Angelica’s Kitchen has been a gateway to New York City for generations of the young, hungry and weird. The pioneering East Village vegan eatery is scheduled to close on April 7 after forty years in business – its owner, Leslie McEachern, said rising rents and a changing neighborhood have led to its closure. If you were a young punk, an art student, a political activist, a former Hare Krishna, a confused hippie, a graffiti artist, a ballet dancer, a magician, an actor, or none of the above, you could move to the city and get a job at AK Apartment, love life, heartbreak, hangovers and all. I first walked through AK’s glass doors in the mid-nineties, but I know there were countless waves of hungry young kids before me and after me – you can swap my stories and memories for dozens of others.

On my first day on the job as a delivery guy in the juice/meal-to-go department of the restaurant, I already knew a good half dozen people on the staff, old friends from the music scene: Scoots; Glenn; Sean; my childhood friend Luke; and Glenn’s brother Brian, my roommate on Rivington Street, in a damp apartment with a sloping floor and faulty heating that the three of us shared for nine hundred bucks a month. That number of friends grew quickly – front of house, back of house, and customers, sometimes enemies, sometimes friends, sometimes local legends, now all pink with nostalgia.

I remember delivering food to Joey Ramone. He ordered under his real name, Hyman. I would get on my iron horse, a rickety AK delivery bike, and ride to the mid-century white brick apartment building on Third Avenue where he lived. His mother was often there – they came to the restaurant together, too. She had thick hair like her son, and she was always nagging him, and Joey’s stone face hid years of irritation.

I don’t remember what Joey was eating, but it was probably the dragon bowl, Angelica’s specialty. Those of us who worked there, those of us who ate there, we knew what cabbage was before cabbage was cabbage. “The Dragon’s Bowl is a macrobiotic classic that sounds terrible in theory, but has always seemed like comfort food to me. It’s what I want on cold winter days: a big bowl of brown rice, tofu, sea vegetables, beans, and a variety of seasonal vegetables. (I’ve always favored winter vegetables, rich kabocha pumpkin, and hearty winter greens, my portion always slathered with an extra large serving of brown rice sauce.) As a penniless service industry worker on a twenty-something paycheck, that free Dragon Bowl at the end of your shift was like the Berlin Air Elevator; it sustained us, nourished our young lives.

Some star visitors, like Joey, had a lot of fun. Or Willem Dafoe, who came with his yoga mat and his curly-haired teenage son, who looked like the boy from The Blue Lagoon, both of whom made the waitresses’ hearts flutter.