In New York, even fish-gutters embrace the can-do spirit

In New York, even fish-gutters embrace the can-do spirit
By Melissa Whitworth
Published: 7:15AM BST 02 Jul 2010



One of my favourite New York stories is about a first-generation Chinese immigrant who spent his career gutting fish at the South Street Seaport. For 40 years, he never closed his doors or took a holiday. Then, one summer day, there was a paper sign on the front of his store that read: "Closed for son's graduation today (Harvard)."

For me, that sums up what's so great about New York: the idea that anything is possible, and it doesn't matter where you come from or what you do to get there. It's in stark contrast to the attitude in England. Growing up in Surrey, I remember someone being teased at school because his family had made their fortune by selling plastic shopping bags. At university, the first question at dinner parties was always: "What does your father do?" And at a pub in Wimbledon last year, I was terribly American in singing the praises of a friend studying for a PhD in genetics, when his best buddy sneeringly interrupted: "Don't get too excited – he hasn't made it yet."

Perhaps that's why so many bright young Britons flee to the Big Apple. Last week I bumped into Ben Towill and Phil Winser, who have started an events company called Silkstone. They began by making sandwiches in a dark basement kitchen they shared with another caterer, and are now organising insanely glamorous parties and luncheons for people like Lenny Kravitz and Liv Tyler; they employ 10 people and are about to open their own restaurant on the Lower East Side, The Fat Radish.
They don't think they would have been as successful in the UK because, they say, there is something about New York that makes it the most exciting place in the world to grow a young business. As Google boss Eric Schmidt told The Daily Telegraph this week, America is a place for "crazy smart people", who "do not fit a standard European education model". Winser puts it more simply: in New York, you enter a room and everyone assumes you're the most interesting person on the planet, until you prove otherwise. In London, it's just the reverse.

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Anna Chapman, the alleged Russian spy, certainly knew that New York was the place to be when she made it her temporary home. As she said in a video posted online this week: "America is a free country. Here is the easiest place in the world to meet successful people … Here you can go to dinner at your neighbour's house and meet the most important venture capital investor that same evening." Her success in gaining access to the best parties is shown by the fact that pictures of her are still up on society photographer Patrick McMullan's website, which upwardly mobile New York types check obsessively to see how many times they've been snapped by him (my total is a paltry 22). Of course, it helps if – like Chapman – you're wearing a dress that leaves little to the imagination.

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After the travesty that was Sex and the City 2 (which led some of my girlfriends to declare that Sarah Jessica Parker was dead to them), the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has done an infinitely better job of explaining life as a female tourist in an Arab state.

Visiting Saudi Arabia for the latest Vanity Fair, she has a black linen abaya specially made. Her Saudi guides think it's not conservative enough, and ask her to put another over it. The country, she says is "the hardest place on earth for a woman to negotiate", needing minders or permission slips to travel on their own.

Dowd asks Prince Sultan bin Salman, the tourism minister, about the dress code. "Well, the abaya is part of the uniform," he said. "It's part of enjoying the culture." Other cultural treats – such as the lunchtime beheadings in "Chop Chop Square" – are apparently reserved for men only.