Hyperlocal Patriotism

Am I wrong for not liking local small businesses?

On our last visit back to Flemington, New Jersey, my parents and my wife and I went out to try a local business we’ve heard a lot of buzz about. The folks I know in town love it; the reviews are outstanding. It’s in a spot that’s fairly popular; it was a warm but comfortable evening, still bright out, and there was a line and a crowd of families and couples strolling or sitting out in the patios of a few different establishments. It’s kind of what every small town wants.

Nonetheless. We were not impressed; none of the four of us. What we got was on the pricey side for what it was, and just nothing special. That would have been okay, I guess. What we didn’t understand was why so many people raved about this place, when the best any of us could say about it was eh.

I’ve been thinking about this. Are people too easily impressed? Do they not care about value and quality? Is it just fun to hype a place? Are the reviews fake? Or am I missing the point? Maybe localism is an aspect of quality. There’s nowhere else in town to go; if you want to walk or have a quick drive, there you go. That’s worth something, isn’t it? But it’s more than just convenience. It’s sort of a sense of being on the map.

This experience reminded me of a detour my wife and I made on the way home from a long weekend in Virginia Beach once. We ended up pulling off the interstate at Sandston, a small suburb of Richmond with a small main street consisting of little old houses, a few businesses, and a dollar store. It was Memorial Day, and the Italian restaurant we’d pulled off for was closed. So we ended up at the town’s little ice cream/fast food place, an independent joint called Sandston Bistro.

The food we got was very mediocre—college dining hall stuff. When we got home, I looked the place up and saw all these great reviews. (To be fair, a lot of them were about the ice cream, which is hard to screw up.) People talked in the reviews about how this was the town’s little gathering spot, where you hung out, chatted, met friends. It meant something far beyond the narrow question of how good the food was.

I also thought of a long piece I wrote about a longtime Flemington restaurant, Jake’s, which closed during the pandemic. It was sort of a personal essay/life and culture piece/restaurant review all in one. I was asking myself the question why—despite liking the place as a kid and going there many times—it had never even occurred to me to take my wife there for a nice dinner on some visit up to New Jersey.

I thought about how we, and a lot of people our age, don’t really go to white-tablecloth restaurants and order steak with rice pilaf and steamed veggies or filet of sole stuffed with crabmeat. We go to trendy all-you-can-eat sushi places; Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Ethiopian restaurants; brewpubs or wine bars or places offering local fare.

At the same time that restaurant options have gotten more diverse and interesting—the last 20 or 30 years or so—supermarkets have gotten better too. You can now buy higher-quality salmon or scallops or steak than you’ll likely get in one of these old-school bar and grill places. The value proposition of this type of restaurant basically doesn’t look the same to us as it did to my parents.

And many of the comments I got for that piece, when I shared it with a Flemington group on Facebook, were somewhat negative. Stuff like, this is our hometown place, we love it. That didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that many of the comments were also sort of baffled. People seemed to think I was missing the point.

It was a fun place, it was nice, it was classy, you could bring guests there, everyone could find something they liked. You’re asking for too much. You young people obsess over Instagramming your plate but you don’t really get the point of eating out. It’s about being with people, it’s about elevating your evening. Stuff like this.

As long as the food was decent, which it mostly was, it wasn’t really about the food.

So maybe I am missing something.

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This little Flemington business that I felt alone in finding underwhelming; maybe “Screw you, I’ll drive to Somerville” isn’t the right answer. Maybe expecting every little place to be amazing is expecting too much. Maybe strolling the street at sunset and helping knit a Main Street economy back together is the point. Maybe you don’t take the breathless recommendations and rave reviews literally. You take them, rather, as expressions of a kind of hyperlocal patriotism. We have this thing now. It’s ours. We’re proud of it. We want to support it and hold onto it.

It’s a bit like how everybody’s mother or grandmother makes the best spaghetti and meatballs or the best rice or whatever seemingly mundane, everyday dish it is. People will die on that hill; there’s some unquantifiable magic there. It is obviously not possible that everybody’s grandma is a preternaturally good cook. And yet. That doesn’t mean there isn’t something real there.

Whatever that is; it’s why Jake’s is the best place ever. Or this place we didn’t like. It’s why every similar-looking Main Street feels like a unique place to the people who love it. It’s something to cherish, and it’s not something you can reverse engineer.

The market will decide if these businesses are going to become well-loved local gems or trendy flashes in the pan; if towns like this can attract a new generation of people with a real investment in their success. I’d like to think so. And I’d like to see that in the support for a new-ish local business that isn’t, objectively, all that great.

So it’s not for me. But it is, evidently, for many people. And that’s just fine.

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Related Reading:

The Old Frontier

Culture, Nostalgia, Cuisines as Living Things

No Housing Please, We’re a Community

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