As turning points go, it might seem underwhelming. But there it was, the moment when Frank’s Meat Market, a decades-old, decidedly old-school butcher shop on West 187th Street in Washington Heights, began selling fresh spinach fettuccine in the late 1980s.
More innovations followed. There was prosciutto. Eli’s Bread. Boylan’s Original Birch Beer.
Not to mention pâté (a customer’s request). As well as Brie. Pesto. And Parmigiano-Reggiano, all in this famously insular, traditionally blue-collar Irish and German-Jewish neighborhood at the top of Manhattan.
In 2000, the shop’s owners, Frank McHugh and Bill Rodriguez — both the sons of apartment house superintendents who grew up on the block — made the store’s transformation official, lopping off its history as a purveyor of head cheese and pickled tongue to become, simply, Frank’s Market.
The new name was an emblem of transformation in an increasingly economically and ethnically diverse neighborhood that was beginning to feel the effects of the city’s food-forward culture, with its emphasis on the artisanal, the authentic and the locally grown. And now, the changes are obvious.
Upper Manhattan as a whole was never exactly the land that food forgot, but now this sprawling, hilly fastness — where not too long ago “people never ate out because they had to be home at 7 to watch ‘Jeopardy,’ ” as James Moran Jr., who was born in the neighborhood and now runs a restaurant there, put it — has been showing the unmistakable signs of menu relevance.
Mr. Moran’s restaurant, Rusty Mackerel, which serves new-Mediterranean-ish American food, was backed by Mr. McHugh and Mr. Rodriguez, who once employed Mr. Moran (whose father was also a local super) as a delivery boy. Mr. McHugh and Mr. Rodriguez also own Vines on Pine, a wine store offering 600 selections, showcased on elegantly carpentered shelves that originally opened on Pinehurst Avenue in 2009, in the spot now occupied by the Rusty Mackerel.
Three A-train stops north, Indian Road Café opened in 2008, in a former bodega at the northernmost tip of Manhattan overlooking Inwood Hill Park. It serves grass-fed beef, Berkshire pork shoulder and Paisley Farm fennel-and-onion tarts. On Broadway near West 171st Street, a tapas bar called Marcha Cocina, run by chefs who once worked at Pipa and Patria downtown, gets a recommendation from The Michelin Guide. The guide’s editors also like Saggio, a pan-Italian trattoria on West 181st Street in Washington Heights, where a partner, Peter Simoes, a grandson of another — Portuguese — super, serves up burrata from Puglia in southern Italy.
So, there goes the neighborhood. The American culinary revolution has breached yet another of the city’s holdouts that had remained resistant to “real food.”
As it has in other parts of the city, the evolution in the dining scene in Washington Heights and Inwood, which stretch from 155th Street to the top of Manhattan Island between the Harlem and Hudson Rivers, has been fueled by demographic change. From 2000 to 2010, the area’s white non-Hispanic population jumped 18.4 percent, while the number of Hispanics dropped 12.6 percent. And the onetime core population, residents of Irish or German ancestry, has declined to less than 2 percent of the total.
In recent years, Mr. Moran said, relatively affordable rents and condo offerings have attracted growing numbers of single people, families with young children and “cool people with shelter dogs.” Rental agents have taken to calling it WaHi, and Mr. McHugh said younger people were selling their studio apartments in Chelsea to buy larger places in Washington Heights. They have joined venturesome eaters from Columbia University and Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in the quest for more gratifying neighborhood dining.
This demographic shift has meant that “suddenly there is a gang of good restaurants in this area that is not supposed to be able to support good restaurants,” said Patti Whipple, an ecotourism administrator who has lived in the neighborhood since 1983. On a recent evening she was sampling the aromatic osso buco at Rusty Mackerel as her husband, Paul Kochman, was savoring Mr. Moran’s pan-seared cauliflower chop with shallots and raisin chimichurri (singled out for special mention in a review in The New York Times).
“This is high-end food, presented well,” said Mr. Kochman, a student-travel coordinator. “So we don’t have to eat downtown.”
Some have even started to use the B-word — yes, Brooklyn — to describe the evolving, amorphous food renaissance.
“But it’s certainly not Brooklyn yet,” said Sarina Prabasi, co-proprietor of the new Café Buunni on Pinehurst, which offers organic fair-trade coffee from Ethiopia, the country from which she and her husband, Elias Gurmu, arrived three years ago.
“It’s not as dense and interconnected,” she added, and thus far the entrepreneurs seem older.
“It’s about time that this happened in the neighborhood,” said the 34-year-old Mr. Moran, whose father is still a superintendent on West 181st Street. “There is definitely a scene,” he added, “and a lot of us know each other.”
Many in the neighborhood have known him as Mac since he went to work as a delivery boy at Frank’s Meat Market at age 12. After culinary school, for nearly a decade he cooked for Todd English’s Olives restaurant at the W Hotel in Union Square, rising to chef de cuisine. Finally, he judged it time to satisfy his solo restaurant obsession.
“Bill and Frank were still my friends, and I asked them to invest,” he recalled. The Frank’s partners were open to moving their first incarnation of Vines on Pine from Pinehurst, so they turned over that space to Mr. Moran and reopened the wine store on 187th Street 17 months ago.
The mission statement for Rusty Mackerel was “to offer high-caliber, chef-driven, market-fresh menus uptown,” Mr. Moran said on a recent evening in the restaurant, which has hickory floors, the original 1907 tin ceiling, an acid-washed copper bar and bright walls of sealed pine. “We wanted warm, comfortable and welcoming — a modern look that sends the message, ‘We take our food seriously — but not too seriously.’ ”
Mr. Moran chose to open in the neighborhood last July not just because it was home, but also because “it would cost so much more if I were downtown,” he said.
“At the same time,” he said, “it’s a neighborhood that isn’t laid out with a lot of retail and commercial space — so real estate is very scarce.”
Indeed, according to the census, only about 14 percent of the land in Upper Manhattan is designated as commercial space, compared with about 42 percent in Greenwich Village and SoHo, 24 percent on the West Side and Upper West Side and 27 percent in Manhattan as a whole. And 98 percent of Upper Manhattan residents live in multi-unit structures, in comparison to 83 percent in the city as a whole.
Jason Minter, a co-owner of Indian Road Café, said he and his restaurant partner, Jason Berger, had to search for two years for the right space in Inwood, where Mr. Minter has lived since the early 1990s. One day he was driving past a bodega at 600 West 218th Street, which is about as far north as you can go and still be on Manhattan Island, and noticed that it had shuttered. “We jumped at the location and worked out a deal,” he said.
It has a rare view facing the Columbia University Boathouse and the confluence of the Hudson and Harlem Rivers. “I felt there was pent-up demand for something eclectic, farm-to-table,” he said, “and thanks to this location, we became a destination location as well as a neighborhood spot.”
There is pork from New Paltz in the 60-seat cafe, as well as eggs from the Hudson Valley, “and though we’re a casual neighborhood place,” said Mr. Minter, who is 43, “we change our menu every two months and source our ingredients like a three-star.”
The restaurant’s idiosyncratic décor includes, as Mr. Minter put it, “heinously ugly tables from Vesuvio,” the restaurant in the HBO series “The Sopranos,” of which Mr. Minter was an associate producer. “Also, those aluminum chairs over there came from the last mental institution that Uncle Junior was in,” he said.
Mr. Minter had no experience in the restaurant business, but he and his wife, Nicole, loved hosting dinner parties for David Chase, Terence Winter, Aida Turturro and other “Sopranos” colleagues. Around the time the show ended, a trove of his mother Bonnie’s cookbooks and yellowed recipes serendipitously came to his attention. She had been murdered in a 1977 home invasion when he was a child, and somehow Mr. Minter found himself thinking that a restaurant might be “the next thing” for him, he said.
The cafe has been so popular that Mr. Minter and his partner are renovating and expanding, even as the cafe continues to operate. “But we walk a fine line,” he said. “Our community is not wealthy, but there are discerning foodies. We want to be able to serve some people dinner for $20, and also serve the people who might be celebrating, and might want to spend $40 or $50 or more.”
There has been resistance. “Some old-timers in the neighborhood say we’re too fancy or pretentious, while some taunt us that we’re too Park Slope,” he said. “Well, I’ve never eaten there, so it’s not true.”
At Frank’s, the transition from butcher shop to market was, for a long time, glacial. Mr. McHugh, 49, and Mr. Rodriguez, 47, have known each other since they were kindergarten age. Mr. McHugh began making deliveries at Frank’s at 11; Mr. Rodriguez began working at a rival butcher shop across the street at 15. The two became butchers and bought out the owner of Frank’s in 1989.
“In that Irish and German neighborhood, Frank’s sold a ton of corned beef, brisket, veal, roasts, chops, calf’s liver, kidneys and cold cuts,” Mr. McHugh said of the old butcher shop, which he said was opened by Zigmund Frank in 1948.
Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mr. McHugh said, “rental buildings were becoming co-ops and condos, there was the first yuppie invasion, and suddenly we realized we had a new client base.” That is when they introduced Eli’s Bread and Boylan’s to the neighborhood, as well as D’Artagnan, a high-end purveyor of pâté and foie gras.
“But none of the specialty suppliers would deliver north of 96th Street — some were afraid to come up here — so we had to pick it all up,” Mr. McHugh said.
At one point, they brought in 10 varieties of fresh pasta from Tutta Pasta in Greenwich Village. “We had no idea how it would work,” Mr. Rodriguez said, “and almost immediately, it became huge for us. Then when people asked for pesto, I didn’t even know what it was — but pesto sauce was immediately a hit, and we began selling 10 cases a week.”
Since 2002 the store has made its own sushi (the spicy salmon rolls now cost $4), and on the shelves are olive oil for $22 a bottle, Really Raw Honey for $16.99 and Gouden Carolus Belgian beer for $14.29 per pint. There are house-made prepared foods, 30 varieties of organic and cage-free eggs and nine kinds of whole-bean coffee.
And currently, the two grocers are of a mind that the neighborhood no longer displays food chauvinism. “There is no such thing as one ethnic group eating one thing — everyone eats everything,” Mr. McHugh said. “Now everyone likes every kind of food.”
But while the neighborhood is changing, it still is not wealthy. Median household income in Upper Manhattan, when adjusted for inflation, has actually dropped by 3 percent since 1999, to $39,535. Almost half of the neighborhood’s population is foreign-born, according to the census, and 75 percent of those speak a language other than English at home, usually Spanish. Price remains a sensitive issue, both at the market and at neighborhood restaurants. “I have a high ingredient cost because every dish I do has to be well sourced — yet it has to be affordable to diners,” Mr. Moran said.
Still, 5 percent of residents had income over $150,000. “People who can buy $500,000 condos are making enough to pay for quality food,” Mr. McHugh said.
Which doesn’t keep them from complaining about high prices. A quick scan of Yelp turns up the inevitable rants.
“Our rent is high and we can’t buy in bulk like the chain supermarkets,” Mr. McHugh said, “but we are as competitive as we can be, and we often pull items if we have to charge too much.”
Another criticism is that the store is cramped. Other customers gripe that Frank’s has launched a world-domination strategy in Upper Manhattan.
“Most people tell us they’re glad we have our stores, because we’ve increased the quality of the neighborhood and improved the value of their properties,” Mr. McHugh said. “But one woman said to me, ‘You’re taking over my neighborhood,’ and so I asked her how long she’d lived here — and she said, ’Ten years.’ ”
Mr. McHugh smiled. “Well, I’ve lived here for 49 years,” he said. Then he sighed. “This is not a takeover.”
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