“I used to not really respond to babies,” Chloë Sevigny, the actress and downtown style icon, said one recent afternoon. “I’d never see a baby and go, ‘Oh, I want a kid.’ But I’d see teen-agers and be, like, ‘Damn, I want a teen-ager!’ ” She laughed, long and loud. Sevigny, who is forty-five, and who for more than half her life has embodied the platonic ideal of what the coolest girl in any room might look and act like, was wearing square-toed cerulean-blue ballerina flats (“Comme des Garçons from the nineties”), paired with short, lacy white socks, and a black slip dress repurposed as a skirt. (“Maison Margiela, also from the nineties. I was watching that documentary series about Michael Jordan—so good!—and this fabric reminded me of basketball shorts.”) She was sitting at the East Village Kosher mainstay B & H Dairy, dining al fresco—although the roar of traffic and sirens on Second Avenue provided an ambience that was less Florentine garden than “Escape from New York.” “I’ve been eating at B & H since ‘Kids,’ ” she said, referring to Larry Clark’s 1995 skater-youth-gone-wild film, in which she had her breakout role. On her lap she was holding her five-month-old son, Vanja, a robust, serene-looking child with alert eyes.
“New customer! Let me see!” Ola Abdelwahed, who owns B & H with her husband, Fawzy, called out, approaching the table. She clucked at Vanja, who blinked calmly. “Blond hair and blue eyes, really Europe style!” she said to his mother. “He gets everything from you!”
Sevigny demurred.“For now! They say it can change. His dad has very dark coloring,” she said, referring to her boyfriend, Sinisa Mackovic, a gallery director. Ola handed the actress a B & H onesie, printed with the words “Challah! Por Favor.” The restaurant has been serving Eastern-European Jewish comfort food like knishes and matzo brei for more than eighty years, but half of its employees are Mexican. Ola is from Poland, and her husband is Egyptian.
“I used to own the falafel place next door,” Fawzy said. “That’s when I met Chloë. It was more a nighttime spot.” He closed it in 2009, a few years after buying B & H. “Chloë is family,” he went on. “She know me when I was nothing.” B & H has had its share of troubles. In 2015, a gas-main explosion in a nearby building led to a months-long closure, and this year the pandemic forced the restaurant to temporarily shut its doors. (A GoFundMe was set up in support of its workers.) After it reopened for limited business, in May, a bottle thrown by a protester shattered the front window. “It almost hit our cook Rafaelo on the head,” Ola said. “It’s, how they say, what do we have to do with this, you know? The business is suffering already.”
Sevigny frowned. “Yeah, and you’re not, like, the Verizon store,” she said. “I’m not into any sort of violence. A safer city is better for all of us.” She began to feed Vanja a bottle of milk. “But I love being in the streets, and it was a little hard not being able to go to the protests. He’s just so little still.” She cooed at the baby, “Don’t worry, you’ll be in the streets later! Won’t you?” She skillfully balanced him in one arm and took a bite of her veggie omelette. “There’s a grittiness here that I like. Tompkins Square Park keeps it really real still,” she said. She lives farther west now. “I wouldn’t come back to live in the East Village. All the bars drove me crazy,” she said. “When we were shooting ‘Kids,’ I didn’t have a place to stay, so I slept over at the costume designer’s house, right above, over there.” She pointed at Fawzy’s old falafel place (now a taquería). “It was one of those bathtubs in the kitchen, toilet down the hall . . .” Her voice trailed off. “There were always junkie works in the bathroom. I’d put up notes: ‘Please don’t leave your stuff here.’ ”
Sevigny is starring in “We Are Who We Are,” Luca Guadagnino’s HBO miniseries, in which she plays a colonel on an American Army base in Italy. There is talk of the show’s being extended, but she’s not sure she would continue. “I don’t want to go back to Italy for four months, with Vanja, without Sinisa. It’s so disruptive,” she said. “And I’ve been doing this since I was nineteen. I don’t want to say I’ve had my career, and I’m sure it’ll continue, but I have to really rethink my choices now.” The farthest she’s gone lately is Connecticut, where she’s been spending weeks at her mother’s house. Would she ever consider leaving New York? “No,” she said, then laughed. “Not even a second-house thing. I’d rather spend my money on a nice holiday.” She hoisted the baby to a standing position on her lap. “Do you want to move to the suburbs, Vanja?” she asked. “That’s O.K. if you want to. You can be square!” ♦
