Indulging in some East Village nostalgia, Lynn Yaeger remembers the restaurant that used to inhabit the Kurve space (Kurve assures us, by the way, that it’s still open despite the phone glitches Bruni experienced — they’re looking into it): “I must have eaten the greasy chicken salad there hundreds of times. The Binibon became famous when it hired ex-con Jack Henry Abbott as a busboy in 1981. Abbott, the author of a prison memoir called In the Belly of the Beast, was a prodigy of Norman Mailer’s, who engineered his release. One night, Abbott had words with a customer and asked him to step outside, where he proceeded to stab him to death. He was reincarcerated and died in prison in 2002. Now, even Mailer is dead, and there’s a cool new restaurant, Kurve, that looks like a spaceship where the Binibon once stood.” [VV]
