Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Harry Rosen with a photo of himself from his early 20s. Dining out energizes him, he says.
A Nightly Dinner Out That’s Like Therapy
By COREY KILGANNON
It never fails, Harry Rosen said on Wednesday evening as he enjoyed
another fine meal by himself in another top-rated Manhattan restaurant.
“Maybe because I’m eating alone at my age, people at other tables start conversations,” he said.
Yes, he tells them, he lives alone, in a modest studio apartment on West
57th Street in Manhattan, and he always eats dinner out, always orders
the fish.
“They always ask my age, and I often lie and tell them I’m 90,” he said.
“If I tell them my real age, it becomes the whole subject of
conversation and makes it look like I’m looking for attention, which I’m
not.”
Mr. Rosen is 103 but he doesn’t look a day over 90. His mother died at
53 and his father at 70, but he says he feels fine and has had no major
operations or health problems.
“I read in a newspaper column a long time ago that the key to a long
life is sleeping on your back, so I always did that,” said Mr. Rosen,
who often finds that his bill has been paid by those friendly diners.
Not that he needs it. He made a bundle with his office supply company
and is spending it — $100 a night, on average — on dinners out.
Much of his work involved wooing clients over lunch and dinner, so after
retiring a few years back because of hearing loss, he continued to put
on a fine work suit every afternoon, grab his satchel, and head out to
hail a yellow cab to one of his favorite restaurants. Café Boulud perhaps, on East 76th Street, or Boulud Sud near Lincoln Center, or Avra Estiatorio on East 48th Street.
“I haven’t eaten dinner home in many years,” said Mr. Rosen, who tried
singles groups and other activities after his wife of 70 years, Lillian,
died five years ago, when she was 95.
But nothing brought him the comfort of a fine restaurant.
“It’s my therapy, it lifts my spirits,” he said Wednesday evening while examining the menu with a magnifying glass at David Burke Townhouse on East 61st Street.
Twice a week, a server there greets him, walks him to his usual corner
table and brings his regular glass of chardonnay, his appetizer of raw
salmon and tuna, and then the swordfish, skin removed, with vegetables
specially puréed for his dentures to handle.
“The food and the ambience, it’s my therapy — it gives me energy,” he said.
Mr. Rosen has lived long enough to see New York City fill with fine
restaurants. In a city of foodies, he may be the oldest.
Call it payback for the meager meals he ate growing up in Russia, where
as a boy, he recalled, he marched with protesters during the Russian
Revolution. He and his family fled the pogroms, came through Ellis
Island and moved into a railroad apartment on Pitt Street on the Lower
East Side. By the time he was 11, young Harry’s meals improved to
pickled herring sold from barrels on the street, and he worked as a
delivery boy for pennies before taking a job at an office supply
company.
“I knew it was the business for me, the same way you know you’re in love
with a woman,” Mr. Rosen said. He started Radio Center Stationery in
Midtown — back then, “you could look down Sixth Avenue and not see a
single office building” — whose staff of 50 included his sons, Stan and
Jerry. They regularly join him for dinner.
The deals to land clients like Walt Disney, ABC and the Hearst
Corporation were made in top restaurants, Mr. Rosen said. You don’t win
over the likes of Jack Linsky, the founder of Swingline staplers, by
dining at dumps.
But as much as any fine meal, Mr. Rosen savors the memories of his deal
making, including landing J. C. Penney with a great price on notepads,
and fighting back from bankruptcy as computers encroached upon the
industry.
On Wednesday, he backed up these recollections with photos and documents
stored meticulously in folder boxes in his apartment.
“They’re called Pendaflex folders,” he said. “I was the first one in the industry to recognize they’d be a big seller.”
Mr. Rosen said he would like to find a regular dining companion. A
recent six-month fling with a 90-year-old woman he met at synagogue did
not work out.
“I’m still open to meeting someone,” he said, his eyes twinkling as he
prepared to order coffee and dessert. “I still have the desire. That’s
what counts.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/nyregion/a-nightly-dinner-out-thats-like-therapy.html?_r=0
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