Is P.J. Clarke's the Perfect NYC Dining Experience?

Martinis. Oysters. The best urinals in the city, baby!

I don’t write restaurant reviews. I’ll write book reviews, like the one I wrote recently for Bon Appétit about the new unauthorized Anthony Bourdain biography. Give the review a read once you’ve finished this. Lord knows I will probably have to pimp my work on here more since Twitter is in a death spiral. Movies, records, sure. I can write critical assessments on those, place them in a context, try to peace out why I think they matter or don’t. But restaurant reviews, no. I can’t do that. The reason is simply that you might experience a place in a different way and having worked in the restaurant industry, I know the tiniest variables might change one experience so it’s something totally different than another. I may have loved this place, you may have thought the food was good but the service stunk; I thought the music was too loud, you loved all the people watching; the chicken was over-salted to you, I thought it lacked seasoning. You get it.

Since this week was a weird one, with the worst vibes imaginable, I needed to escape. I started it off at the auditorium in Carnegie Hall on Monday watching the great new television limited series of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel Fleishman Is in Trouble, then walked from there with my friends Emma Straub and Megan Abbott to the after-party at Tavern on the Green. I figured since I was there and I don’t get to that many parties where they rent out one of the more iconic spots in Manhattan and the whole deluge of news that the next day people were going to vote to kill democracy (spoiler: that didn’t seem to happen, but there’s still time!), I maybe overdid it on the vodka Marinis and free egg rolls. I was pretty much ready to call it a week, go home, pack my things, and start the journey toward the Canadian border.

But I couldn’t do that because…duty called. I had to go see a movie for work in Manhattan on Tuesday, so my journey would have to wait. So I saw the film that was playing at the Lincoln Square AMC, one of my favorite places in the world to see movies, and walked out into the night. I was hungry and knew exactly where I was going to. I have a hard, fast rule that when I’m in the neighborhood that there’s one place and one place only I will eat. And baby, it sure ain’t the Smith. It’s the P.J. Clarke’s. One of my absolute favorite eating experiences in the whole damn city.

Now when I say P.J. Clarke’s is one of my favorites, I don’t mean the original spot on 55th and 3rd. The saloon that Irish immigrant Patrick J. Clarke took over in the early part of the 20th century after bartending there for a few years is a fun spot to eat at and I’ll never say no to it if I’m nearby. But, then again, if it’s a nice night I might also say a walk through Central Park is in order and just go to J.G. Melon instead. Depends on my mood and how tired I am.

The thing about the P.J. Clarke’s in Lincoln Square is simply that it feels like the most welcoming place in a city known for being totally cramped and inhospitable. That’s part of the reason why when I wrote about the old-school preppy bar I said the original P.J.’s is one, but didn’t mention the Lincoln Square version. A preppy bar has to be cozy and worn in. The Lincoln Square P.J. Clarke’s is gigantic. It has so many tables that I’ve almost always been able to just walk right in and sit down. That’s a minor miracle given where it sits.

And where it sits, of course, is right across the street from Lincoln Center. Not only is it across from Lincoln Center, but it’s also a few blocks down from the aforementioned AMC theater which is its own gigantic cave of a structure that takes about 65 escalator rides to get to your movie. It’s truly in the heart of everything, just a few blocks from where Midtown technically ends, it’s the Upper West Side but doesn’t feel like the same neighborhood a dozen or so blocks up when you start getting into Zabar’s and Barney Greengrass territory. And as for the cozy, old-school feel, the gigantic P.J. Clarke’s was opened in 2007. It’s basically a baby. But I like to say it’s a timeless baby. One with a perfect martini.

I say “timeless baby” because something that opened in 2007 that was based off a place that had already been around for over a century is at least based on old-school, quality ideas. The drinks are good, the food is good, people are there, the atmosphere is generally chill and if you sit at the bar you will likely hear some good gossip like the time I heard a woman talk about how she was a nanny and she was sleeping with her boss and then said “And I was sleeping with his ex-wife.” I thought to myself, man, this is the sort of eavesdropping gold people expect when they’re in the Big Apple! The place is very Whit Stillman but it also appeals to tourists who walk in and feel like maybe they’re in some restaurant they’ve been to before. I mean this as the absolute highest compliment, but the Lincoln Square P.J. Clarke’s is basically what Bennigan's or Applebees or any other casual dining chain that children of the ‘80s and ‘90s grew up on aimed to capture. Except with P.J. Clarke’s, it doesn’t feel like some corporate boardroom version of the original. It just feels like a bigger, newer version smack in the middle of one of the most popular areas in the city. It’s got to do enough to appeal to just locals to survive, and I can understand that.

But the absolute most perfect thing—and this is insider info to people that don’t use the men’s room—the pièce de résistance that makes me love this spot isn’t the gossip or the cocktails or the very good oysters or the fish and chips that I also really like. It’s the urinals. The famous urinals, the ones the New Yorker described as “towering” and that Frank Sinatra once supposedly said, “You could stand [former New York City mayor] Abe Beame in one of them and have room to spare.” They are gigantic art deco beauties. I’d say it’s weird how much I love them, but a cursory look at my Google search brings up plenty of other tributes to the towers of tinkle. They’re so popular, and the outcry was supposedly so great when the original P.J. Clarke’s replaced the old classics with boring American Standards, that when the new owners took over, they spared no expense bringing the old pissers back. According to the New York Times:

Philip Scotti, who put together the group of investors that took over the original P. J.'s in 2002, and who is also an owner of its spawn, said in a telephone conversation that he has plans to keep the brood growing. He's all but finalized a deal to put a P. J.'s near Lincoln Center. He's had thoughts about Washington, and he's had 10 copies of the original's famously oversize, winged porcelain urinals made, at a total cost of about $80,000.

Ten was the minimum order that a special ceramics manufacturer in Ohio would accept, he said. Two of these urinals were installed in the new P. J.'s. Four pairs remain. P. J.'s could be the first restaurant chain with a destiny manifestly influenced by lavatory flourishes.

I know it might seem strange to be like “I like this business a lot because of the bathrooms!” And, to be honest, if you took out the urinals then I’d probably still go if I was in the area and wanted a meal. It wouldn’t be the same, but it’s that nice little touch, that tiny little thing that makes it feel like, hey, there’s actually a person behind this who cares about the little things and not a bunch of guys in suits going “How can we make this deep fried combination Bloomin' Onion wrapped in a Buffalo blast for even less money, but charge more?” I think that more than anything, is why I love the spot. Of course, there are nice variables, like walking outside from the movies or an opera into the night and noticing the snow has just started to fall and thinking how nice a bowl of soup and a beer would be right now, so you walk over to P.J. Clarke’s. But I don’t need that. I just like knowing there’s this one place and it’s always really nice, the drinks are good, and I can’t wait to visit the bathroom.