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On my third day at Will Goldfarb's new restaurant, on Cleveland Place, in SoHo, an assessor from the Tower Insurance Company of New York made an unannounced but utterly routine visit. The restaurant, called Room 4 Dessert, had been open for two months. It was long and narrow and furnished with stools. It looked like a bar. The place next door, which was long and narrow, was a bar. The one next to it was a bar, too. In fact, except for Eileen's Special Cheesecake, on the corner, this two-block stretch (Cleveland Place is one of the shortest streets in Manhattan) was pretty much all bars (including the nearby Falls, still open and busy six weeks after a bouncer had been charged with murdering a customer).
"So what do you serve?" the assessor was asking. "Mainly spirits?"
"No," Goldfarb replied. "Spirits are five per cent of the business."
"Really? Only five per cent? So it's what--beer, predominantly?"
"Almost no beer," Goldfarb said.
"No beer!" The assessor was openly puzzled. "What, then?"
Goldfarb was at a computer, devising a one-off eight-course dessert