the weight of our communal need for clubbing, but it does have me wondering why must a pizza place do it?  So great is the lack of club, physically, many a bar or restaurant in possession of a basement is starting to convert.  For example, the miniature dance floor below Le Dive, with a disco ball barely high enough to walk under and a coat check, DJ booth and bathroom all built on top of one another, routinely hosts a scrum of evening revelers squirming for room to shimmy an elbow.  Rumor has it the people behind Parcelle are looking to do the same in what used to be Ming’s Cafe.  Most of the old downtown spots are either closed, no longer cool, or very inconvenient to get into with any great regularity.  The Box for example can be a tough one.  One sure fire way is to be an employee, or rich or know someone (who is one of those aforementioned things).  Come to think of it, when was the last time I was at Paul’s? - Baby Grand, not Casablanca.  In either case it was to see a friend DJ or because they were hosting and therefore had a table.

Whilst I am aware of the prevalence of clubs and dancing venues in Brooklyn I am not considering them as preferable options here because they are not easy, in neither theory nor execution, and often require forethought.  A venue to be truly great must be able to be “wound up at.”  Bushwick/Brooklyn clubs aren’t not fun but there are so many of them very little stands out.  Do you want a “Berlin-ish” thing?  Go to Basement.  Do you want some Paradise Garage-y cosplay?  Go to Nightmoves. Do you want to spend $60 on entry to a generic time in a really big warehouse?  House of Yes, Brooklyn Mirage, Avant Gardner, Nowadays, Elsewhere, the list goes on and on.  Are there organized rave-like events with a ticket?  Yes and those are fun but you have to purchase a ticket in advance and they usually aren’t on a Tuesday.

There will always (hopefully) be the sort of locally great and regionally specific spots like East Village’s Nu Blu and Myrtle Broadway’s Bossa Nova but you can tell they are becoming rarer (in my attendance not their existence) because those places have become busy enough to open satellite locations.  Nu Blu has a new Nu Blu up the street and has started referring to the original location as Nu Blu Classic.  Bossa Nova opened a new club called Paragon right down the street as well.  I am not sure which is closest to its older sibling but if any one wants to bet we could make a wager of it.  The infamous The Box has created another The on 57st street and 8th Ave titled The Stranger.  I went once around when it opened and waited dutifully in line.  Four of my five friends left and went to a dive bar, while my lone comrade and I stood 40 minutes to be admitted; only as a result of a person of interest arriving and waving us in.  Have you been to a raver commune house in East Oakland in 2011?  It looks like that but much more expensive, larger, and presumably up to building code.

As for the Bass helmed endeavors: is it a sure fire win?  No.  Have I had a great time at them?  Yes, of course.  Is it a prisoner's dilemma in which we all agree this is fun and make it the hip spot and dance for as long as it keeps working?  That may just be what we have to live with right now.  It is however keeping alive a lineage of party pop-up stretching back to the fabled Manhattan megaclub days of old, aka the 90’s, by leapfrogging from one Chinese restaurant to a Romanian tri-level club to a several times failed East Village bar to a pizza restaurant on Mulberry down the street from an Italian restaurant on Mulberry.  This may just be the only way in current rental, regulatory, and corporate climate in which the seed of a thing called nightlife stays planted (or repotted and cloned I should say? Grafted onto a new branch?).  Let’s hope this bloodline isn’t Habsburgian.  We may be in the middle of the short time span in which we forget where it was we used to dance.  Before we know it we’ll be back in the basement/backroom/attic/kitchen of a Russian tea room or a Ukrainian community center or perhaps a dim sum ballroom?  Has anyone taken over the lease at the old Jing Fong yet?  I am told Manero’s has good pizza, so I will probably be back soon, but with an appetite.