NEW YORK – Some 750,000 people pass through Grand Central Station every day, which turned 110 on February 2. During the last third of that history, exactly 37 years, the oyster bar located under the main lobby of the station has been the workplace of Marcelo Hernández.
Marcelo is a recently retired Ecuadorian who has traveled from New Jersey to New York for six decades to make a living preparing cocktails at the cocktail bar of the Oyster Bar, a corner of the famous restaurant that only has eight stools where CEOs have sat. from the main banks of the city – and therefore, of the world – to artists like Andy Warhol, passing through politicians like John F. Kennedy Jr.
Accompanied by oysters or not, everyone has enjoyed the cocktails prepared by Marcelo and, some more than others, have opened up to conversation with the everlasting bartender with the flashy ties, his differentiating sign born by chance, like almost everything that matters in this life.
The story of Marcelo Hernández is now collected in a novel by the Spanish journalist and writer Guillermo Fesser, who has lived in Rhinebeck, NY for more than 15 years.
“Marcelo was the first to find out about the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008, because the CEO of Lehman Brothers told him through tears while drinking a dry martini: ‘We’re closing tomorrow, Marcelo,’ he told him,” says Fesser.
A tribute to Latinos, the engine of America
“Presidents of government, actors, politicians have passed through the oyster bar… But the book is not about that,” explains Fesser. It is a tribute to the people who are the engine of America right now, the Latinos”.
“It is the story of Marcelo, from his childhood and adolescence in Ecuador, until the 57 years he has been in New York, told through the bar of that bar, with the people he has met, with his loves, with his family” , Add.
Fesser met Marcelo when he was working on his previous novel, “A Cien Millas de Manhattan”. Someone told him that the fried oyster sandwich at Grand Central’s Oyster Bar was “a taste of New York.”
There he met a bartender with a “spectacular” gift of people.
“The way he served me my beer and my oyster sandwich made me feel like he had been waiting my whole life and I was the most important guy in the world. And that is how it makes everyone who arrives feel”, says Fesser.
That ability to attend with self-confidence, attention and taste for details caught the writer’s attention so much that he returned to that bar. It wasn’t until a much later visit that he realized he was Hispanic. It was the year 2016, when Donald Trump was headed for the presidency denigrating immigrants.
a movie script
It was Fesser’s wife, Sarah, who encouraged him to write Marcelo’s story. After the protagonist’s initial disbelief and two years of interviews, the material collected was so extensive and difficult to cover that the author decided it would be a novel with some fictional characters created from some of his acquaintances.
The book was published in 2022 in Spain. Hernández, who after the pandemic break planned to return to the Oyster Bar, decided to retire to travel and promote the novel in Madrid, Barcelona and later in Mexico, where it was presented at the Guadalajara International Book Fair.
Fesser is working on adapting “Marcelo” into a script for a future film.
Now “Marcelo” (516 pages) can already be obtained in the United States through Amazon in hardcover edition ($42.44 dollars) or in Barnes & Noble in electronic edition ($10.80 dollars).
About the author
Guillermo Fesser (Madrid, May 4, 1960) is a Spanish journalist who was one half of the popular radio program Gomaespuma along with Juan Luis Cano. He wrote his first book in 1998, “When God squeezes, he drowns but well (memoirs of a maid)”, which was made into a film in 2006 in a film that he directed himself. In 2008 he published “One Hundred Miles from Manhattan,” a fun personal take on American culture. “Marcelo” is his latest novel.