Tourists praise the experience as ‘unforgettable’ and ‘impossible to get a refill during’, while locals prepare the usual response, which is to walk quickly in the other direction
New York now has two Times Square diners where the waiters sing, a milestone that civic leaders have described as ‘inevitable’ and the rest of the city has described as ‘a hostage situation with milkshakes’. A roundup of local news confirms the second diner has opened its doors, and early reviews suggest the first thing a customer notices on entering is that the hostess has already begun the second verse.
How Singing Waiters in Times Square Became a Growth Industry
For years, the market was held by a single establishment where young performers dressed in aprons delivered burgers and Broadway belting in equal measure. Industry analysts regarded this as a charming oddity. Then someone noticed that it had a queue, and in the American economy a queue is a business plan.
The second diner, a brightly lit venue with a neon sign shaped like a cheeseburger doing a high kick, has a cast of forty-four servers, each of whom has a degree in musical theatre and a quiet, burning need to be heard. ‘Our customers do not come for the food,’ said general manager Beatrix Okonkwo-Ferrari. ‘They come for the moment when a stranger in a bow tie sings a full ballad directly at their meatloaf.’
A Typical Dinner, Minute by Minute
At 6:02 pm you are seated and handed a menu bound in what appears to be a small hymn book. At 6:04 a waiter named Brayden bursts into a song about specials. At 6:09 a different waiter named Madison bursts into a rival song about the same specials, and the room is thereby split into two political camps. At 6:20 your food arrives, accompanied by a ten-part harmony, and you realise nobody has asked whether you would like ketchup. At 6:41 you are asked to join the finale.
The Menu, Briefly
The signature dish is the Overture Omelette. There is a Phantom of the Opera Burger, which is served under a cloche and unveiled with an ominous chord. There is a Les Miserables Mac and Cheese, a plate so heavy with emotion that regulars sometimes need to sit down halfway through. A dessert called the Encore arrives repeatedly until you cry or leave.
What Locals Think of Times Square Diners
New Yorkers, as a rule, avoid Times Square in the way a swimmer avoids a jellyfish. But even they admit a grudging respect for the sheer commitment of a place that will force a man to sing a love song to a fried egg. ‘I went once with my cousin from Ohio,’ said a Queens electrician. ‘I came out three hours later with a new appreciation for silence. I now hear it as a luxury.’
The economics are interesting too. The combined payroll of the two diners is said to exceed that of a small country. Waiters work for tips, and the tips are determined by how many octaves a man can reach while carrying a tray of root beer floats. A veteran server named Dolores described the job as ‘cardio with a harmony part’, and added that she can now identify a customer’s age by the way they hold a fork during a key change.
Why the Rest of the World Cannot Look Away
The same mixture of hunger and theatre has travelled widely. London’s restaurants, as one report noted, have long been turning hunger into research, in which diners are encouraged to analyse a dish before attempting to eat it. In an even stranger corner of the same world, a late night restaurant was once classified by physicists as a liminal space at 4am, with experts recommending that customers avoid eye contact, which suggests that the singing waiter would have been a revolution.
British politics, too, has its own musical dimension. The ritual of the cabinet reshuffle is widely understood as the quadrennial game of musical chairs that governs Britain, and nobody has yet been asked to sing while it happens, though the idea has its supporters in the House of Commons Tea Room.
Is It Authentic?
That is the question that matters, in a city currently obsessed with the idea of being real. Recent news noted that riding a Citi Bike is now said to prove you are an authentic New Yorker, and some cultural critics have asked whether eating at a singing diner could prove the opposite, namely that you are a tourist. Sociologists are divided. One camp says a local who eats at a singing diner is acting out a heroic form of irony. Another says he is merely hungry.
Whatever the truth, the theatre district has embraced the trend with open arms and a faint sense of dread. Three more singing venues are said to be in the planning stage, including a bakery where the croissants harmonise, a laundromat where the machines hum in B flat and a bank where every transaction ends with a key change. A pharmacy, wisely, has declined.
The Future of Singing Waiters in Times Square
For now, the owners are optimistic. Business is brisk. The line stretches around the block, and the waiters keep singing to those who wait in it, in what Okonkwo-Ferrari called ‘a free preview of the suffering to come’. She added that the best part of the job is the moment when a diner who arrived stiff and cynical sings the last chorus with tears in his eyes and ketchup on his tie.
For a comic hero who understood the delicate pain of the public performance, Alan Partridge, Britain’s greatest comic creation, remains the patron saint of any man holding a microphone in a diner. As for the singing waiters in Times Square, they are likely to keep singing until somebody pays them to stop, a sum the market has not yet discovered. For more on the oddities of modern dining, see The Daily Mash, and this report arrives courtesy of Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
SOURCE: bohiney.com