“Eat Dinner, Take Meetings and Die.”

New York is a pretty sick town. Not in the “bro, that’s sick” way. Morbid, ill, macabre. The sickness has a lot to do with how disastrously emphasized the “New” in “New York” is with each passing generation. Forget what came before you. Just accept that things change. Enjoy the present while it lasts.

While eating at the new New York restaurant Manuela in SoHo, I had only one thought: Our present sucks. To be blunt: Manuela is quite nice. The food is obviously excellent; even better are the people who work there. It’s the streets around it that are decadent and depraved, and blandly so. Manuela, a spinoff of an LA restaurant by Hauser & Wirth’s hospitality arm Artfarm, can’t help but be caught in the crossfire.

Manuela is located at 130 Prince Street. Across the street, at 127 Prince Street, was Gordon Matta-Clark’s FOOD, the artist-run restaurant opened in 1971, designed to provide struggling artists with a dining-room and a kitchen to prepare low-cost meals and to develop a warm community. Struggling artists. Low-cost. Community. Now, in 2025, across the street, artsy types can get a good half-chicken for $42, a good steak tartare for $26, good cream biscuits with country ham for $16, and bone-in ribeye for two with green peppercorn sauce, $175. Cool. Everyone here looks well fed and taken care of. And 127 Prince is no longer operated by Matta-Clark, but by Marc Jacobs.

When I dined at Manuela with “the girls”—K.C., V.G., and J.S.—it was a chilly Galentine’s Day. At first, we went to the wrong door, one sealed-off, locked, and labeled “V.I.P.” Through the glass, we could see a private dining table seven meters long, studded with mosaic pieces by Rashid Johnson. Before we sipped our amaretto upon it, we were told the table was a tribute to the Central Park Five.

This elite space is cordoned off from the rest of the restaurant, which is elsewhere strewn with tables painted in bright primary-school colors, and looked down upon by artworks of various sorts: a Phillip Guston painting of his wife Musa here, a Cindy Sherman photograph of a panicked girl there. A Louise Bourgeois spider guides you down to the toilets.

Manuela’s website sells its cuisine, culture, and community as being “complemented by the guiding conviction that art and life are indivisible.” Sure! Yet that indivisibility feels more like a sick parody with each new day, especially in SoHo. Bordering Manuela is a new McNally Jackson location; the bookstore just moved over to live among the hubbub of boutiques. There, before my dinner, I bought a collection of Gary Indiana’s Village Voice columns, Vile Days. His words guide me through these early days of 2025. In 1988, he wrote: “I have avoided New York nightlife for years. Everything always looks to me like a stale parody of something else. Sexual opportunity is dead. So is romance. All anyone does any more is eat dinner, take meetings and die.” Some things don’t change.

The food was good. The hospitality, beyond lovely. The atmosphere, equally conducive to a business meeting with an artist as a gossip session with the girls. At our tables, we talk of everyone’s love lives, thriving or failing, as I ogle a Rita Ackermann mural opposite me, with three “bored nymphettes” (Artnet’s wording) sprawled across a sofa scribbled with the question WHAT DID YOU DO TODAY? That day, all K.C. did was make plans with me to reread Dostoyevsky’s short story “White Nights” (1848), watch the Bresson film based upon it (Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1971), and wonder out loud how much of the food was made in the open kitchen opposite her versus how much had been prepared in the wings.

K.C. recognized a good friend’s cousin, Molly, as our waitress. Molly is the kindest. She should be tipped generously, always, by all of you. We had a fabulous old time. And yet, crowded by insured masterworks, the experience is subtly creepy, as with other works of art turned into fun “experiences”—Luna Luna, immersive Van Gogh, Infinity Rooms.

We go our separate ways for the night. I make plans the next day to see if “White Nights” is at the used bookstore I frequent. Later, when I find out it is not, I return to the McNally Jackson SoHo, next to Manuela on Prince.

But before then, the final verdicts on our dinner. Ladies?

K.C.: “Amazing!”

V.G.: “So good! One of my favorite nights ever.”

J.S.: “Ten out of ten. Would go back, if I could afford it.”