“He was just the waiter.” That’s what one of the owners of legendary New York steakhouse Peter Luger said about Wolfgang Zwiener. “All” he’d done over the decades was wait tables at Luger’s, and this ordinary former employee was in the process of opening his own, eponymous steakhouse to compete not just with Luger’s, but in the most restaurant competitive city on earth.
What the owner perhaps missed is that people who love themselves enough to get to the United States are rarely ordinary, and Zwiener took his ambition from Germany (his father was killed by a landmine in WWII) to the U.S. in 1960. Much more important, no one who chooses New York City as their place to work (whether immigrant or native) while in the U.S. can be limited to what they were before arrival, what they are upon arrival, and what they’re doing on their way up.
Paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald about New Yorkers, they’re different from you and me. Not just anyone chooses a city that’s so loud, so frenzied, so competitive, and so expensive. They must be different in the first place, and they must see a more expansive future for themselves than the present might otherwise indicate. With New Yorkers, their past is a lousy indicator of their future. That’s why they’re in New York.
It’s worth keeping in mind as policy types write their endless eulogies, laments or both about the greatest city on earth. Supposedly NYC was “once great,” but for left wing policies of tax, regulation, and spending that hamstring the city’s past and future. It’s not serious, and that’s not a defense of left-wing policies.
Just the same, the awful policies are unequal to those they’re geared to restrain. Ken Fisher routinely points out that capitalism is too fast for politicians, and while true, it should be added that New Yorkers are way too fast for the politicians who think the boundless human energy within the city can somehow be restrained by the elected and appointed. No chance, and the recently passed Zwiener helps show why.
Though it’s true that he was “just a waiter,” to say he was just anything ignores once again the kind of ambition and energy that would bring someone to New York City in the first place. In other words, his past proved a flawed way to predict his future.
As Pete Wells described Zwiener in the New York Times, upon opening his first Wolfgang’s Steakhouse “Mr. Zwiener traded black bow ties and cotton aprons for suits, silk pocket squares and buffed leather shoes.” Put another way, Zwiener did as New Yorkers have always done, and reinvented himself. Rather than let the next generation of Zwieners (his sons encouraged him to start his own restaurant) do as Americans do as they climb up the proverbial ladder, the first-generation immigrant in Zwiener acted like a New Yorker and an American, and climbed it himself. The former waiter succeeded.
By the time he died, Zwiener could lay claim to a restaurant empire that per Wells stretches “from Park Avenue to the Philippines.” 35 restaurants. What a story. What a New York story.
Importantly, what a reminder that people are the biggest drivers of progress, and that some of the most productive people tend to be migratory types intent on working and thriving on the biggest stages. Call New York a city of super-immigrants within a nation full of them.
New Yorkers bring a little more to work each day, whether they were born within the U.S. or in another country altogether. Having revealed their mettle by simply getting to New York, they’re neither limited by policy nor the circumstances that instigated their migration to begin with.
