A Brief Oral History of a Brief Oral History of Prune’s Brunch

Or what do you do with the old wedding photos of your failed marriage?

For a recent issue of New York magazine, I was asked to compile an oral history of brunch at Prune. For many New Yorkers, including this one, brunch at Prune was the ideal form of the oft-derided meal in an often difficult city. Egalitarian. Democratic. Delicious. There was a long wait and no getting around it. No strings to pull or palms to grease. This was before the venal rat’s nest of reservation apps prolferated. You just had to wait. For the food that came out of Gabrielle Hamilton’s shoebox kitchen, the wait was worth it. Baroque Bloody Maries. Eggs that quivered like a slapped ass. A Dutch baby bigger than a bedspread.

So for a week or two I tracked down as many former Pruners I could. I spoke to GH herself, chefs like Mashama Bailey of The Grey and Shaina Loew-Banayan of Cafe Mutton, who had done time at Prune, managers and bartenders and servers like Sammy Tunis and Kendra “Boo Boo Darlin’” Lansing (“The Fun Time Girl”). Everyone with whom I spoke held their memories of working at Prune like a little flame cupped on a windy street corner. Perhaps it was nostalgia that goldened the hue of memory. Equally likely was that those long brunch shifts at Prune — hard, boozy, youthful, a sorority of sweat and service — were the best of times. Reminiscing, a few of the Prune alumnae choked up. If I could cry, I might have too for it was an unexpectedly emotional for a romp through a bygone brunch.

Scrolling back through my Google Photos, my wrinkles disappear, my hair gets thicker, and my smile less guarded. Among the very first images that have not been lost in the ruins of dead laptops and defective clouds are a series of photographs from Prune. The date was August 29, 2008. My wedding day. My wife and I had just gotten married at the City Hall Marriage Bureau — this was the old City Hall Marriage Bureau which, portentously was the same office where one filed for divorce. My mother had flown in from New Mexico, along with kazoos (to serenade us) and a Tibetan prayer bowl (to mark our union. My sister and her husband were in from California; my bride’s mother and father came from Brazil. My dad, wearing a strangely embellished dress shirt I had no doubt his new Kazakh wife picked out for him, arrived in a Corvette. The ceremony was quick and business-like. The kazoo chorus of “Here Comes the Bride” quickly shushed. After 5 minutes, we were officially married.

At the Marriage Bureau

We hadn’t made plans after the ceremony and on a whim, I thought it would be nice to visit Prune. We called and asked if they had a space. Surprisingly they did. (It was a Thursday.) From what I remember a server ran to a bakery nearby and miraculaously bought us a wedding cake. My dad was on his best behavior, taking pictures with his little digital camera. My mom rang the Tibetan bowl like crazy. My wife was on the phone to Brazil — on a flip phone! — accepting congratulations and speaking Portuguese which I still got a kick out of. I was, naturally, elated. Could my life as a married man be like this: Intimate. Joyful. Egalitarian. Delicious. Surrounded by family and a juicy burgers?

After the meal, we newlyweds went to Sunshine Cinema to see Man on Wire, inaugurating a tradition of seeing documentaries on our anniversary that lasted a while. (The Cove was just too depressing.) But nothing really lasts. Not the marriage, which ended in 2019. Not Sunshine Cinema, which was demolished. Not Prune, which closed in 2020. Now all that remains are condos, custody, and a few photographs, like two vast and trunkless legs of stone, marking a family that once was.

How to hold the moments captured in those images? They feel like pockets of sadness in the sediment of consciousness. Sadness or joy? Sadness and joy? Bummer geodes? Happy veins? How do you extract the past? As I get older and I have more past than I do future, how I relate to what was is increasingly pressing. The past can be an asset or a burden, depending on how you carry it. But what if you just can’t get a handle?

On the one hand, to recognize the beauty and joy and true happiness of that moment at Prune is to constantly remourn. Not the marriage (doomed; fucked). But the versions of me and my ex were — so youthful, in love, starry eyed and unbanged up — and what we — or at least I — became. It’s all so painful. I feel unbearably and retroactively foolish, sitting there in my pinstripe suit in that East Village room. Better, perhaps, to definitively recode the entire thing. Misery at the end; misery at the beginning. Pluto was never a planet. It was never love. The delta is zero. Nothing gained. Nothing lost.

On the other hand, to deny true happiness when it arises, whenever it arises, feels immoral and obscene. What could be more profane? A gift, that cake at Prune; a gift, to be young and in love and to hold in your heart hope. A gift, even now, the tenderness — not pity, tenderness — I feel for the 27-year-old me, the first my friends to get married, the first to have kids, the first to divorce; and for my ex. Her hand on my arm. Her heart entwined, for a time, with mine.

The melancholy is a melody that resolves in a minor chord. I’ve moved on and processed, and yet the emotive potency of the images linger. Someday, maybe, they’ll cease to summon sadness. Some days they do. I look at the photos and just see me, happy me, and a cake from around the corner, and the butcher paper on the table, and a place and a person, people, who no longer there and I feel not just sad but happy too. Some days I can hold both feelings in my heart. But, as all things Prune, there was a long wait and no getting around it.