Atmosphere: Homely, noisy restaurant with tiny bar, which can be crowded with waiting diners and where smoking is permitted.
She repeated the process with the bulgogi but, with an eye on the scrum of waiting diners, asked whether she could cook the chicken in the back.
So why would the insanely popular Ippudo – the East Village no-reservations ramen palace that has attracted a virtually continuous queue of patiently waiting diners since its opening in 2008 — want to expand to Midtown Manhattan?
But then there are the idiosyncrasies: the pink Vespa that takes up most of the entryway (meaning there's little room for waiting diners), the dashing ensemble of fedora and waistcoat worn by the host.
A vestibule, not big enough to hold waiting diners on a Saturday night, opens into a bustling station, but slide past there and into a booth and the din recedes.
At 8 30 on a recent Wednesday night, groups of waiting diners chatted outside, customers streamed out of the bakery attached to the restaurant, and the predictable cluster of beggars were at the reservation desk, being snubbed by the maître d'hôtel.
It does not take reservations, and after you've slithered and elbowed your way through the scrum of waiting diners, you're handed one of those plastic pagers that lights up when your table is ready -- at least an hour and 15 minutes, we were told at 6 on a recent weeknight.
We waited for food, and kept waiting as diners all around us sat down, ordered, finished their appetizers and moved on to their main courses.
"Twenty years ago, it was like upstate around here," Mr. Snemyr said as he sat at a granite counter in the Woodrow Diner waiting for a Caesar salad.
She did not stop reading when she noticed James, so he walked closer and hovered over the group like an impatient diner waiting for a table to open up.
