Field note · The dining room
The first table back
Dining rooms reopened unevenly. Notes on the autumn of 2021, and on not pretending a meal was a return to normal.
By Val Okolu · 9 September 2021 · 5 min · Issue No. 17
By September 2021 the performance of normal had returned faster than normal itself. Restaurants were open, staffed thinly, and full of people who wanted a meal to mean the ordeal was over. It wasn’t. The journal’s job that autumn was narrow: do not publish a comeback story with a borrowed reservation at the center.
What we could say, because it was observable, was that the rooms people missed were not always the grand ones. They missed the hour. The noise level of a Tuesday. A server who had been there before and was, miraculously, there again. Grand dining came back as a set piece. The ordinary room came back as a relief.
Do not demand that a depleted kitchen stage your reunion with the world.
We kept our bookings off the page unless we had actually sat them, and in that season we often had not. Readers wrote to ask where to go. The honest answer was local, recent, and short on glamour: call the day of, tip as if the last year had happened, and do not demand that a depleted kitchen stage your reunion with the world. The piece is a field note because it is about conduct - ours, and a diner’s - more than about any one address.
Val Okolu · Field Notes · Issue No. 17 · Invite Only