Phil Mouquinho and Cairo were out on the corner of Greenwich and Charlton Sts. on a blustery Thursday afternoon last week in front of Mouquinho’s P.J. Charlton restaurant. They had been greeting kids from the Children’s Museum of the Arts down the block.
The German shepherd is a certified service dog that the restaurateur / chef and his wife, Camille, got in Maryland two years ago. He had already been named after the courageous canine that accompanied the Navy SEALS on their daring raid to take out Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011.
“His mission was to keep anyone from leaving that house,” said Mouquinho of the original Cairo, a Belgian Malinois, a more-compact German shepherd. Meanwhile, the Hudson Square Cairo’s usual mission is to accompany Camille to Roosevelt Island’s Legacy School to work with autistic students.
Suddenly, there was an emergency across the street. Neighbor Dale Fitzgerald, former director of the Jazz Gallery, had been riding with his son Gabriel in his adult tricycle and one of its rear wheels had snapped off, sending them sprawling. This wasn’t Cairo’s area of expertise, however, plus he got distracted by vintage cookbook store owner Joanne Hendricks’s dog as she and her pooch were also responding to the accident. Mouquinho, always ready to help out, quickly tied Cairo to a pole and assisted the shaken senior in wheeling the broken bike home.
Mouquinho grew up in the neighborhood and is a former volunteer member of Community Board 2. He is also the community’s point person on the jumbo-sized three-district Department of Sanitation garage being built on Washington St.
— Lincoln Anderson
