228 Thompson Streetbr]
(between West 3rd and Bleecker)
Turn left onto Bleecker and then left onto Thompson. The Dove is
on the east side of Thompson just below West 3rd.
Favourite Restaurants
The Grand Ticino, then one of the finest Italian restaurants in Greenwich Village, is where Dylan is said to have experienced his first meal in America. John Malcolm Brinnin, organizer of Dylan’s tours of the US, took him there on his 2nd day in New York, after a whistle-stop sightseeing tour of the city. He spent time at the Ticino with poets Ruthven Todd and Allen Curnow. The white-table-clothed atmosphere and friendly hospitality appealed to him. He wrote to his parents about American food: he had sampled milk shakes, fried shrimp and “a T-bone steak the size of a month’s ration for an English family.”
He also liked a restaurant called the Little Shrimp, at the Hotel Chelsea. This was where a most significant recording deal was struck. Barbara Cohen (later Holdridge) and Marianne Roney (later Mantell) nurtured the idea that recordings of poetry could sell, and had decided that Dylan would be the ideal contemporary poet for them to record. After several unsuccessful approaches they finally got his agreement at the Little Shrimp. “As far as Dylan was concerned,” said Mrs. Mantell later, “we were just two young girls with an idea and some money.”
On 22 February 1952 Dylan arrived for the recording at Steinway Hall with a sheaf of poems. When the engineer told him that they would only fill one side of a longplaying record, he read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” from Harper’s Bazaar. That record launched Caedmon, a leading spoken-word recording label, now part of HarperCollins. Since Dylan’s first recording many great literary figures have committed their voices to Caedmon vinyl, including T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
