I clicked on the story linked below because I misread the headline as “I Miss My Family Restaurant.” Which I do. But the correct reading works too.
Our neighborhood brew pub has been closed to inside dining since March. We would eat there about once a week, sometimes with friends, occasionally just myself. Some of my most creative ideas come while discussing the week’s events there over food and a couple of beers. Except for eating there on a picnic table in the parking lot once this summer, we’ve been ordering take-out pizza to help keep them going until the plague lifts. Same with our favorite Thai restaurant … and Chinese restaurant … and Italian restaurant.
I Miss My Restaurant Family, Unfortunately
We miss them, the local restaurants, friends who own them, and their staffs. Not eating out this year has been one of the toughest inversions of normalcy beside the Trumpism of the last four. Servers are a kind of extended family for regular customers. You know their names and snippets of their stories. You ask for their sections and tip them well. Having spent a few years on the other side of this arrangement, that comes naturally. We’ve been there.
Sam Stone writes of his coworkers, they were “family because they annoyed the hell out of me but I had to spend time with them regardless.” You find a way to get along because you have to:
My coworkers had become a sort of un-chosen family, and almost four years after that first training shift, when the coronavirus shutdown meant we would no longer see one another every day, I was surprised to find that I, unfortunately, missed them.
I missed the way Tom surreptitiously slid me a bitters-and-soda under the bar at the end of a particularly grueling shift. I missed Robbie waxing poetic about malolactic fermentation while I frantically tapped an order into the computer, my section absolutely burning to the ground. I missed the collective dread of a menu quiz at a pre-shift meeting, and I missed the sweet silence that hung in the air as we sat at the bar after a long shift in the wee hours of the morning, counting tips.
Work at my restaurant was loud and chaotic, and it’s easy to remember it only for its unpleasantness. A shift often felt like seven consecutive hours of wealthy older women screaming at me about bottled water, but as I spent the past months sifting through my years there, I realized that what made it even remotely bearable was my co-workers and the camaraderie we built because we had no other choice.
Not only do we miss our un-chosen pub family today, but our real ones.
A friend’s mother was a British war bride who went through The Blitz huddled each night in the London Underground. My father-in-law would have eaten his Thanksgiving dinner in 1944 out of a mess kit somewhere in Alsace near the German border.
So it boggles the mind how Americans who fantasize themselves Minutemen with AR-15s refuse to defend the colonies by not riding into Tarrytown or Newark for a pint. They pitch public tantrums over being asked to wear simple surgical masks. Tyranny!
It may not look like wartime, but with over a quarter million Americans dead, 90,000 hospitalized, and over 2,000 dying of COVID-19 each day, just because there is no shelling in your town does not mean this is not a war.
We are all just trying to survive it. One Thanksgiving away from families is an unacceptable hardship? Spare me.
Meantime, local restaurants and churches s here are cooperatively bulk-buying free-standing propane heaters for conducting business outdoors as winter sets in. They’ll get no help from a Mitch McConnell Senate.
“If I could make a plea to people,” The Market Place chef and owner William Dissen told local press, “Just be kind.” Obstreperous, rude and rowdy customers only add to everyone’s stress. And there are plenty.
“I’m very thankful my staff have shown how strong they are and wonderful and resilient,” Dissen said. “They’ve had to deal with a lot. This is my restaurant family and my team, and I’ll do what I can to protect them.”
Do what you can to protect yours. May we all find a way to get along because we have to.
Thank you for visiting with us here every day. Happy COVID Thanksgiving.