Listen, all you bums and poets. This is New York…where politics and chopped chicken liver are born bedfellows. If you don’t want to be a judge or run for Mayor and you haven’t saved up enough cash to emigrate to Brazil, what else can you do if you’re a politician’s politician and a Mayor’s muscle-plus-fount-of-patronage? You open a restaurant.
   
       The party is over at City Hall. Big John is beautiful but he isn’t going to be President. You grew up riding herd on youth gangs in the great gung-ho days of the Lindsay adolescence. You cut your teeth riding in a big fat limousine with red power beams flashing…and a private phone to check in with your broker. You thrive on pressure and deadlines and the soulful seduction of men’s minds at 4 a.m. Eight hours’ straight sleep make you a nervous wreck.
   
       So you open a restaurant. Who is to say ex-Deputy Mayor Richard Aurelio and former Administrative Assistant Sid Davidoff were not destined to move into the wounded space that once housed Toots Shor’s to run a saloon-of-sorts called Jimmy’s?

       Politics, Dick Schaap assures me, teaches you to lie and cheat and connive. Certainly these skills are not superfluous in the restaurant business. Contacts, contracts, high-wire acts, symbiotic bonhomie -- what’s good for the city is good for the saloon. A good campaign needs compelling graphics; what graphics designer Phil George did for the Lindsay Presidential printware, he’s done for Jimmy’s innards and menus. And there’s a winning slogan: “The restaurant for people who love New York.”

       For energy, guts and a mastery of hyperbole, who can rival the political advance man? Surely serving a decidedly lightweight -- it looked less than two and a half pounds to me -- lobster when the menu promises three and a half pounds at $16.75, as Jimmy’s did one autumn evening, is only as bold as eyeing a crowd of 15,000 and judging it as 35,000.
   
       Actually, Sid Davidoff and Richard Aurelio do have certain undeniable qualifications for running a restaurant. They both eat out a lot. Sid’s folks owned a candy store in Brooklyn, and later one in Queens. “I started working behind the counter when I was only five,” he confided to Leonard Lyons. “I was the Marjoe of the short-order cooks.” He also worked his way through school booking bands in local clubs, waiting tables in the Catskills, selling DDT to tenement dwellers in Chelsea. He came to Lindsay as chauffer-bodyguard-troubleshooter in 1966, proud of his biceps and his image as a health nut, modest about ranking seventh in his law school class at N.Y.U.

       Now that Aurelio stalks his nighttime fief at 33 West 52nd Street (days are dedicated to his public-relations business), old friends of his Newsday night-editor days recall intimations of a gastronomic destiny. Remember that night in Bay Shore when Sunny Aurelio ordered lobster and ate only the lobster’s liver? Is the tale apocryphal? Newsday chums remember it well.

       Freelance writer Harvey Aronson remembers Dick Aurelio as The Sheik of Newsday. “We were all little kids at Newsday, fresh out of college. He was kind of suave. He wore sweaters. At night we used to send out across the street to this diner for sandwiches and he would invent these gourmet combinations. Instead of just plain tuna, he would order tuna, bacon and a slice of tomato on rye with mayo.
   
       “Dick was always crazy about New York,” Aronson recalls. “Whenever we went into Manhattan, we’d ask him where to eat, what shows to see. Once he took us to this French restaurant. Everybody knew him. The waiter brought out the food still in the cooking pots for us to smell. I was so impressed. Fourteen years ago we had a house-warming, bring-your-own-bottle. Dick could have brought Scotch or rye, even gin. We would have found that sophisticated. You know what he brought? Tequila. And he went out to the kitchen for lemons. You’re supposed to suck the lemon and drink the tequila. Wait. I think the bottle is still here. Yes, it is. Do you think I should throw it out?”
   
       So you see, all you bums and poets! Dick and Sid bring solid experience, taste and sophistication to West 52nd Street. They also, by incredible coincidence, lucked into an experienced partner of estimable assets: the Irving half of the extraordinary Riese Brothers. The Murray half surrendered his stock in Jimmy’s to Dick and Sid. The Riese Brothers are not interested in Food. That has not kept them from becoming the biggest restaurant owners in New York City. They know all about real estate and cost control. They are fanatics about the bottom line.

       Cynics and the hyperfastidious are amused by the Rieses’ paternal interest in Sid and Dick’s tablecloth debut. Do not let this disturb you. It did not disturb New York City’s very own Board of Ethics. With a fresh-honed flare for good public relations, Sid applied to the Board for an opinion on the propriety of his partnership with the Rieses. The application was straightforward and scornful of excessive detail. It pointed out simply that his new partners “have done business with the city in the form of several concessions” -- among them Riis Park, Fort Tryon, Canarsie Pier, Plum Beach, Dyker Beach, Golf Course, Clearview Golf Course, the Staten Island Ferry -- all picked up under the Lindsay administration. The toothless Board of Ethics contemplated the matter and fond no unpleasant scent.

       Let’s be realistic. Toots Shor’s dream saloon is no candy store. A financial editor of the old Herald Tribune put the original cost of the building at $7.5 million. The Reises owned the lease and one professional restaurateur had already lost a bankroll there. Midtown is a patchwork of quicksand for the restaurant man. If your best friend started talking about opening a saloon, you’d lock him up till he got sober.

       There is room for considerable debate here about who is doing a favor for whom. Two smart guys…why did the do it? “As soon as everyone said we were wrong, I knew we were right,” says Sid.

       “We expect this restaurant to become an institution,” Dick confides. The house does have its institutional intimations. The opening party drew a dazzling motley of pols, press, powermongers and political groupies. Himself the Mayor, Bess Myerson, Howard Samuels, Arthur Schleslinger, August Heckscher, Ted Kheel, Meade Esposito, Shirley MacLaine, Bella Abzug and Toots loyalists like Ed Sullivan, Alan King and Earl Wilson’s secretary. One fall evening Mary Perot Nichols’, The Village Voice’s chronicler of Runnin’ Scared, catalogued Manhattan G.O.P. leader Vince Albano huddling with two from Creep (the Committee to Re-elect the President), later joined by Supreme Court Judge Irving Kirschenbaum. Also: Sid’s ex-brownstone-mate, now-departed Youth Service Commissioner Ted Gross. Ronnie Eldridge, Assemblyman Al Blumenthal and former Democratic State Chairman John Burns…Aurelio chatting with pollster Tully Plesser…midtown planner Jaquelin Roberston…and table-hopping longshoreman Anthony Scotto. “With a bug under each table, I could have written this column for six weeks,” she concluded.

      The Corrections Crowd harbors Jimmy’s repeaters: Commissioner Bill vanden Heuvel with Amanda Burden, fresh from Sun Valley and her own personal liberation. Likewise the O.T.B. set and the news team from NBC. The touring national press homed in on Jimmy’s whenever McGovern alighted overnight.

       The great circular bar, 54 feet around, can be properly raucous, especially from five to seven over free nibbles and after eight when a jazz duo imposes tempo on the clamor. It was a bit of a setback when Jimmy Breslin gave the house his name, then bowed out as stockholder. Aurelio sips white wine. Sid doesn’t drink at all. Myth makes a saloon an institution. The house cries for a resident boozer. But the drinks are monumental. And the food is not all that bad, though Sid did an oversell on the chopped chicken liver. It got a terrible press.

       Pals and anonymous benefactors fired off a fusillade of chopped-chicken-liver samples. “We got calls,” says Davidoff. “‘I’m Sybil Schwartz, Jewish American Princess,’ she says, ‘And I am sending you two pounds of my incomparable chopped chicken liver.’“

       Finally they dispatched a car to Harlem to pick up a black woman famous for her Jewish chopped chicken liver. She taught the chef. At lunch one day, the liver came on like a mousse. At dinner a few nights later, it had a bit more soul. But it was still definitely Episcopalian. Sublime cottage fries have been similarly elusive. “We brought them in from other restaurants…had some sent in from Sam’s.” Aurelio confides. “I think our cottage fries are almost there,” Davidoff observes. “It takes three months of reminding to get anything done. But government was the same way.”

       A caucus of experts has lent counsel: Phil Sloves of Sam’s, Stuart Levin. With The Pavillon’s demise, they picked up Levin’s exclusive on Miss Grimble’s splendid lemon cheesecake. The chef of The Potagerie came over to deliver a catechism on French onion soup. The result looks spectacular. All the sentiments are there: onions afloat and a thick cheesy crust. It lacks only flavor and, alas, the crust is not merely melted but kilned to near-ceramic. From the broiler came a decent steak. But at $9.75 ($8.25 at lunch) Sid and Dick determined to do better. With the Lobel Brothers of unimpeachable meat mastery (negotiating to become minority partners) hand-picking and aging their cows, the beef should improve.

       The veal is already first rate and the calf’s liver of discernible pedigree. But the kitchen is unreliable. Chops and steaks ordered rare arrived medium at three different meals. A steak requested medium was blue. Veal chop Giovanni is a happy ooze of eggplant and ricotta. But that aristocratic calf’s liver -- two huge thin slices -- was served gray instead of rare as ordered. The veal piccata was also unpleasantly soggy. Sliced steak Bordelaise at lunch had that pre-cut steam-table aura. Scampi, unremarkably bland twice suddenly came to life with zesty charm. That was even before the arrival of the new chef, hired away from Danny’s Hide-a-Way. Nothing is static. Aurelio and Davidoff kept editing.
   
       Portions are spectacular—prime ribs of beef more than an inch thick, whale-size slabs of sole (it didn’t taste like sole, and a hail of paprika doesn’t help). Prices match. Everything is à la carte, with lunch entrées mostly $3.75 and $4.75 (salad included); with appetizers as high as $3.50 for seafood crêpes and entrées from $5.50 for broiled chicken to $16.75 for that debatable lobster, dinner for two can easily run $40. Three drinks and a bottle of wine brought the tab for four to $91, tip included.

       Still, there are details at Jimmy’s that reflect taste and haute intention. The frosted-glass partitions and soft, dropped-green-shaded lights give the room a classy intimacy. Wit, ego and irony sing from the walls in quotes from New York’s critics…from Verrazano and Charles de Gaulle to George C. Scott. I’m not sure I appreciate the kiosk of the week’s events in town or the UPI news wire or the flyers for information on sickle-cell anemia, but as the ad boasts, “There’s a lot of New York in Jimmy’s…You can’t walk into Jimmy’s and close the door on New York.” I seek escape. Jimmy’s is for people who need to keep in touch.

       But there is no faulting Miss Grimble’s fine cheesecake. And cheers for the heroism of a well-stocked cheese platter at room temperature. Everyone is supposed to get a crock of cheese and crackers with drinks and soft, sticky macaroons with coffee…but the only time I spied crock or cookie was dining at the table of Max Palevsky, the multi-millionaire who fatcatted for McGovern. Aside from this Wispride snub, the service is extraordinary: fast and amiable. “Would you like me to shell your lobster?” our captain asked. “Shell my lobster,” gasped our native New Yorker. “It would be the best thing that happened in New York all day.”
   
       Though he delivered the wine as if it were a Yo-Yo, the captain poured, with studied style, a fine Beaune that mellowed in good time, selected from a very impressive wine list. The inventory is limited and ought to list vintages, but the choice is remarkably imaginative, and gently priced, with an excellent Muscadet, Domaine de L’Hyverniére at $5, Pouilly-Fumé, Ladoucette at $7, a Fleurie at $4.50, many selections from the respected shipper Joseph Drouhin, including a white Beaune Clos des Mouches at $12 (we paid $14 for the same wine in France. It is $16 at La Caravelle). There are only five Italian wines, but among them is a Barolo at $8 and the Amarone of Lamberti at $9. Then, miracle! Every label but two is available in half-bottle.

       Will Jimmy’s mellow into an institution? There are discount lunches downstairs, jazz on Friday and talk of a casino upstairs if Albany should ever give approval. But Toots’s crowd has followed the re-financed saloon prince across town to 5 East 54th Street, where the big round bar is reborn, the acoustics are lethal and the food…well no one goes to Toots’s for gastronomy. And as Jack Newfield speculates: “The power may hang out at Jimmy’s, but the plotters will remain at the Lion’s Head.”
   
       “Jimmy’s is too midtown, too formal, not intimate,” says Newsday’s New York bureau chief Dennis Duggan, a Lion’s Head regular. “The stars of journalism might hang out there. But I don’t trust the whole business of participatory journalism. It gets kind of hairy…hang around with politicians and you get to believe them.”     

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