To live in New York is to be a simultaneous citizen of restaurants. We don’t have the space to spread out like in LA, or the natural beauty close at hand that does so much of San Francisco’s work for it. Apartments are small, and dreams and appetites are large, so we do our eating and drinking and flirting and plotting in spaces where we don’t cook, other homes where we feel more alive than in our own. The thrill of being seen and the rush of feeling anonymous.
The overlap of Covid-19 and a cold temperatures (and blizzards) on the East Coast made the precarious social arrangements that have allowed some degree of normalcy to persist even more endangered. You could sit outside and pretend you’re making a go of it, but you might not feel your toes during your walk home. In California, infection rates have done the same grim work.
Of course, debates about indoor dining are at the center of a larger scrum over how society should reform itself to live with and not die from the worst pandemic in a century. The virus continues to rampage, although perhaps with less force, and the rights of restaurants of course stand in relation to a whole host of other commitments to the young and old. Choosing life is blazingly obvious and sometimes an agonizingly difficult thing to put into practice.
The restrictions on dining have been nothing short of devastating for a huge sector of the urban economy, but the loss of places to eat together has also had enormous if less tangible effects on a much broader canvas: who we are, how we are with one another, and the fate of the cities we share. Cities are built on eating together. If we are to recover, it will be because of our restaurants. When we can dine in and eat out, we’ll know that we can pull through. Indoor dining opened in New York last week, at least giving glimpses of forward momentum.
What do we lose when we lose the ability to go out to eat or sit in a coffee shop, pretending to work on our next column, plotting our next social media post, or reading a hot new novel ? It’s simple: the idea of somewhere that is both public and private, where you can see other people and be seen yourself. In other words, a scene. Many of us have stayed connected with best friends through the pandemic and relied on family. But what is often missing is the sense of a wider world beyond, a context that swirls with more action than our individual lives can ever hope to provide. We need the background, the churn of looks and glances and visual wallpaper that makes the world feel 3D.
Every trip to a restaurant, even the most comforting and familiar neighborhood haunt, crackles with unintended possibility. The choreography of ordering, the perils of possibilities of a menu: these moments of serendipity add an element of useful chance into a way of living that seems all too algorithmically sorted and screened most days. When we are by ourselves, we control the climate. Eating with others, we regain the possibilities of a little helpful chaos. Each meal out goes into a rough archive of good meals and bad ones, memorable nights and ones that you wished were over when they had hardly begun.
Restaurants and cafes don’t only bring us together with friends and lovers, strangers and the extras of urban life. They can also allow us to be alone differently than we otherwise might be. Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker about the particular joy of a coffee shop: “What matters is not the words of the person at the next table but the feeling of nearness—the sense of being able to carve out an identity among other identities, of being potentially private in a public space and casually public even while lost in private reveries.”
Of course, restaurants are not the only institutions that have shuttered their doors for part or all of the pandemic. Houses of worship, gyms, and countless small businesses have also been forced to close, often for months at a time. But writing this in New York City, there is something uniquely worth mourning about these months of ordering in. We’ve missed the chance to hash out the state of our world over pasta and red wine or see how that person we are interested in looks in candlelight. There are tastes that will never touch our tongues, rendezvous that will remain always unmet, reservations that will be kept or not, but in another time and place.
The longing for places to sit and eat is of course about much more than just digestion. It speaks to a wider and deeper desire for the world as it used to be, the sheer normalcy of deciding not to cook and hitting the streets to find your gastronomic fortune, alone or with others. I think we need to get back to restaurants not out of nostalgia for what was, but to start to live in the world just now taking shape. I want it to include hands greasy from fries and lips painted with wine and legs bumping under the table .
I’ve been to a few favorite spots since indoor dining reopened: Hungarian Pastry Shop for mediocre coffee and excellent ambiance, bars for dates where sitting inside seems both banal and a little edgy. Birds of a Feather in Williamsburg, one of the last places I visited before the pandemic. I’ll make it to Babs one of these days. Memories of tables for one and dinners for two and reservations for six. The algebra of eating out.
Intimacy with other people, dinner table conversation, small talk and large orders, ordering for the table and sneaking in the side dish you are secretly craving: these are the maneuvers that we may have forgotten how to execute during these long months on our own.
Just as we will have to relearn how to dance and sing and sway at concerts and sweat at clubs together again, we all need catch up courses in how to eat with one another, with all of the joys that can bring.
A
P.S. if you didn’t catch my piece in the Forward this week on charting a post Trump course, check it out here.
P.P.S. here’s a view from my N.Y.U. office window, looking out to wherever you might be.