In the whole restaurant, it was couples, groups of four, one group of three women, and then–us. Two women alone.
We nodded to each other and–because I was 31, which is still young, and because she was not young–she smiled and raised her glass to me. Like a silent, this is the way.
“Bridget,” she said.
We were both at Lovely’s Fifty Fifty in Portland and she debated if she wanted the pizza I ordered before her, while she was still thinking about what she wanted, or another one. So I did what I would do in this situation any time, what I have done countless times. I leaned over and said, “I ordered the rapini. If you want to order the potato,” and I raised my left eyebrow.
I started taking my salad and putting it on the plate they gave me, passed it over to her, while she, with equal parts shock and delight said, “Are you serious?”
“Dead,” I said.
It was hailing outside. Tiny balls of it. Like fancy ice in a cocktail glass. My heart was hurting.
I softened into her, this moment. The restaurant was a little too warm in the classic way restaurants with open kitchens are by the end of the night. And she and I both know: if you want a table alone, the right time to come is the last seating, if you have any sense. Where there are fewer people and you feel a little less bad about being ½ of a table. And where things are settling, quieter, so you can listen.
“Why are you eating alone,” she asked.
Instead of telling her the truth, that a man I accidentally met in a new city, two months out of a failed engagement, took me by surprise and smashed my illusions that I was in my hot girl era and wasn’t gonna give a fuck about men; because when I looked at him, I was full of wanting; and that, then, after the most tender kiss of my life (still is), and a night where he left me before midnight but told me he’d come back for me, tomorrow; after he told me he’d be able to meet me for dinner, and once again, as countless men before him had done: he didn’t.
To Bridget, I said a different truth: “This is what I do.”
CW: abuse
When I was in my early and mid 20s, I worked jobs that required travel to expensive cities to ask rich people for money for nonprofits.
At one of them, I got my per diem in cash. It was tempting–and I did at first–to just eat pop tarts and ramen and pocket the rest and spend it on toothpaste and rent.
The girlies traveling around the country to ask people for $100,000 are sometimes not making anywhere near that much, and I sure as shit wasn’t. When I started, I was living on $28,000 and per diems, which were significant enough to matter. $70-100 a day, for food, sometimes for 10 days a month? It was somewhere in the ballpark of $9,000 a year. And I wasn’t spending it.
But, when you ask rich people for money, they sometimes invite you along to do rich people things.
Like drink Bordeaux in their cellars or go to a country club or eat a 12 course tasting menu at a restaurant you’d never be able to afford one dish at, which unfortunately gave me, in my early 20s, a hankering for a different life than the one I lived: in a roach (and ant) infested apartment in a busted up neighborhood in Philadelphia with a man whose idea of a good time was drinking 12 beers and screaming at me when I came home from trivia on Thursday nights. My dream was bigger than how do I get out of here? My dream was, if I have to be here until I can get out of here, how do I survive it?
And so: half of my per diem went into an envelope that I stored in the top drawer of my office, saving bits of money he’d never know I had to flee him in the dead of night with just my dogs, a knife, and what I could take in my car, while he was in another state for work. And the other half, well—
I was in my hotel with my stomach grumbling, a bottle of wine, watching Sex and the City, things women in their early twenties did in the 2010s.
My feet killed me after all day in black pumps. And I was bored. The kind of bored that comes from traveling on a plane week after week, to a new place, with no roots, or the kind of bored you feel after you upended your life and moved across the country for a man who kept the bruises on your ribs or your back or your thighs. Places a barbell might hit at the gym. Places you might bump into the bed. A man who swore every morning that he had no memory, not just no memory, but that there was no truth, behind what happened last night.
The kind of bored that comes from, once again, listening to a rich man tell you about his stocks and you have to smile and nod and say oh yeah. The kind of bored that comes from joining a rich woman at a fancy gym for a spin class then listening to her talk about sums of money that would be life changing for you over $8 coffee. The kind of bored you feel when your fucking hotel doesn’t have a tub (they never do). The kind of bored you might experience when you’re an early stage alcoholic on a fast track to bottom.
And then I saw it. If you’ve seen it, you know it. The episode that ends with Carrie going out to dinner without a book or a journal or anything else. Just herself.
And in some ways, she’s scared to just be with herself, but she does it. As the credits rolled and that stupid music played, I stared at the bottle of wine across from me, opened my envelope of cash, and Googled: vegan tasting menu.
It came up as the first hit: Equinox. I felt a rush I hadn’t felt in a long time, a little bit like danger, but not like danger. Not like danger like my boyfriend might kill me with our dull knife. Danger like when you meet a man two months out of an engagement and feel like you might be falling in love.
Look, when I say fine dining saved my life, I don’t mean it in some abstract sense like, fine dining gave me hope or joy or purpose.
I mean it in the: I’m either going to drink myself to death or my boyfriend is going to kill me and this is the one thing I have where I don’t have to worry about that and so it’s the one thing that makes me feel safe.
I mean like when I went out to eat in Philadelphia while he was drinking himself into a man I didn’t recognize, I was feeling something that broke through the numbness of being broke as fuck and trapped in a mean ass city like Philadelphia with a mean ass man.
And so when people tell me that my love of fine dining is pretentious or extravagant, I become steely and a little mean, like when I was 19 I put $20 that I didn’t have in an envelope every week so I could spend that money at Bar La Grassa or Tilia.
When people tell me that I have nothing to say about food, I know what my face looks like, who I become: that young woman who bought my spices in 1/2 teaspoon amounts and weighed the shallots to find the smallest one so that I could have one meal a month that made me feel like life was worth living and that I wasn’t living in poverty with a man who didn’t love me.
You’re going to tell me I have nothing to say about food when it is the reason I am alive, when it is my whole beating heart, the space I feel the most joy?
I sat mostly alone at those chef’s counters or bars, but sometimes with my boss who also, really, my only friend. I got to know bartenders, who got to know me, who knew that my restaurant activity was just to eavesdrop on strangers who were falling in love, and who picked up my menu and moved it if I was sat next to other people who were not falling in love and a spot was open next to people who were.
My favorite bartender, the man in the bolo hat at Charlie was a Sinner, used to clock me coming in from the door and stand in front of where I should sit, arms acting like an airplane attendant, seating me with a wink and a, “Report back.” And I would give him ratings out of 10 for how likely I thought a second date was–and sometimes he’d report back when someone I gave a rock bottom score of 1 ended up making out (with lots of tongue and a lifted shirt) in front of him.
That girl–getting made out with–sometimes I wonder about her. Was she falling in love while my boyfriend was screaming at me in the hallway? Or threatening to throw me off the balcony? Or telling me if I ever left, he’d find me?
It was this way for me in my early-mid twenties.
“Reservation?”
“For Kirstie.”
“For … one?”
“One.”
“One?”
“One.”
“One?”
“Oh my god.”
In the early 2010s, no one was all that used to seeing a young girl (and I looked younger than I was, constantly got side-eyed at my ID) eating alone. But I didn’t know that yet. This was my first time. And so it required a little more confidence than I had to answer the first time it was asked, “One,” I said to the host, who had a feather in his hat that I wanted to pluck out and stab into my eye.
“One?” he asked one last time.
“It’s just me,” I said, with a sigh and a hand gesture like unfortunately, or, sorry.
Equinox, before it moved, had an outdoor semi-COVID style patio long before COVID. This one, walled, but from the outside, sort of looks the same. It was lit that night and plants hung from the ceiling. I was sat in front of snake plants, under a fern.
My server, upon seeing one menu in front of me, asked, “Just you?”
I wanted to rip the white tablecloth off the table and hide under it. I looked at him, RBF eye contact and said, “Has no one seen a young woman coming out to eat alone in this town?”
And with candor, he said, “Well, no,” then kind of tenderly, he added, “Not one that looks like you, anyway.” (Poor. He meant poor.) And he laughed. A laugh I can only describe as warm. As heating. As crackling.
It wasn’t the first time I consumed a testing menu. I had eaten at restaurants like this dozens of times at this point. But it was the first time I paid. And all I could afford was the tasting menu itself and one glass of (the cheapest) wine. So that’s what I ordered and which my server responded to by tapping my table and saying, “Hold on.”
When I say fine dining saved my life, I mean moment after moment after moment like this:
my server dragging a man in a suit to the entrance of the plant covered patio, talking to that man in the suit who looks so fucking tired, both of them looking at me, like oh my god can people stop looking at me, and the man in the suit coming over to my table, pulling out a chair and saying, “Never order the cheapest glass. Never order the cheapest bottle.”
“Okay,” I said to the man in the suit.
The man nodded and moved his head side to side, tongue between his teeth and lip, thinking. “Look,” he said, “[Server’s name] asked me to comp you the wine and he never asks for anything, so I’m comping you the wine.”
I looked at my server over his head, who gave me the stupidest smile and a big thumb’s up from the doorway, like he knew, somehow, he was about to change the trajectory of my goddamn life.
I know most people eat at restaurants like this in stuffy contexts or birthdays or when they get promotions, with no concept of the world around them, and with no connection to the people around them.
I know most people wouldn’t experience the world the way I did, like I slid right in, an outsider, and was treated like I belonged. Or even at the stuffy restaurants, which are always stuffy, how I can break that illusion for myself, my one table. Like snap my fingers and break the veil. It’s quite literally my job–and I’m good at it.
I know most early 20s broke ass bitches from Philadelphia would have walked into this restaurant and felt that’s not for me when the host and then the server raked them over the coals about dining alone. And most people who would arrive in restaurants trying to find this wouldn’t get it. But I swam in this world. I was able to put on a front in this world. I was able to convince rich people to give me large sums of money for organizations at a young age, and after, I would go to my car, put in my piercings, and go to the grimiest club you’ve ever been to.
I joke to the men I meet and date and try to love that no one is a stranger to me, everyone a friend. Especially at, specifically at, places where no one makes friends. And it has been and will always be true. Little slices of magic.
Bridget and countless other women like her. Bartenders watching tickets come and come and come all in a row looking at me and giving me a little salute. Servers seeing me come in and saying, “Seat her in my section,” and then taking a moment to just exhale at my table. Cooks on the line, who have seen me at the chef’s counter for years, sending me a dish. A no reservation restaurant who knows I’m coming at 5:30 on the dot putting a paper sign with the world’s shittiest handwriting on my spot with my name spelled incorrectly, filling me with the most delight I’ve ever felt. A host sitting me in the the “eavesdropping spot” because the sound from one table echoed right into it. Chefs catching my eye at the pass and taking a smoke break when I leave to give me their number.
I know most people don’t get this, no matter how hard they hustle for it. I know I’m lucky.
And I know most people now, in their 30s, don’t pick up and travel to other cities and are perfectly content to spend the rest of the day in their hotel bed watching HGTV in between some type of bougie pastry and eating at a restaurant they’ve booked a reservation for months ago. Like the day before Lovely’s, I walked around Portland out of obligation, not desire, in between meals.
Because the point of travel is not to be in the city, but to be in the restaurant.
So that is where I’m writing now: at 4:00am in the morning waiting for Ken’s to open up, so I can eat the bread I’ve been making in my own home for years, at the bakery where it was invented, thinking if the chef who couldn’t get dinner with me really had wanted to, last night he would have showed up at 12:30 in the fucking morning and neither of us would have slept. And now, while I’m finishing this piece, which became a goddamned book, instead, it could have died on the vine, never been started. Instead, all this energy: it could have been for him.
Like, thank god, Chef. What a gift. And hey, I hope you’re doing all right.
“Hey Bridget,” I said, interrupting her Youtube videos in Hebrew.
“Kirstie,” she said, mildly incorrectly, like most people do.
“Question for you.”
The restaurant had quieted down, with us and a few other tables of mostly what looked like double dates. But one table of three women who were laughing and serving each other. And a man waiting at the counter for an order, looking at his watch, looking at the ice cream in front of him, frowning.
She smoothed out her napkin. “Oh, great,” she said, turning to me, pizza in hand.
“The grim reaper comes to you.”
“Oh,” she said, frowning.
“And he says, it’s your time, unfortunately.”
“I hope not. I’m still young.”
“But you can go back to one moment in your life before you go.”
“Seems fair.”
“But there’s a catch.”
“Always is with men,” she hits my thigh. The women at the table by us laugh, like they’re in on the joke, but also our conversation.
“None of your loved ones can be there. Where do you go?”
Mouth full of pizza, she said, “Mmm! Oh, what a good party question.”
“The best one,” I said, as the women at the table turned back to each other and began to answer it, their answers popping up like little audio clips over the sounds of silverware and glasses, while Bridget was thinking.
“When I went to the wailing wall,” she said as she put her pizza down, staring at her hands.
“Oh,” I said. “I love that answer.” I was waiting for more, but she shook her head, a tiny welling of tears in her eyes. “I feel that way, too, when I think about my answer.”
“What about you,” she asked, grabbing my hand for a moment.
I tried to write it. The dinner at Equinox. But there are some things I want to keep as mine. That dinner. The way I went to the bathroom and leaned over the sink and cried. The way I went home resolved to leave him. To live. The wine. The fucking wine. The food, some of which I can still taste in my mouth. My server, who gave me the biggest gift I could have never even dreamed of asking for. How at the end of the night, I turned around and looked at the restaurant after I stepped out the door and I can still see that image in my head, seared there forever. A core memory.
I became, in that moment, the truth I told Bridget: I became a woman who dines alone, who feels most herself in these moments. It felt like destiny. It felt alive. Hey, to the server at Equinox: you saved my life.
The facts of those things, I can tell you, but the details of them are mine. So I told her, “The first time I ate at a fine dining restaurant alone.”
She lifted her fork and pointed it at my heart. “Oh,” she said. “I love that answer.”