Minor Miracles.(mom-and-pop restaurants)(Restaurant review)

Byline: Illustration by Jane Kaplowitz.

On the hunt for great food in intimate settings, Jeffrey Steingarten eats his way through lower Manhattan's mom-and-pop restaurants.

I'll bet there are more mom-and-pop restaurants in New York City than anywhere else in the country. I can't prove it, but if it is true, then it's certainly one of the reasons I live in Manhattan, because I have a real weakness for mom-and-pop restaurants. Especially when the cooking is lip-smacking or mouthwatering or both, and the owners are in the kitchen. I'll tell you about my favorites a little later on.

I interpret the term mom-and-pop liberally but not loosely. I'm sure it would be a violation of the civil rights laws if we limited it to eating places owned and operated by an actual mom and an actual pop, married and living together. Even more restrictive, nearly on the cusp of bigotry, the dictionary says you can't be a mom or a pop without having a child. But isn't America running out of nuclear families? Must we therefore also run out of mom-and-pop restaurants?

Not if we let all married or unmarried cohabiting couples who have or lack a kid call themselves moms and pops, which includes mom-and-mom restaurants, whose female owner-operators-chefs live together. Two of my favorites started out that way. Pop-and-pop restaurants must exist, though I can't think of one, but pop-and-son is proudly represented by Wylie Dufresne and his father, Dewey, in their hypermodern WD-50, on the Lower East Side, on Clinton Street. There's a homemade quality to the decornothing slick about the bar, the dining room, or the servicebut the kitchen is large and lavishly equipped, there's lots of paid talent in the place, and the cooking is cutting-edge, for which Wylie is famous wherever in the world liquid nitrogen and hydrocolloids are relished, and even beyond. Do mom-and-pop and pop-and-son eateries need to be about homely food, nothing avant-garde?

I thought I'd clear up everything with a simple definition: A mom-and-pop restaurant is a small, family-owned and -run eating place employing little outside labor and with a family member acting as chef. (In choosing my favorites, I've stretched the idea of family to include individuals; there always seem to be family members lurking in the background.) They can give good value for the money, and their staff (probably friends or family members) are skilled at making customers feel comfy and recognized. The cooking will have a link to the traditional (and these days probably to the ethnic), the menu will change slowly, and some favorites will never disappear.

High rents make all this less likely, as do complex legal and health regulations that require a paid expert to figure out and execute. (Perhaps before the well-meaning city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene enforces a regulation that threatens the existence of small, chef-owned restaurants, it should first document the number of customers who have been taken to the hospital or the cemetery before the new regulation was put in place. It must also keep in mind that the closing of a fine little restaurant is an assault upon the mental hygiene of most citizens, especially me.) Still, the financial fragility of new restaurants is chronically overstated. How many times have you heard that 90 percent of new restaurants fail in their first year? This is balderdash! (Apparently it was repeated during nearly every episode of Restaurant, that excruciating NBC reality show a few years back starring chef Rocco DiSpirito.) Ever since a famous study in 2005 in Columbus, Ohio, by H. G. Parsa, Ph.D., we've known that restaurants have about the same failure rate as other small businesses. This means that about a quarter of them close in their first year, a fifth in their second year, and a seventh in the third. So, after three years in business, 59 percent of restaurants will have closed or changed ownership. But it is also true that many of these closings are due to the owners' health problems, desire to work less than eighteen hours a day, need to spend more time with their pets or children, exhaustion, or decision to retirenot due to bad planning, sloppy management, or inedible food. The odds are slightly worse for small and independent eating places, which certainly includes mom-and-pops.