Eating out
A friend treated us this week to a new restaurant that is tremendously fashionable, very reviewed and super expensive, no subtlety, no ease – and all of this recently hitting a point of insane din, banging-on-pans loudness that no experience, definitely no food can match.
And averse as I am to pretty much all of that, I still loved it. The service was excellent. The napkins were heavy. The food wasn’t great, but the fried squash blossoms were just as good or better than ones had in Rome.
Fuck, what is it about eating out? I used to say I’d know I was “successful” if I had the time and money to eat out every meal. Not fancy or pricey but nice enough – a table, a waiter or waitress, the dance of fans around paying the check. I don’t care about restaurants, what I love is eating and drinking, mood and sound, and though those things do occur in restaurants, it’s also about the taco truck and the fish market stall, the lit-up Manhattan slice shop open to the street at two a.m. Basically, I love a temporary relationship and how immediate it feels, a moment briefly summoned by factors mostly out of my control, then gone.
Dining out is just great human drama. I mean, the restaurant this week was so loud, the three of us were clutching each other just to hear each other, but maybe that was the point, to heighten spectacle. I remember a Hollywood friend, who works occasionally with Christopher Nolan, telling me Nolan deliberately lowers the sound of dialogue in his movies to make the audience lean forward in their seats.
Sometimes I’ll eat something in a tremendously fashionable, very reviewed, no-ease restaurant and know I can cook it just as well, but that’s beside the point. It’s about abandon, it’s about limitation. A bread basket, an iced and briny martini, these are old gestures, almost regal, timeworn, pure delight. No experience of dining out ever happens again, it’s a brief bliss.
People are hungry and always have been; eating out is leveling up. “First we eat, then we do everything else,” said M.F.K. Fisher. On my morning walk to the office, I often pass a café, and each morning there’s the same woman – mid eighties, perhaps early nineties – in the window, same corner table, with a brioche or bun, a cup of something warm. Maybe she’s miserable, but it looks like a nice start to a day.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters
Experiments in the sandbox with OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model
Recalling what it’s like to walk around Manhattan for 10 hours as a woman
A new way to incorporate more Björk in your life, plus recent albums loved
And next week, for supporters, a longer essay (hopefully) dispatched from an island in the Pacific Northwest. If you’re not supporting, go blue, there’s a free trial fwiw.
What the what
“Meditations in an Emergency” is published Saturdays by writer Rosecrans Baldwin, a weekly micro-essay about something he finds beautiful, with a longer piece once a month for paying subscribers, written in the woods.
Also for paying subscribers, a Sunday supplement, three weeks a month, with three-plus ideas of things to love, no paid placements 💀
Rosecrans is the author most recently of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, winner of the 2022 California Book Award, now available in paperback from Bookshop, Bezos Farms, or (preferably) your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
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