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 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.