No Time To Dine

Further thoughts on what restaurants are really for

I got started on this whole restaurant thing when I saw some social media discussion tut-tutting restaurant customers for “lingering” at tables. The idea being, hurry up and leave so we can turn the table over. Maybe I’d feel differently if I were a restaurant owner, but I don’t like that at all.

So I’m in Discourse Magazine with a piece on restaurants—specifically, wondering whether we’re looking at a correction from the cheap-money lifestyle of the 2010s, during which restaurants boomed and dining out became a very casual and relatively cheap activity.

I talk a bit about how inflation and the difficulty of hiring service workers has eroded the hospitality element of the hospitality industry, and that there’s a bare transactional nature to eating out post-pandemic:

Restaurants are a very tough, grueling business, and operating them profitably during the pandemic was an almost impossible achievement—for the ones that survived. But while it was both kind and in our self-interest to patronize struggling restaurants and tip extra, even for poor service or food that wasn’t quite on the mark—you wanted them to make it through and be there on the other side—that urgency and solidarity is harder to summon post-pandemic.

Restaurants are not just commercial kitchens to churn out food. They are places to gather, and linger, and chat. To refer to customers “camping out” at tables is one step away from “Here’s your slop, pig, chow down and step away from the trough.” It’s off-putting and brazenly transactional. There is a limit to what an ordinary restaurant with ordinary staff can provide. But there is also a limit to what customers will pay for and put up with.

And here’s my conclusion about us possibly seeing a market correction:

If there was an urban restaurant bubble, floating on cheap money and awful working conditions, perhaps its popping was a pandemic silver lining. Perhaps dining out should revert to something a little more rarefied, elegant and rare, on the one hand, and a little less formal and fancy on the other. And if the old-school, down-home places are a little farther out, maybe it just means pairing dinner with a road trip.

But I want to think more about that first bit. What are restaurants for? What are they?

My own memories of restaurants are as mostly casual places where you ate food pretty similar to what you might eat at home on a good night. Steaks, fish fillets, spaghetti and meatballs, grilled chicken, Italian food. Of course certain cuisines I had as a kid, like Indian or Mexican, weren’t things we cooked at home. But I don’t remember anything at all like the “Instagrammable” restaurant—fussy plates designed to photograph well, entrance vestibules with fake neon signs or trendy artwork, etc. If I had to pick one word for restaurants as I mostly remember them, it would probably be unassuming.

There’s probably more to it than I saw or remember. I guess there’s always been fussy fine dining and haute cuisine—my mom remembers those types of restaurants in the 1980s, where the plate was huge and the portion was tiny.

But I think it’s interesting, and kind of odd, that at the same time restaurant dining became devalued—no longer a treat, just a casual lifestyle thing—the expectations of restaurants got higher. Eating out became more casual at the same time restaurants became, or tried to become, less unassuming.

One thing that got me thinking about this, a couple of years ago at least now, was rewatching some of the old Kitchen Nightmares shows with Gordon Ramsay. Most of the time Gordon is right, when he berates lazy chefs serving overpriced slop or observes the layer of dust on a collection of clutter “decorating” a tired-looking interior and mutters, “Wow, f*** me.” But sometimes he’ll take what looks to me like a perfectly serviceable neighborhood joint and call it “dated” or something, and I wonder if we have different ideas of what a restaurant is supposed to be. There was Flamangos—10 minutes from where I grew up—which older folks liked, and which seemed like a pretty typical American restaurant to me. Gordon liked nothing about it.

But there’s one segment of an episode in particular, an Italian restaurant, that made me think. In that one, a vegetarian diner finds a fragment of pork bone in her red sauce, and she’s alarmed—both at almost having cracked her tooth, and at there apparently being meat in her sauce.

Gordon asks the owner if there’s any kind of meat in the sauce, and he replies, as if it’s a silly question, yeah, there are pork bones and sausages and stuff in it for flavor. Gordon is mystified and flabbergasted. What if the customer is a vegetarian? How can you put pork in the sauce? (I also like this bit because “pork” and “sauce” are two words where Gordon’s British accent really come through.) The owner is equally mystified that anybody wouldn’t put pork in red sauce. “It’s how we’ve always done it,” he says, or something like that. He seems utterly confused.

I relate to his view here more than Gordon’s. He’s from a time when a red-sauce Italian restaurant had a clientele of people who either made and ate that food at home sometimes, or were completely comfortable with what it was. Of course it wasn’t vegetarian. A restaurant wasn’t about the food so much. Nobody had vegetarian or gluten-free options, nobody put food allergy information or calorie counts on menus. You went, you ordered, you ate, you enjoyed the company of your dinner party and not having dishes to do at the end of the night.

There’s a whole cultural attitude difference here. Those old restaurants were almost like home kitchens with dining rooms—they weren’t professionalized. They weren’t “chef-driven,” they didn’t give a hoot about local or sustainable, they didn’t have a “bar manager” creating “innovative cocktails” that cost $18. People went out and ate basic food that was kind of like what they might cook at home sometimes. It was just nice to go out. It was casual and special at the same time.

I see this shift in myself—the expectation or at least hope that some meal, be it fried chicken, pad Thai, steak, whatever, will transcend the physical properties of the ingredients and be a stunning culinary experience. But it just…isn’t. Chicken is chicken. Noodles are noodles. Spaghetti and meatballs in tomato sauce is spaghetti and meatballs in tomato sauce. Methods and seasonings and cookware matter, but there’s a cap on how “good” a meal can get. I don’t like restaurant inflation or poor service. But increasingly I think we’ve come to expect more of a typical restaurant than is reasonable or even possible. I remember an article about buffets where the author, the child of immigrant parents, wrote that her father would say little more of a restaurant than “good food, good value.” Nothing wrong with that.

I wonder what’s going on here. Some of this seems generational; some seems like a dimension of the parent/non-parent divide. Some of it is that we’re richer than we were several decades ago, as a society. It makes sense that we’d expect a higher bar when we dine out. But I also think there’s something to the idea that food and especially food “experiences” are overvalued these days, and that to some extent restaurants have chased that experience, or just the aesthetic of it. Read this article, for example. But not while you’re eating.

It’s also interesting that the social nature of dining out feels diminished along with the increase in the culinary expectations. The pandemic laid bare the commercial nature of restaurants. The whole experience is definitely more rushed now. And not for places that are amazing, or where it’s maybe charming to get pushed through quickly because it’s part of the atmosphere or something. It’s pretty much everywhere now.

My parents don’t much care for dining out anymore, especially not at this vast sea of kind-of-expensive, aesthetically trendy, but mediocre places. They all feel a little soulless and 20 percent too expensive. My dad recalled a little place in an old house run by a friendly guy, where they used to eat sometimes back in the ’80s, 10 or 15 minutes from their house. It was kind of intimate and personal, at a scale where the owner could actually chat with you or ask how everything was and mean it as more than a formality. The food was certainly good, but it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

I remember the same sort of dining out experience at various diners and Italian restaurants and places like that. That kind of qualitative restaurant experience is something I haven’t experienced in a long time. At least not in the D.C. area. Am I just imagining a cultural shift based on my geographic shift, or is this real?

Was the huge shift several years ago to more spending on restaurants and prepared foods than raw groceries unsustainable and now reversing?

And yet restaurants have gotten cheaper or held their prices, all told. I’ve read many times, on the Northern Virginia Facebook groups, about a local chain called Chesapeake Bay Seafood House. All you can eat snow crab legs, fried scallops, steamed shrimp. For a price that’s not cheap, but competitive, in today’s dollars. It wasn’t a buffet—they’d bring the stuff to you in plates. People remember it as being generous. Is that just nostalgia? Or was it really—as far as I can tell, as an all-you-can-eat connoisseur—superior to any restaurant now in existence anywhere in the area?

What is the nature of this shift or trend? Higher labor prices? Higher food prices? Foodie-ism turned unreasonable expectations of ordinary establishments? Too much affluence?

Familiarity breeds contempt. I wonder if doing without a little bit—not in an East German sense, but in a Lenten sense—would do us some good.

Restaurant commentary always seems to spark some conversation. So go ahead and tell me what you think!

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Related Reading:

Iconic Hometown Restaurant, Obsolete Dining Concept?

Culture, Nostalgia, Cuisines as Living Things

Meat and Money in Northern Virginia

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