Michelle and I took some time off in New York City last week. We’d done all the touristy things in past Big Apple trips, so the bulk of our time was spent engaging in various self-indulgent behaviors. When we weren’t passed out in the marvelous Ace Hotel, we were drinking lots of really good booze, staying up to ridiculous hours and walking, walking, walking and people-watching in the blistering heat with good food either in our mouths or on our minds.

The trip was a barn burner: too much fun every day. In the midst of all the good times, however, I couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed as a Vancouverite. New York is a very permissive town in comparison to my own. I could buy a single can of beer at a corner store at midnight, be ridiculed in my hotel bar for asking if they’re still serving drinks at 3:00am (“Of course we are! You must be from Canada…”), and eat just about anything I wanted from an almost obscene abundance of street food vendors.

People weren’t dropping dead on every street corner as a consequence of those petit freedoms. They were having a jolly fine time of it, and really, I’d never seen New York look and feel so vibrant, clean and healthy in all my life. It made me wonder at how much better Vancouver could be if City Hall and the provincial government just loosened the reins a little. We have our strengths, sure, but the barriers to enjoying oneself freely as they do in so many cities elsewhere are often so hard to surmount that it makes it tricky to muster the will to even bother sometimes.

The more I walked around the more I asked myself what it was that our municipal governments were so afraid of back home. If it’s mayhem on the streets, I don’t see it. If it’s food poisoning or rampant alcoholism, I don’t see it. While I realise that there have been baby steps toward progress here (the fumbling toward street food; the addition of an hour to liquor licenses), the generally restrictive attitude remains firmly entrenched, an ugly birthmark disfiguring our potential. Indeed, if I took one thing home with me from this trip, it was a tired sigh rather an epiphany. I love my city more than any other, but it would be especially nice if it took its damn nappy off and grew the fuck up.

That said and cast aside (I do like to bitch), here are a few of the things we ate, drank and saw. Enjoy…

Yesterday, and observant reader sent in a link to some New York Magazine coverage of a restaurateur in mid-meltdown. Vadim Ponorovsky, owner of Paradou restaurant in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, recently sent out a group email to his staff berating them for their inability to coax enough email addresses from their customers:

Everytime we have a slow night and you make no money and you sit there bitching about how you make no money, remember its because youre fucking lazy motherfuckers. YOU SHOULD ALL BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY!!!!! ALL OF YOU, INCLUDING THE HOSTS!!!!…

…Youre probably sitting there saying “How dare he speak to me like this. How dare he not have respect for me”. Youre right there also. I have absolutely no respect for any of you….if you dont respect us enough to do the little that we ask you to do, then GET THE FUCK OUT YOU FUCKING LAZY DISRESPECTFUL ASSHOLES!!!!!

And so on. Nice right? But it gets better. After Gawker piggybacked the story without any sourcing of their own, Ponorovsky started getting nasty emails and death threats from the public. This, unsurprisingly given the tone of his email, sent him on a freak out safari, a la crazy. New York Magazine continues the story:

Paradou owner Vadim Ponorovsky just called us in a huff because he says that after Gawker and other blogs published an angry e-mail he fired off to employees, his wife, who answers the phones at Paradou, is now receiving anonymous death threats along the lines of “we’re going to kill you” and “we’re going to burn down your restaurant.” Vadim says, “This has now hit a point beyond civil discourse,” and adds, “You can quote me on this: Any time, any place (and you can put my personal e-mail, vadim@paradounyc.com), these fucks, if they want to send me an e-mail, I will crack every one of their fucking heads and make the streets run with blood. I will not have my family threatened by anyone. I will fucking slaughter all these people and dance on their heads.”

Wow. Eater NY picks up on it (hat tip to reader SH) and finds Ponorovsky has a habit of going off the rails:

Take a look at the owner’s response to an admittedly harsh Citysearch review, found by a Gawker commenter. An excerpt: “You are an idiot. I am so tired of people who have absolutely no cultural or historical awareness telling people what we should eat or not and how we should behave or not…How dare you wish that I go out of business and call me heartless. How about I wish instant death to you and your family.”

Not exactly cut from the same cloth as John Bishop…

There are, of course, many Vancouver restaurateurs with notable rage issues (and some who have actually been convicted of being “boors”). My favourite delights in responding to letters of complaint with the kind of viciousness that can only gestate in the mind of the criminally insane. It’s something of a minor miracle that our “screamers” aren’t sent up for public ridicule from time to time, especially in this day and age of tweets and bloggery.

I suspect, however, that despite the sturm und drang, those who go so shockingly and publicly batshit (like Ponorovsky) see a nearly immediate uptick in trade. I once knew a chef who tossed all his guests out during the dinner rush. He just snapped. Word got around, and lo! Reservations went up like an Apollo rocket. This is, after all, the era of Gordon Ramsay, when the public expects a measure of insanity from their neighbourhood restaurateurs – perhaps proof positive that even with white linen and silver, dining will always be a savage pursuit.

Please pass the skulls.