For the first time since March, New York City dining rooms will be allowed to fill every seat on Wednesday. In theory, this is huge. In fact, six-foot gaps between tables and plexiglass partitions will likely continue to be seen as long as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends them. It’s been fascinating to watch them return one piece at a time if you’re curious about what restaurants are and what makes them tick. In recent weeks, it has become clear that a half-empty dining room with people seated at the bar will feel more thrilling than one that is nearly full.
We take their contribution for granted since so many modern restaurant interiors are built around their bars. All those clattering shakers, swiveling bar stools, and bartenders looking for a bottle or a rag; the customers sitting and standing: Bars are perpetual motion devices that assist in the rotation of the dining room’s larger, slower gears. It’s difficult to get some momentum going in the rest of the room when the lights at the bar are turned off. The restaurant has an empty feel to it.
Close the bar and dining room, which we used to refer to as “the restaurant.” As several cities did last summer, replace them with tables and chairs outside. Even if it doesn’t look like a restaurant, what you have looks like one. Dining outside offers us more of what we come to restaurants for in certain ways. Do you like looking at the clothes that people have decided to wear before leaving the house? In ten minutes outside Bavette, you’ll see more accessories, fabrics, and fashions than you will in an entire night in its back room.
We get more than just chances to look at interestingly dressed people while we eat outside. There are friends, for example, who are dressed in unusual ways.
Last week, I had dinner at an Indian restaurant that recently relocated from Antoine Westermann’s “bistro of beautiful birds,” Le Coq Rico, on East 20th Street. I walked east for about 15 steps after eating before seeing an editor I used to work with sitting at a table in the street in front of Gramercy Tavern. He was dressed in a dark plaid blazer with a canary-yellow polo shirt, a look I’d never seen him or anyone else wear before. My first reaction was, “He looks fantastic. “My second thought was gratitude that he had survived the pandemic and was dining at one of his favorite restaurants, which he had frequented for years.
Then I noticed the woman standing next to him, someone with whom we’d previously collaborated. I hadn’t seen her since the pandemic started, and I had that familiar feeling you get when you reconnect with people after a traumatic experience. One of the reasons we get off the couch and leave the house is for chance encounters like this. It lasted less than five minutes, but it meant more to me than any of the online cocktail parties I’ve attended.
