I take you
…to be my lawfully wedded wife.
I helped throw a really big party six years ago. It may have been the best party I had ever been to, and was most certainly the best one I had ever hosted. My recollection of the day is hazy, but fragments remain indelibly imprinted upon my memory.
I recall the dead silence of an empty event hall and the resonance of lone voices echoing off its rafters. Then, the loud rumble and chorus of laughter, hours later when the room was filled with seats, bodies, and sound equipment. I can hear the sequenced, dulcet tones of Frou Frou and The xx coming from the night’s playlist in my mind’s ear.
To drink, I remember wine and a keg of local microbrew; people were invited to bring their own spirits. A bottle of Fireball made its way around the dance floor, followed shortly thereafter by Tuaca — a peculiar favorite of one of our guests. To eat, there were three kinds of antipasti preceding wood-fired pizzas from a food truck. And for dessert, Hungarian kifli — soft cookies reminiscent of rugelach, with jam and nuts enveloped between flaky, gossamer crust; concentrated doses of sugar to fuel late-night dancing to the succession of bangers I remember coming from a very, very, good DJ.
That party, thrown on September 12th, 2015 in a Philadelphia brewery turned trolleycar repair shop, was my very informal, incredibly fun wedding.
To have and to hold
When I announced my engagement at the age of twenty-three, many who were close to me were wholly unsurprised. I was a romantic. I felt like I had waited my whole life to marry. Not to assuage loneliness, but to ride the high of mutual benevolence that comes with falling in love and spending a life listening to, caring for, and being thoughtful towards another person. In a wedded universe I was offered a version of myself that I could admire and respect, one worthy of my own esteem. Dependable, loyal, there to help — my mea culpa to the universe for my self-serving teenaged years. Sign me up.
Before marriage, of course, came love. But some months before the party, I sat in my backyard with a friend and expressed to him what I believed to be a foundational truth of my relationship: my soon-to-be wife could never love me as much as I loved her. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel loved by her; I did. But I felt so deeply that I had to earn her love — that without enough given, I could not expect to receive any. To be loved felt almost unfairly undeserved — who was I to feel joys and passions of this depth? In exchange, I compensated, tipping the scales of affection in my partner’s favor, doting and trying to be the best man I could be.
The rough reality is this: the motivations behind what we come to recognize as love are complex — in my case, love for my wife was driven from a deep sense of duty towards her, an extreme romantic bent, and yes, a font of my own insecurities. But in marriage, the ends justify the means, right? I thought I could afford this one bit of selfishness.
For better or worse, in sickness & in health
It was all worth it. Being married to someone I loved so deeply simplified so much of my life. The most existential of questions I used to ask myself now all seemed impertinent: What am I doing with my life? Why am I doing it? How long do I have to keep going? Answers to these and more were in the wedding vows.
Just as soon as I had finished writing those vows, I started thinking about what I might add to them when the time came to renew, ten, twenty, or thirty years later. I imagined my own parents and how marriage for them, after forty-five years, must have required so much effort and thought, committing and recommitting, evolving and changing. I couldn’t wait to do the same.
The long, unknown stretch of time ’til death — with all of it’s good, bad, sickness, and health — that inspires cold feet in some was a shower of relief upon me. I was aboard the ship, and all that was left was to chart a course. The thought of a lifelong commitment was a warming balm on my cold, anxious, nomadic soul.
’Til death do us part
To end a marriage at twenty-six is to feel loss on a scale I was not ready to accept. In the days before my divorce, I steeled myself against heartbreak. It’s what you see in movies and often in real life, in a country where half of marriages end in divorce. It’s what you feel when any relationship ends. Yet for as ready as I was for that heartbreak, I was unprepared for the grief. I was unprepared for the sorrow. I felt feelings you might ascribe to death or limb amputation, not divorce. I was whole, and then I was broken.
It’s torturous work to call your parents, friends, and loved ones and tell them that the lifelong commitment they watched you make years ago is to be dissolved. Perhaps the worst task of all is reassuring everyone who asks that you’re fine, even if you’re not. There is no option but to lie to these people, for as much as they care about you, they are unequipped to heal you, and powerless in the face of this kind of despair.
After I called my parents, a call it took me a month to make, I wept openly for the first time in years. On my knees, at the foot of what used to be the bed I shared with my wife, I cried deeply. I was surprised. The tenor of this anguish was different than anything I had ever felt: disoriented, forsaken, and confused, like those of Christ on the cross. Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani? But my cries, no matter how loud or pained, only represented the voices on the outside. The ones on the inside cried out much louder and didn’t exist on the other end of a line that could be hung up, or in a room where a pillow could muffle my screams.
The things that well-meaning people say when you tell them a marriage has ended are by and large unhelpful or hurtful platitudes. Some echo the cliché of “it wasn’t meant to be.” Others read your pain as anger and offer some of their own as an empathetic reflex. Then there’s those who recall readings they made in tea leaves — some as early as the wedding day — that made them certain the marriage wouldn’t last (no comment on why they didn’t speak up). Finally, those that you meet after the divorce interrogate you for details of the longevity of your courtship, or any number of other factors, in search of corpus delicti under which to try you, as if to suggest you must have done something for there to be a divorce; that there is no divorce for those who are un-divorceable.
Amen.
My divorce was what many call “clean” — no alimony, no custody, no complicated division of property. When I began the process I leaned hopefully into that word, trusting that I’d come out of all of this spotless, or at the very least, like-new. Unfortunately, the reality is that there is no clean divorce. Old anxieties about my self-worth have returned, joined by new ones inspired by the end of my marriage. Rejection stings in a way it did not used to. An ability to trust remains, but takes much more effort to engage.
In the wake of divorce, I have a new set of existential questions, with fewer answers: Will I marry again? Will I love again? Do I have a moral duty to do so? Life without marriage is certainly possible, is life without love? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but at least I threw a really good party.
Goodbye Bridgewater’s Pub.
The pandemic claims a Philadelphia institution.
written in January 2021
As the Covid-19 pandemic wages its assault on the world, I find it hard to be optimistic or grateful about anything. But still, as each day passes, I try to count myself lucky that none of my beloved have been among the two million (and climbing) worldwide dead at the hands of the virus.
A few weeks ago, scrolling through my social media feeds, it seemed that even those in my extended network — high school classmates I don’t speak to on the phone or see for virtual happy hours — were doing OK. Some had tied the knot during the pandemic and many were able to procreate — lucky them.
As I lingered on photos of past crushes now married or engaged to be so, my mind wandered to the restaurants I would frequent during the same period as my infatuations; the establishments that nourished me in my young adulthood on the East Coast, shaping my gastronomic identity as the city of Philadelphia was undergoing a great culinary growth spurt in the late 2000s. With a twinge of curiosity, I punched the names of some of my favorite places in a search engine, just like I would with my crushes.
Tria, a wine bar in Rittenhouse Square that awakened the oenophile in me, was taking reservations. On their menu, I recognized many of the same dishes I used to order at the bar, like the mushroom bruschetta with truffle and pungent fontina which I can still smell if I close my eyes. Down the street, the weathered brass fixtures of a.bar, the first craft cocktail bar I patronized, were still standing as well, nourishing the citizens of Philadelphia with libations to-go. My temple of carbohydrates, High Street on Market had rebranded as “High Steet Philadelphia,” relocating due to rising rent, but with a recognizable menu still full of pastries in the morning and pasta in the evening.
But before I ever set foot in any of those places, I used to spend my time perched on a stool at Bridgewater’s Pub, a bar nestled just inside the entrance to 30th Street Station.
“Permanently closed.” My heart sank when I saw the red banner Google slapped above the business name, incongruous with the rest of the search results; photos of food and drink from customers, a selection of reviews, and an invitation to send the address to my phone as if I might want to navigate there to see for myself. Even Google’s business summary felt out of place with what it was telling me, written not in the past tense like an obituary, but in the present tense like an advertisement, saying, “Lively train-station saloon offering a wide range of craft beers, plus nibbles & happy-hour deals.” On the pub’s linked Facebook page, I found a post from the owner dated November 17th, announcing that it would close the following month.
Google was right to call Bridgewater’s Pub lively. As the bartenders served me German beer, the bustle of the train station provided a soundtrack that overrode the music they played inside. The bar was not enclosed, but rather merely partitioned from the train station, and the whirring sounds of roller-bag wheels on the hard floors and Amtrak announcements on loudspeakers would reverberate off the train station’s vaulted ceilings and down into the bar, imbuing a sense of movement and urgency, even if you weren’t in a rush to catch a train. On any given day, the bar would be dotted with locals and regulars who would stay put in their seats as “one and done” commuters would arrive one after the other to grab a drink before their departure. I used to think that it would be interesting to record a time lapse of the bar to see the ebb and flow of commuter train schedules reflected in swelling and receding crowds in the bar.
Bridgewater’s Pub had excellent beer on tap, but was also blessed (during the years I ate there) with an incredibly talented executive chef by the name of Frederick Price, who pushed my culinary tastes in surprisingly progressive directions for a bar in a train station. On one occasion, he prepared a burger made with kangaroo. On another, a stew with rattlesnake. The food at Bridgewater’s was unrivaled in the train station, which was home to nothing but outlets from the world’s favorite franchises: there was a Subway, a McDonald’s, an Au Bon Pain, and an Auntie Anne’s just to name a few.
I knew nothing of cocktails at the time, and so can’t say much for that part of the pub’s menu, though I do recall once asking if I could have a mojito, only to be met by the glare of a surly bartender who let me know that was not an option. My only other interaction with the spirits list at Bridgewater’s Pub was after discovering the movie “The Big Lebowski,” when I adopted the White Russian as my drink of choice in a desperate attempt to will the effortless swagger of The Dude upon myself. My favorite bartender, Devitt, would serve them to me as doubles in 16-ounce pint glasses, often only charging me for singles.
My memories of Bridgewater’s Pub are almost universally positive, despite that time being a notably rocky period in my life, and I grew to love the pub in a way I had never loved a place before. I spent many hours sitting at the bar, having arrived feeling crippled by depression and anxiety, overwhelmed by life. As I settled in to my barstool, the noise of the world moving around me was like a salve on an open wound. I felt soothed, and viewed the pub as a welcome refuge from the theater of my own mind. There were entire months where Bridgewater’s Pub was the only place I would go except for work and my apartment, eschewing social activities with my friends just to sit by myself at the bar, trying to contemplate the enormity of my own sorrows. Though I never confided in the staff, I recall appreciating the intimate, unspoken relationship between bartender and patron. The staff there were important to me in ways that are hard to describe.
I haven’t seen the bartender Devitt in many years, but was glad to run in to another bartender, Chris, during a visit I made to Philadelphia in 2019. We had a chance to catch up as I sat for a drink, and though my schedule prevented me from staying as long as I would have liked, I assured him that we’d cross paths again soon. Foolishly, I assumed that after twenty years in operation, the pub would surely be there, waiting for me, on my next trip to Philadelphia. I have never been more upset to be wrong.
In the concourse of the 30th Street Station, a towering 28-foot bronze sculpture by the artist Walker Hancock cuts an imposing silhouette, framed by the tall Corinthian columns behind it, reaching up to the station’s ninety-five foot tall ceilings. Called Angel of the Resurrection, the piece depicts Saint Michael, the archangel, lifting a dead man to the heavens. On the eleven foot black granite plinth, the first of two inscriptions reads, “In memory of the men and women of the Pennsylvania Rairoad who laid down their lives for our country.” The next, “That all travelers here may remember those of the Pennsylvania Railroad who did not return from the Second World War.” It’s a touching tribute to the over 1,300 members of the Pennysylvania Railroad who fought and perished in World War II.
As cities begin to think of ways to commemorate those who have died during the pandemic, so too will we all have to find ways to commemorate the restaurants we’ve lost. There will be no bronze statue for Bridgewater’s Pub, but as travelers pass through the shadow of the Angel of the Resurrection, and onward to the space where Bridgewater’s Pub used to be, perhaps those who found solace in it, just as I did, will remember it fondly, just as I will.
I’m scared of a world without my favorite restaurants.
Prix fixe as medicine, a long hug after heartbreak, and other reasons I’m very afraid of the possibility of a world without my favorite restaurants.
Prix fixe as medicine, a long hug after heartbreak, and other reasons I’m very afraid of a year with no dining out.
Just before Thanksgiving in 2019, I was aroused to a frantic shake of my shoulder at the 1-Michelin star restaurant, Ikoyi, in London’s St James’s neighborhood. I picked myself up, blinked a few times, and tried to figure out why I was waking up in a dining room.
When I came to, I locked eyes with a concerned looking British woman to my left, whose lips moved as she said something to me that never made its way through my ears. It seemed urgent, but my hearing wasn’t quite working. A few sips of white wine in a glass, a set of silverware on the table, and a serviette on my lap suggested to me that I was an invited guest of the restaurant and needn’t panic. I did anyway. Seconds exploded to the length of an eternity in my mind as I registered the stares of everyone in the small restaurant. What the fuck happened?
Earlier in the evening, I suffered a nasty fall when the decidedly not-slip-resistant soles of my Clarks desert boots gave way under the wet wrought iron stairs descending to my basement Airbnb. I fell the roughly 20 feet from the top of the stairs, and was just barely able to crawl my way inside.
An hour later, bloodied, practically dragging my left leg behind me, and with tears welling in my eyes, I limped down the road to Paddington station and did the only thing that made sense to me in the moment: I got on the tube to make it to Ikoyi on time for my reservation. And so it was there where, after accidentally shifting weight to my bum leg on the restaurant’s bench seating, I entered a fit of pain so intense that my vision went white and I keeled over, passed out, just before the arrival of my fourth course.
After convincing the worried couple next to me that I was not prone to seizures, I excused myself to the staff in the most profuse British way I knew and stepped out into the brisk, damp London air to collect myself. Once again, tears welled in my eyes, but this time not because of my leg.
The year had not been a particularly good one for me. Although I had my health (minus the recent fall), a roof over my head, and food on my plate, I felt persistently alone. And in the cold London night, with nothing but an empty Airbnb waiting for me, and more emptiness at home in California, the loneliness and embarrassment of fainting in public triggered rapid emotional regression to an infantile state of whimpering.
Perched on my one good ass cheek atop a wooden fixture in front of the restaurant, I fought a quivering lip as I pulled out my phone, which cheerfully unlocked itself for me, quite unsympathetically revealing a screen absent of messages from loved ones. No digital kiss for my boo-boo.
But this is not meant to be a sad story about being alone at dinner. What I discovered during the remainder of a fantastic meal at Ikoyi (which I ate standing at the bar) was that restaurants were where I most wanted to be when I felt hurt and alone.
The words hospitality and hospital (unsurprisingly) share a common root: hospes, the Latin word for guest. Perhaps it makes sense, then, that I had arrived at Ikoyi with as much a desire to heal my great emotional hurt as I would have at an emergency room to heal my leg. This was not the first time I’d turned to a restaurant for comfort.
(L-R:) Scotch bonnet plantain with raspberry salt at Ikoyi; The stairs I fell down; My first chinese wine, and the last photo I took before I keeled over.
Two years before the incident at Ikoyi, I said goodbye to my wife as she packed the last of her belongings and left the home we shared to move in with her new boyfriend. Our divorce paperwork was filed 3 months earlier but due to a cruel set of circumstances and the harsh realities of Bay Area housing prices, we continued to live together as roommates while trying to make sense of life without one another. To cope (or move on, I’ll never know), she began dating again after we filed our papers. Finding myself filled with hurt and devoid of the self-esteem necessary to do the same, I took to bars and restaurants for company instead.
It wasn’t about the alcohol; I found out early on that I couldn’t successfully drown sorrows of this scale with booze, though I did try. Instead, it was the company, the ambience, and the aura of packed dining rooms that provided me reprieve and emotional shelter.
Though mine and my wife’s finances were uncomplicated enough to be divided without the involvement of the courts, there were other things left to be divvied up: friends, kitchen appliances, and watering holes to name a few. Through the unwritten and unspoken agreements of millenial divorce, I had claimed the local cocktail bar just as she had claimed the furniture.
Explaining my divorce to the staff, who felt like family at this point, was not high on my list of things to do. I dreaded bringing it up, stumped at how to even broach the subject. Beyond that, I feared the follow-up questions the most, worried that they might make me feel like this was all somehow my fault: What did you do? How did you fuck this up? What’s wrong with you?
That awkward moment never came, at least, not in the way I’d imagined it. My soon-to-be-ex-wife had beat me to the punch breaking the news, leaving me to contend with a solemn and simple, “I heard,” from one of the servers as I settled my tab one night. While I fumbled through a rehearsed response, he surprised me by opening his arms for a hug. I reciprocated, and realized that his was the first human touch I’d felt in months. Walking home later, I wondered when I’d next hug anyone outside of a restaurant again.
Now, three years later, and in the throes of pandemic-related isolation, I find myself once more, many months removed from the warm embrace of another person. And yet, confined to eating most of my meals in an empty home, it’s not the bustle of a crowded front-of-house that I crave the most these days, it’s the kitchen.
My neighborhood cocktail bar, and home away from home.
Last year, I started a very small pop-up making smashburgers. Through some miracle of good luck, good timing, and I suppose, the evergreen appeal of a really tasty burger, I found moderate success.
The burger business is not particularly lucrative for me, especially because I insist on keeping my day job, relegating my pop-up to whatever Friday or Saturday nights a local restaurant can afford to shut down their kitchen and host me.
But those few hours in front of a grill were addictive in a way I was not expecting or prepared for. The heat, the sweat, the frenetic pace of it all, the pure physicality of using your hands, some crude tools, and heat to create something that people want to eat — and pay for! — left me with a dopamine hit that lasted for hours after service was over, and well into the next day.
When I brought a friend with no restaurant experience into the kitchen to help me at one of my recent pop-ups, I could tell from the look on her face that she felt it too: the pleasure of taking care of guests and the joys of hospitality were universal.
But there was also a masochistic draw to being in the kitchen. When I pressed freshly shaved, juicy onions onto the 500 degree cooktop over and over throughout the course of a night, the resultant steam rising off the surface of the griddle would burn the inside of my wrist. And the rough edge of the stainless steel smasher I used to flatten patties of ground beef would leave fine cuts on my palms that would sting badly when they came in contact with soap in the shower later on. I relished these sensations; they hurt, but they made me feel alive.
Once, when speaking with a chef friend of mine, my eyes were drawn to a series of short scars that ran parallel to his forearm. The scars looked a lot like my own, acquired in my early twenties. But as I studied his arm, I realized the marks were from burns in the kitchen, accidents, while mine were more deliberate artifacts of razor cuts that I had given myself. But pain is pain, and I knew that for him, the sting of scorched skin was part and parcel of the high of being in a kitchen just as my old cuts were, for me, a physical facsimile of deep emotional pain, and my new ones forged in the kitchen were a reminder that I could feel something, even at my numbest.
Pop-ups in Redwood City and Palo Alto
Earlier this month, worsening Covid-19 case counts consumed ICU beds in the Bay Area’s hospitals to within a frightening margin from empty and drove the number of deaths at the hands of this disease to an alarming high. I asked a local bar manager how he would feel about another potential lockdown, to which he gestured at a full outdoor patio and expressed gratitude that the waitstaff could at least count on a few more nights of tips before the inevitable.
As predicted, the closures came again. No matter how necessary they were, I couldn’t stop thinking about the checks and tips from that last week of outdoor dining. I wondered how long servers and restaurants could reasonably be expected to stretch them, but no amount of mental calculus I performed supported an outcome where the community would emerge from this pandemic without hundreds of ruined lives and businesses.
And yet, I get to write this from a position of incredible privilege. My livelihood is intact, and while I wax poetic about playing cook for a few nights, I watch many of my friends who do so full-time fight valiantly for the life of their trade. Sadly, they are left to wage their battle on a field carelessly buttressed by state regulations that shift as if they were written on an Etch A Sketch, unsupported by a government that has plainly refused to take care of an industry that is the soul of our country.
What I’ve learned from fainting and crying at Ikoyi, hugging servers at my local bar, cooking in a kitchen, and watching the pandemic’s toll on restaurants is that so much of my identity is wrapped up in this industry. Restaurant closures have taken away my antidote to loneliness, my primary coping mechanism, the spaces where I feel most connected to others. Restaurants have saved my life, and as I watch them die, I’m heartbroken that I can’t return the favor.
A closed outdoor dining patio in Redwood City.