Corner Bistro is a good, solid place—a throwback West Village corner bar that you’d see on Mad Men if Don and the gang ever ate anything besides Scotch. Like a classic burger, say, or some potatoes fried in that exquisite French style.

Corner Bistro: the Burger Distraction

I’d been told about the place for years, but mostly for that burger. Yes, the burger is fine, and my vegetarian wife would go farther, saying it’s “worth falling of the [non-meat] wagon for”; it’s the only burger I’ve seen her order and eat in my life. A generous, plump patty, broiled en masse with dozens of others right there in front of you, in the gas-powered salamander behind the bar.

The burger. The BURGER. That’s all I ever heard about. It’s not the best I’ve had in town, and my theory is that its reputation is built in part upon a million joyful drunken face-slammings, when cheap, hot, late-night food in the Village was what really counted, not the actual flavor. The calories, fat, and starch are really what a lot of people appreciate, and I get it. That’s fun. It’s like that pizza place you go to after drinking. It’s not that great, but it’s there when you need ballast and you love it for that.

But Corner Bistro is more than a damn hamburger. It’s a really good place; a classic, woody bar at a three-way corner in the weird part of the West Village where NYC’s uptight, right-angles-only grid system goes off the rails and the north-south streets dogleg to the southeast, near the Bermuda Triangle-like sector of the Village where eerie phenomena become routine, such as West 10th intersecting the supposedly-parallel West 4th, and streets with names like Horatio, Jane and Bethune pop up—like Brigadoon or memories from a dream—every so often when you visit.

So it’s interestingly well-positioned, right there. Which is part of what made me first love it.

Corner Bistro: the origin of its allure

2009: Colleen and I were meeting friends for a drink after work, at Corner Bistro. It was February, and the snow hit, meaningfully. When it snows meaningfully in New York, things get interesting, and by that I mean different than they usually are (frantic, dingy gray) to become calm and bright white. We got to the Bistro and scored a spot near the front, by the window, the snow piling up on the sidewalk, the fire hydrants, the essential curbside bags of Manhattan garbage. The place was crowded, of course, with a dozen or more people in line for seats, but from our perch at the big window, we managed not only the best seat in the house for precipitational viewing, but easy access to the bartender, just a couple yards to our… east? southeast…? and therefore a steady supply of broiled edibles, fries from France, and beverages aplenty. And this lasted for hours, the snow dutifully falling. Hours spent with people I love and who make me laugh, with calories—both warm and greasy and cold and bubbly—delivered to my cells with stressless regularity, and that soul-soothing snow falling onto our weird little corner (West 4th Street meets Jane Street meets 8th Avenue) of New York.

Now THAT’S the kind of moment that makes me love a place, and it happened at Corner Bistro. So I drew it. And I’ll include a color version in the book Great Good Places of New York, due out in 2018 and published by Rizzoli. You can buy the original art in my shop.