Neighborhood Watch: Meatpacking Merges the New and the Old With Trendy Restaurants

The Meatpacking District, officially known as Gansevoort Market, takes its name from the industry that once dominated the neighborhood and lent it its stark toughness. But today, the only meat you are likely to see there is your $28 steak from one of the area’s many upscale restaurants.

The space west of Hudson between Gansevoort and West 14th streets was filled 100 years ago with 250 slaughterhouses and packing plants. In the last decade or so, however, the grime of the packing plants has been rubbed away by a wave of change that made the neighborhood one of New York’s most fashionable. As meat companies left the area, their places were filled by expensive boutiques and restaurants that cater to the chicest of the chic.

Pastis, a brasserie at Ninth Avenue and Little West 12th Street, offers its sleek, black-clad clientele traditional French café fare, from croque-monsieur sandwiches to mussels with french fries, along with a thoroughly stocked bar and an ambiance of bustling cheeriness. Women compliment each other’s Armani sunglasses, and men in turtlenecks discuss the latest innovations in business and technology in the dim yellow light that issues from globes hanging from the ceiling.

For something more exotic, visitors to the district can try Jean-George Vongerichten’s Spice Market at Ninth Avenue and 13th Street. Full of carved wooden ornamentation, brightly colored drapery, and pots of palm fronds, this restaurant’s menu displays a wide range of Southeast Asian influences of which the most prominent are Indian, Vietnamese, and Thai.

Nevertheless, the neighborhood’s old character manages to peek through the recent dusting of glitter these showy establishments have provided. The streets within the district itself are cobbled, strewn with trash, and flanked by crumbling, graffitied brick buildings with garage-like entrances. The one restaurant whose atmosphere seems consistent with this working-class image is Hector’s Café, a diner on Little West 12th Street. Its checkered wall tiles, Formica tables, and Naugahyde bar stools, along with its simple menu centered on sandwiches and eggs, harks back to the diners of the 1950s.

Only yards from Hector’s, within view of the river, you can observe one of the last vestiges of the industrial identity from which this gritty atmosphere originated. Little West 12th Street and the adjacent stretch of 10th Avenue are lined with the plants of some of the 35 meat suppliers that remain in the neighborhood. As forbidding as the rows of trucks and the heavy, locked metal doors may be, it is reassuring to know that such an elegant place remains tied to its humble roots.