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Sad Swinging End to Beloved Café
It was, instead, to the rhythm of a wailing trumpet, the clicking heels of flamenco dancers and the loud cheers of hundreds of devoted customers. From noon to midnight on June 10, more than 500 customers made their last visit to this popular Tribeca eatery at the corner of Varick and West Broadway. They ate and danced and sang and when the evening came to an end the customers, and the staff who had served them through the years, hugged and kissed and cried. “Let’s celebrate, be happy,” Marc Kaczmarek, a co-owner with his wife, Mei Chau, said as he welcomed the guests. “You close the door, you open another. We don’t know what is waiting for us.” Chau and Kaczmarek learned three months ago that the restaurant’s days were numbered as word came in a terse note from the management company that their lease would not be renewed. They immediately told their staff, and all of them stayed to the last day. On the door, they posted an invitation to the party, free food and all. “This was a good way to say goodbye to everyone,” explained Chau, “and to thank all the customers.”
“I wanted to say goodbye and to pay tribute to the institution and the owners and the staff,” said Toby Old, a photographer who came down from 115th Street. “I used to have a studio on White Street and this restaurant was such a part of my life for so long.” Every restaurant has its regulars, but Franklin Station had its devotees. “Sometimes I’d eat here three times a day,” said Ellen Kovachevich, who stood with her husband, Tom, a few feet from the tiny, sweltering kitchen where cooks had stirred pots and loaded ovens for hours in a marathon cooking session. “This restaurant made my life so happy. I can’t talk about it, I’ll cry.” Nearby, Wayne Turrett, an architect who lives with his wife Jessica and two daughters on Walker Street, waited in line at a table groaning with plates of chicken satay, randang lamb, mint shrimp and noodles with peanut sauce. “When you came here you felt so comfortable,” he said, echoing the sentiment of so many others. “You knew them, they knew you. When the girls did well in class, we didn’t go to Chanterelle. We said, ‘Let’s go to Franklin Station and celebrate.’”
“The food has flavors that I had never tasted before,” he said of the French Malaysian fare. “I would become obsessed with dishes. First it was the chicken curry noodle soup with the little egg. Then one day I ordered the chicken udon. Then there was the garlic shrimp sandwich with this ginger mayo. Everything Mei made was amazing.” Chau, a native of Malaysia, was a student at Parsons School of Design in 1993 when she ran out of money. Kaczmarek, a native of France, had just quit his job as a photography teacher there. “We had to do something,” she recalled, “so I borrowed money from my sister, who owns a restaurant in Connecticut. I had been cooking for my brothers since I was 13. We lived in a small village and my mother had opened up a canteen for workers in the jungle, a three-hour trip, so she didn’t always come home. I cooked in the morning and then went to school in the afternoon.” The couple’s plan was to open a take-out noodle place that would help support them while they continued their lives as artists. The plan was soon abandoned. In the first few years, Chau did nearly all the cooking, working up to 13 hours a day. Kaczmarek managed the room. The menu grew, with dishes from Chau’s childhood and new inventions. She is now compiling the recipes into a cookbook that she hopes to publish. “We wanted people to feel like it was their home, to relax,” said Kaczmarek. “I would tell the waiters to welcome the customers like you would welcome your own guest, because they are your guests.” The workers, natives of Malaysia, China, Nepal and Indonesia, grew close over the years to their customers and to each other.
When one of the workers and his wife were having marital problems, Kaczmarek and Chau paid for marriage counseling. When a cook burned herself in the kitchen, she recuperated in the owners’ loft. “I took care of her like a sister,” Kaczmarek recalled. Many of the customers offered to help the workers find jobs, even asking them for their resumés. “They said, ‘Call me if you need anything,’” said Daisy Paulce, who worked as a waitress for three years. “We were more than customer and server. We were more like friends.” Indeed, soon after the restaurant closed the manager and one waiter had already found work in the law firm of a customer. Throughout the day and night of the party, friends of Kaczmarek and Chau entertained—a teen band called Square One, a flutist and guitarist who played a duet, a former customer and saxophonist who came from Georgia, and flamenco dancers and singers. Chau is a long-time student of flamenco. Not long before midnight, the small room was alive with dancing and the intoxicating sounds of Dixieland jazz. Kaczmarek was swinging with Sister Gue, the dishwasher, and Chau boogied with Ken Chen, the waiter. Chau, leading the entire staff in an impromptu Taiwanese song, ended with her turning to her customers and bowing deeply. “I love you,” she said. A week later, Chau and Kaczmarek were in their Walker Street loft, tucking away the dishes, pots and other restaurant remains that went unsold at auction. “We had a good run for 15 years,” Chau said, still weary from the excitement and work of the days before. “That’s why I feel it’s not sad.” Then the couple looked at each other and together posed the question that their customers were also asking. “Where are we going to eat now?”
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