New and Old #175

Friday roundup and commentary

I Reviewed Restaurants for 12 Years. They’ve Changed, and Not for the Better, The New York Times, Pete Wells, August 6, 2024

I’m at the end of 12 years as a critic who ate in and reviewed restaurants constantly. Of those years, I probably spent two solid months just waiting for the check. I ought to be in favor of anything that speeds up the end of the meal, but Blackbird’s new checkless exit gives me the creeps. It is just the latest in a series of changes that have gradually and steadily stripped the human touch and the human voice out of restaurants. Each of these changes was small, but together they’ve made going out to eat much less personal. Meals are different now, and our sense of who we are is different, too.

I wrote something along these lines, from the customer perspective, here. A couple of people who worked in restaurants before thought I was just doing the whiny customer thing, but it really does feel like the human element—the, you know, hospitality element—is being squeezed out of the dining out experience. Restaurants feel transactional in a way that feels like it used to be obscured or hidden. It’s interesting to see a professional restaurant critic notice the same trend.

This is probably the most important bit:

From the moment we walked in, we talked with hosts, bartenders, captains, runners and bussers. Being served in a restaurant wasn’t passive. We had to participate.

Many of the little routines of dining that we used to handle by talking to a person now happen on a screen. When we go to Shake Shack, we order and pay for our burger and frozen custard on a screen. In some places, we enter our names on the waiting list for tables on a screen. We scan QR codes so we can read the menu on a screen. Restaurants are turning into vending machines with chairs.

“Being served in a restaurant wasn’t passive. We had to participate.” Yep.

There’s also stuff like this, that reminds me, or makes me hope, that I live in a cultural bubble. Actually, even in the D.C. area, I’ve never encountered a restaurant that doesn’t have a phone number or pick up the phone):

Now restaurants hardly ever pay someone to pick up the phone, if they have one; few newer places bother getting a number because so few calls come in. Eulalie, in TriBeCa, is one of the few that still takes reservations over the phone, a quirk so rare that it seems like a willfully perverse exercise in historical re-enactment.

And there’s this: it’s impossible to enjoy all of this “convenience” without our tolerance for discomfort being forced down, almost against our will or despite ourselves. That’s the cost that convenience extracts from you.

It’s no wonder we are always hearing about diners acting like entitled jerks — they’ve been trained to expect that everybody who works in a restaurant should be as fast and compliant as a touch screen.

And this, which identifies in fuller language what I mean when I criticize “concept” restaurants:

Even the Cheesecake Factory gives you a free slice of cake on your birthday. But the Cheesecake Factory wants you to come back; a lot of tasting-menu restaurants assume, correctly, that almost nobody sitting at the counter is going to become a regular. These places are built for one-night flings, not long-term relationships. They’re hookup restaurants.

The kind of simple but nice restaurants I remember as a kid, where you knew the owner and waitress and the menu never changed but it was big and good and you could just casually show up and not think about a huge bill? I miss that.

Read the whole thing. Also, here’s a Reddit thread on the article with a lot of commentary from all angles.

Jerry’s Apartment, City of Yes, Ryan Puzycki, August 2, 2024

Real adult life is largely bereft of the pop-in friend—and I think it might be for the worse. When we lived on West 44th Street in Manhattan, we had one friend who would occasionally buzz up after getting a haircut in the salon in our (smart, walkable, mixed-use) building. These visits involved no planning, no expectations, nothing more than a few moments to catch up and enjoy each other’s company. And for those moments, they made a big, often anonymous city feel a lot more intimate and accessible—these pop-in visits made our lives better and our friendship stronger. 

But if our friend’s salon hadn’t been in our building, how likely is it he would have gone forty-five blocks out of his way to pop in otherwise? He was the exception that proves the rule.

The kind of low-effort socialization portrayed in Seinfeld and other shows is exceedingly rare in real life, but it’s something I’ve been craving more of, especially in these post-pandemic days of working from home.

Is this ever true. It’s a great piece, and it goes on further into trying to answer this question (spoiler: physically spread-out communities make low-stakes, semi-random socializing difficult).

But it raises a deeper question for me: has suburbia created an idea that loneliness is a normal part of adulthood and maturity? Which is to say, has the designed isolation of America’s predominant land-use pattern become so invisible to us that we mistake its social costs for something inherent in growing up? How much joy do we give up because we associate the social benefits of urbanism with immaturity? With rootless young adulthood? With college? Has suburbia screwed up our causal arrows so much that we don’t even realize that what college and traditional urbanism share is a dense, mixed-use, proximate physical design, and that this, not being young per se, is what makes them so delightful and serendipitous?

Yeah, I think you know how I’d probably answer those questions.

A brief foray into Dallas, missing Kampala, and some thoughts on over-tourism, Chris Arnade Walks the World, Chris Arnade, July 31, 2024

Las Colinas is a perfectly fine neighborhood, and anyone from the shanty towns of Kampala would be over the moon if they could live there, certain they’d won life’s lottery. It’s safe, wealthy, functional, clean, and most of all, a wonderful environment to raise your children, and if any Kenyan or Ugandan asked me for their advice, I would say yes, if you can, immigrate to Las Colinas, because as I’ve written, I’m not foolish enough to romanticize destitution.

Still, by moving to Las Colinas, or the thousands of other indistinguishable US towns, that person would be making a trade, gaining material wealth, while giving up an elementary part of being human, which is best described as communal, but is deeper than that. It’s about thriving and flourishing, in the ways people have for millions of years understood what that means.

This once again makes me think of this point I make about innovation/modernity/suburbia—there are things we lose when technology saves us work, or when modern capitalism creates material abundance, or when we have the ensconced privacy of the suburbs.

We become aware of the elements of the old way we miss, but it’s an almost impossible mental lift to choose to do things the old way when necessity no longer requires it. There’s this longing that comes from wishing one could be freed from the psychological necessity or material comfort of the most efficient, modern way of doing a thing. Innovation and convenience, I guess you could say, exert a pressure to make use of them.

This is a deep point and has a lot of elements, but here’s a specific example of what Arnade describes as wringing messy, unplanned, chance encounters and activities out of everyday life:

God forbid you should do something as crazy as trying to walk from your apartment to the strip mall, like I tried to do. Walking in Irving, Texas is the act of a mad man. Irving surprisingly provides sidewalks, but they are perfunctory, long, straight un-shaded strips directly next to loud eight-lane roads, that nobody uses, because walking along them is as pleasant as a root canal. A hot, loud, exhaust-filled, lonely journey, that nobody else is silly enough to do. The only other people I saw during my walks (or on the buses I eventually took) are physically, economically, or legally incapable of having a car, and lonely enough they don’t have friend or relative with one.

Here’s the sort of crux of it:

More importantly, it doesn’t have to be that way. Material wealth doesn’t have to go hand in hand with atomization, spiritual emptiness, loneliness, and an aesthetic blandness, but that’s the trade we in the US have made, and seem committed to. We have decided it’s necessary to throw out the spiritual baby with the bathwater, a direction Europe hasn’t fully moved in yet.

Is that really true? Europe isn’t really as affluent as the United States. Maybe we’re just a little further along the gain wealth/lose community continuum. As an urbanist I like to think these are choices we make (or don’t realize we’re making, but which can be made differently), but maybe there really is something inexorable going on here.

The steps of memory, Smita Patil, September 2, 2023

Which spatial experiences have made it to your memories? Which incidents can you not recollect without their spatial settings? 

Today’s newsletter is about a few of those memories of mine that relate to steps. I’d like to think of this as a meaning-making exercise – what can steps, one of the most common architectural elements, connote beyond their inherent meanings? My well-sifted memories seem to be a good place to begin.

What a nice little read. And to tie it into the “Jerry’s Apartment” piece, what sorts of physical settings are most ripe for creating and reliving memories?

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Related Reading:

New and Old #38

New and Old #39

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