Food Feature: Industrial front

Jay Grimm (505 W. 28 Street) is one of those smaller galleries, a one-room space opened in November 1998 that represents emerging artists and abstract painters, and is presided over by the eponymous, hospitable owner Grimm. Though Chelsea encompasses a large portion of the west side of Manhattan, the concentration of galleries can be limited — with exceptions — to a rectangular chunk between 18th and 28th streets on the south and north, and Westside Highway and Ninth Avenue on the west and east.

While Soho still boasts important spaces all worth visiting, the area’s increasing commercialization and its Eurotrash, tourist and model-clogged streets are increasingly oppressive, making the trek from gallery to gallery more of a chore.

But Chelsea tends to draw a more serious, or at least more visible, art crowd, there for the galleries alone. The neighborhood is as yet still relatively expansive — huge avenues that house wholesale companies and auto repair businesses. Chelsea has the raw, industrial and, at-times, barren feel that suggest what Soho might have once felt like during its own pioneer heyday in the ’70s. Tucked amidst these cavernous boulevards are some of the best venues for seeing art in Manhattan in an environment that often has a neighborly friendliness as gallery-goers on the same circuit of gallery stops, smile or say hello, recognizing fellow travelers on the art loop. Sightings of artists like Matthew Barney or Chuck Close amidst mere mortals give the scene its occasionally heady edge.

On one stop at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in the 526 building, artist Dylan Stone is busy updating his current installation that documents his effort to photograph each and every building in Manhattan. At periodic intervals, Stone comes into Klagsbrun to file his new series of photographs, in a project which has begun to resemble the kind of thankless menial labor most artists struggle a lifetime to avoid. Stone sheepishly notes that the project, that has thus far taken a year to document a tiny parcel of Manhattan’s southern tip, “would go more quickly if I didn’t have a job.”

Spaces like the 526 West 26th Street building feature an unwelcoming, nondescript facade that gives little indication of the art activity within. Inside, an antique elevator staffed by an operator takes gallery-goers to numerous worthwhile spaces including the edgy Clementine Gallery, which features younger, pop culture influenced artists; Caren Golden Fine Art; and Henry Urbach Architecture (Room 1019), a gallery representing experimental architects.

For experienced travelers and art aficionados familiar with Chelsea who want to cover as much territory as possible, a copy of the Gallery Guide (free and available at many galleries, which includes a helpful map of gallery locations) or the current Village Voice are the only tools necessary for finding interesting shows. But novices, those interested in strolling more casually from gallery to gallery or who are intimidated by the barrenness and often tricky-to-locate spaces, may feel more comfortable taking a friend along.

Where to dine

More and more restaurants are opening up in the Chelsea gallery area — smaller sandwich shops, bistros and the proverbial greasy pizza places. But a short cab ride or long walk after a day of Chelsea gallery going offers two examples of stalwart Manhattan gastronomic institutions.

On a rapidly gentrifying block of Hell’s Kitchen (now dubbed the far less atmospheric “Clinton”) is the recently refurbished but still no-frills Italian joint Hero Boy (492 Ninth Ave.). Though its recent facelift, featuring a newly clean but characterless interior, has erased some of the restaurant’s old-world cafeteria-style charm, Hero Boy’s staff of older men, who’ve been serving up meatball heroes from behind its counters for decades, and its cheap prices mark this chow-down as still wonderfully distinctive.

At a long counter, the Hero Boys serve up gargantuan plates of pasta and hero delicacies like their fantastic eggplant parmigiana (on a plate or a sandwich, only $4.75) or their famous Mile High Special (a hero with prosciutti, salami, mortadella, sopressata, cooked salami, provolone, roasted peppers, tomato, lettuce and spices for $5.25).

After lunch or an early dinner, head north on Ninth Avenue to West 39th Street to the Cupcake Cafe, a cramped, adorably retro corner bakery famous for its cupcakes topped with lavish flower decorations fashioned from thick buttercream frosting ($2.50 lg./$1.50 sm.).

Further afield, and open for lunch or late dinner, is the incomparable Oyster Bar and Restaurant located on the lower level of one of New York’s most gorgeous, romantic buildings, the recently restored Grand Central Station. In a setting as he-man and old-world in its own way as Hero Boy, the Oyster Bar boasts a beautiful tiled expanse of rooms which have the plain, elegant feeling of another time, apropos as the restaurant opened in 1913.

Diners have three options at the Oyster Bar — an elegant dining room (reservations recommended), several low luncheon counters and one long counter in the main space, which suggest a vintage ’30s or ’40s Chock-Full-of-Nuts or Automat. Continuing past these always busy counters is a dimly lit, cozy saloon with low ceilings where diners can sit at small tables covered with quaint blue-and-white checked tablecloths.

The Oyster Bar’s menu — which changes daily — is astounding in the number and variety of choices. While a lavish dinner beginning with a half-dozen raw oysters served with a delicious, tangy shallot sauce and an entree can run around $36 (more with alcohol), a simple lunch of the Oyster Bar’s unbeatable (and generous) bowl of sublime New England clam chowder — the richest and most cream and plump-oyster laden in existence — is only $3.95. This flexibility — an elegant dinner location or a quick lunch stop — accounts for some of the restaurant’s enduring popularity and charm, as Brooks Brothers preppies on their second martinis rub elbows with hungry secretaries from nearby office buildings in this exquisitely old-fashioned restaurant boasting some of the best, most eclectic seafood in New York.