Finding a Mid-Priced Restaurant

by Ethan Jucovy

A task force of the Committee convened on the evening of Thursday, 20 December.  Mr. Benthall took down, and is in possession of, the meeting’s minutes; I shall not presume to write without his notes about the restaurant we studied, but rest assured that the full Committee and our loyal readers will shortly be informed of the task force’s findings.

Last week’s meeting had a slightly different purpose from our first meeting, where Committee members Benthall, Penate, and myself met specifically to study Silk Road Palace.  Instead, this time, a group of five (Committee members Benthall, Lence, Hammel, David and myself) met up at the Fairway on Broadway and 74th and set out to find a mid-priced restaurant to study.  Though the task force members were tired, ravenous and notoriously incapable of making simple decisions like where to eat, we assumed that it would be a simple task to quickly find a suitable eatery: after all, the neighbourhood is teeming with mid-priced restaurants.  Surely, we reasoned, we would find ourselves seated somewhere within ten minutes, happily ensconcing ourselves away from the overwhelming grime of the Upper West Side’s filthy streets.

Not so, friends; not so.  Heavy with hunger, the task force trundled nearly twenty blocks up Broadway, turned east to Columbus Ave, south several blocks and finally back west to Amsterdam before finding a single restaurant that we unanimously agreed fit the Committee’s stated areas of concern.

Needless to say, this raises alarming questions for the Committee.  Where are the Upper West Side’s fabled hordes of mid-priced restaurants?  Perhaps our informal criteria are too strict or altogether misguided?  In the coming weeks I believe the Committee should hold extensive discussions to hammer out the precise qualifications for a restaurant’s inclusion in our scope, to allow for a more scientific approach to our studies and, hopefully, prevent a repetition of last Thursday’s troubling incident.