My wife and I ate at a restaurant last night for the first time since early March of 2020. I used to eat out a lot - my wife and I would have regular dates at different restaurants in town, and I would dine in nice restaurants on work trips quite frequently. I loved restaurants, dining, and drinking. I subscribed to multiple food and restaurant magazines and always kept up with new restaurant openings, which ones were closing, what ventures local chefs I followed were starting, and who was being nominated for James Beard awards. I was into it. It was a hobby.
So, I was surprised when, during the pandemic, I didn’t miss restaurant dining very much. In the same way I didn’t miss travel. I started cooking a lot more, and learning more about food, ingredients, techniques. I started spending much more time preparing meals than I had in the past, and developing a more aware taste for how different plants behave when you do certain things to them or mix them with different ingredients. What goes well with what. Which vegetables are better blanched, roasted, or sautéed. Recently, I’m learning more about vinegars and how to find and use the tremendous range of vinegars out there, and which ones go better with which vegetables.
It wasn’t until we sat down at the restaurant last night that the impact of my decision to switch to a plant based diet really hit me. It is easy to be vegan when you are cooking all your own meals and have access to fresh produce. When you aren’t in control, though, it feels like a much bigger constraint. The waitress came by and asked if we had any questions. I told her I was vegan.
“I’m vegan!” She responded instantly, “I always have to lie about the food here when customers ask for recommendations because I can’t eat any of it.” It was funny. I felt her empathy and compassion, and also had to laugh at the reality of the situation. She explained to me what she could do, and what she couldn’t do, with the menu. I felt I was in good hands.
We sat on the patio, which abutted a beautiful park. As I looked around at all the people eating, talking, drinking, I realized how not ready I was to eat inside. If we had sat inside the restaurant, which was crowded and felt chaotic, I would have felt anxious, I would have been on edge, I would have been eager to leave and there would be no hope of me relaxing, or enjoying the evening with my wife. But the patio was OK. The patio felt safe. My wife and I looked at the drinks menu. This was my first time reading a drinks menu since I stopped drinking. I used to love reading the drinks menu. The descriptions of the different cocktails. The origins of the wines. The anticipation of the first sip of alcohol washing through my chest and into my limbs, making me feel safe, secure, confident.
This drinks menu had a non-alcoholic section, which was a welcome change. Two years ago I wouldn’t have been looking for it, but my memory is that the NA section on the menu was typically limited to coke, sprite, and iced tea. At more thoughtful restaurants there would be kombucha, perhaps, or maybe an assortment of seltzer waters. But this was a full selection of mocktails (a term I just can’t say with a straight face). As I read through the list, I was both impressed and not interested. Things like honey, sage, cardamom, rose water, bitters, lemon, pomegranate, and “carbonation”. As intriguing as they looked, none of them were appealing. But, they had a craft non-alcoholic microbrew, which was the perfect thing for one of the first warm, sunny days of the year.
We ordered our drinks (my wife got a real cocktail) and we looked around while we waited. It was a long wait. With the current labor shortage, I had read that restaurant service is significantly slower and more error prone than we remember from before the pandemic. Be patient, restaurant critics have been writing, and be nice. Tip well, and try to empathize instead of getting upset. Restaurant goers need to be retrained with new expectations in a world where there are fewer workers, more risk, and more stress for everyone involved. I realized how long it had been since I just sat somewhere in public and watched people. I used to do this often, sitting in cafes or bars with my journal, writing for hours while sipping a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.
As we waited for our drinks, I felt a sense of calm and patience. I enjoyed the warm sun, the people watching, the beautiful park that surrounded us. And I knew that if I was still drinking, and if I had ordered a cocktail rather than a non-alcoholic beer, that instead of feeling calm and content, I would, at that moment, be feeling anxious and getting frustrated at the long delay. I would be wanting my drink. I’d be turning my head frequently to the door where the server would emerge from, hoping that he’d be there with our drinks on a tray. Each time he wasn’t there, I’d get a little more upset, and probably start complaining to my wife about the delay. “This is taking forever,” I’d say, and mentally consider reducing my tip as the minutes ticked on. It felt so good to not have those feelings, and to realize that I wasn’t having those feelings, and to just sit and be content.
I watched as other diners drank. An expanding table at one end of the patio with its growing group of friends, all dressed in black, all looking like sophisticated, urban, cultural elites, ordering round after round of wine as they waited (and waited) for their food to arrive. I knew those people; I used to be in that group. I used to find so much comfort in being among people who wanted to drink as much as I did. Being with a group where I didn’t have to order another drink because someone else was already getting another bottle for the table. Being with a group where we could get ridiculously drunk while also feeling smug and superior in our refined appreciation of the arts, as if we were really going to have a deep cultural experience during the performance we planned to see after dinner, all drunk, all waiting for intermission so that we could order another round at the bar before the second act.
I watched as the beautiful, black clad, wine drinkers got more and more sloppy. One got up and started doing an odd sort of dance, inspired by the way the wind had blown her large brimmed hat. I would not like that woman, I thought, if I was part of that group. I’d be wanting her to contain herself, even as I would drink to excess and start to exhibit my own drunken tendencies. Mine didn’t come in the form of interpretive dance (well, unless I was really drunk), but usually in the form of increasingly dark and biting sarcasm, alternately funny or mean depending on your perspective and your mood.
At another table sat two couples, just a bit younger than us, with one infant child between them. The child was young enough that she could be taken to restaurants and depended upon to rest quietly in her stroller without too much fuss while her parents enjoyed themselves. The child was too young to walk, too young to move herself more than a few inches, too young to eat with her hands and make a mess. Too young to interrupt the new parents as they enjoyed cocktails in the sun with their friends. I used to be them, too. So happy to have a drink, and then another drink, and probably one more drink, to relieve the stress of being responsible for a human life in ways that had been unimaginable just months earlier. In that context, I would be the one flagging down the waiter as my wine glass drew down, anxiously anticipating the delay between when I finished the first drink and the second one was delivered. “Would anyone else like another?” I’d ask, hoping that at least one or two of them would express the same amount of eagerness as I did, but knowing that even if they all said no I’d still charge ahead into round two.
I remember once, years ago before I was married, having dinner with a group of friends, getting up to secure another bottle of wine before our food arrived. “The waiter will be here any minute,” one of the friends said. “You don’t have to go to the counter,” another one added. But we were out of wine, I thought, and that situation had to be remedied quickly. I couldn’t leave it to the whims of the waiter’s schedule during the dinner rush. I went to the counter and returned with a bottle of wine, open and ready to pour. Nobody complained, but only now do I realize the desperation that must have shown in my eyes, and how rude it was, how strange, to need that second bottle so urgently that I would get up and barge over to the counter despite the gentle attempts at redirection from my friends. I was oblivious. I was under the spell.
It was, apparently, prom night, and the park adjacent to the restaurant was filled with creatively dressed up kids taking pictures before the big event. Three prom going high school kids sat at the table closest to us. They were an interesting group, sort of quirky, both participating in the ritual of prom but also gently mocking it. I thought about how when I was in high school I rejected prom, and felt rejected by it. But these kids, instead, were making it their own thing. I admired them, and thought how nice it was that these kids who perhaps didn’t fit with the “mainstream” didn’t care and forged ahead. I imagined that at least one of them was on the spectrum (since my diagnosis I find myself silently diagnosing others with some frequency). We saw lots of kids who seemed to have the same idea - participating in prom on their own terms. It was refreshing and gave me a kind of hope.
Our drinks still had not arrived, and I still felt fine, as my wife and I enjoyed this moment of rest. We talked like we hadn’t talked in a while - it’s hard to find moments of calm with no work, no demands, nothing pulling one or the other of us away. The evening played out slowly, and I was patient and content. It was both a signal that we can start to emerge and participate in the world and also a reminder that it’s going to be slow going, just one little bit at a time.