Angelica Kitchen was, for many generations of the young, hungry, and weird, a gateway to New York City. The pioneering East Village vegan eatery is slated to close on April 7th, after forty years of operation—its owner, Leslie McEachern, said that rising rents and a changing neighborhood led to its demise. If you were a young punk, art student, political activist, ex-Hare Krishna, confused hippie, graffiti artist, ballet dancer, magician, actor, or none or all of the above, you could move to the city and get a job at A.K. An apartment, a love life, heartbreak, hangovers, and all the rest of it would follow. I walked through A.K.’s glass doors for the first time in the mid-nineties, but I know there were countless waves of hungry young kids before me and after me—you could swap my stories and memories for dozens of others.

My first day on the job, as a delivery guy in the juice-bar/takeout section 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 at the time down on Rivington Street, in a dank apartment with slanted floors and faulty heating that 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 of them rose-tinted with nostalgia.

I remember delivering food to Joey Ramone. He’d order under his real name, Hyman. I’d hop on the iron horse, the rickety A.K. delivery bike, and head up to the mid-century white-brick apartment building on Third Avenue where he lived. Often, his mom was there—they’d come into the restaurant together as well. She had a large head of hair like her son and was continually nagging him, with Joey’s stone face hiding years of exasperation.

I can’t remember what Joey ate, but it was probably the Dragon Bowl, Angelica’s signature dish. Those of us who worked there, those of us who ate there, we knew what kale was before kale was kale. The Dragon Bowl is a macrobiotic classic that sounds horrible in theory but has always seemed like comfort food to me. I crave it on cold winter days: an oversized bowl of brown rice, tofu, sea vegetables, beans, and a rotating selection of seasonal vegetables. (I always preferred the winter vegetables, rich kabocha squash and hearty winter greens, my serving always lathered with an extra-large helping of brown-rice gravy.) As a penniless payout-to-payout twentysomething service-industry worker, that free Dragon Bowl at the end of your shift was like the Berlin Airlift; it kept us going, fuelled our young lives.

Some celebrity visitors, like Joey, were great fun. Or Willem Dafoe, who’d come in with his yoga mat and his curly-haired teen-age son, who looked like the kid from “The Blue Lagoon,” both of them setting the waitresses’ hearts aflutter. I once got into an inadvertent bike race with Mike D from the Beastie Boys, another genial regular. I was biking down Twelfth Street, heading to work, and there was Mike D, rolling down the street on his banana-seat bike, king of the road. The unspoken rule of our celebrity guests was to treat them like everyone else: don’t pester them, don’t acknowledge their fame. So, there was Mike D, trying to stay incognito, clearly both of us headed to the same spot. To give him room, I pedalled faster, but he had been thinking the same thing, so suddenly we were neck-and-neck, and then we both slowed down to let the other pass, and then both stopped at the light on Second Ave and Twelfth Street, each pretending not to notice the other.

Anthony Kiedis’s “people” called up one busy Friday night when I was managing the floor. “Anthony Kiedis, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers?” his handler told me. “He’s on his way uptown from the SoHo Grand? It would be great if you could have a table ready for him and his party.”

I was almost gleeful in my answer.

“O.K., great. When Anthony gets here, he can come put his name on the list. It’s about a half-hour wait for a table right now.” Talk about speaking truth to power!

The only time I fudged that rule was for Madonna. She showed up one busy night when the wait for a table was roughly an hour. The vestibule and tiny waiting area were crammed with people since it was freezing outside. All eyes, deer-in-headlights-style, were on Madonna and her crew. I quickly put her at Table 23, in the way back, far from prying eyes. I was surprised that none of our regulars, who kept a keen, lawyerly watch for equitable treatment, called me out for that. I think everybody was as uncomfortable with the situation as I was.

And Kerry Washington, pre-“Scandal,” worked with us for a time, as a hostess. I got a death threat one night that she was working, one of two I received in my five years at the restaurant. At 10:30 P.M., Kerry locked the front door, as we always did. There’s only so much tofu you can sling in a day. At 10:31, a regular shows up, famished and with a low-blood-sugar temper tantrum, ready to go. Kerry smiled and said, “Sorry, we’re closed.” I was already downstairs counting the money. By the time I was alerted to the situation, the kitchen was already well toward shutting down. I stepped outside and was berated by the man, frothing out the mouth.

“If I ever see you on the street, you’re dead. I’m gonna fuck you up,” he told me.

“Well, aren’t I on the street right now?” I asked.

But, really, it’s the non-famous folks I remember most: Spencer, always walking into work with a purple plastic Kim’s Video bag in one hand, stuffed full of records—a man of obscure and eclectic musical tastes who was prone to saying things like, “The only good Beatles song is ‘Norwegian Wood.’ ” There was Dexter, a tall Trinidadian with a beaming smile, who unofficially ran the kitchen. Somehow, in between working at the restaurant seemingly 24/7, caring for his young daughter, and waking up at 5 A.M. to do yoga, he had the time to be on a first-name basis with every attractive woman who came in the door. Genuine supermodels would peek their heads into the juice bar, all with the same question: “Is Dexter working?” Last I heard, Dexter was Erykah Badu’s personal chef.

Carolina, the Brazilian pastry chef. When you came in for a day shift, she’d be leaving, her day having started well before dawn. “Ciao, babies,” she’d say to us boys with a flourish, dressed up for her day on the town. Sayeed, a teen-ager from Bangladesh, bussing tables after school, was acclimating to American culture by becoming a full smooth homeboy, checking out the girls walking by the wide plate-glass windows that looked out onto Twelfth Street, with a smile and a “da-a-a-a-amn.” Sayeed, unlike other bussers (and I had been a frazzled one myself), never seemed to rush, even when the restaurant was at its busiest, but his tables were always clean, stacks of dirty glasses in his hands piled up like a juggler.