Restaurant R.I.P.: an Ongoing Series

I don't know what it is, I can't...it's coincidence, that's all, I can't get my mind around it, it's...

It's just that, within the past six months or so, five of my favorite restaurants have gone. That's not even counting Parwana! Wonderful as Parwana was. Irreplaceable as they were. We didn't go there all the time, and as much as I mourned when we walked up and saw the sign in the window (will I ever again eat lamb that tastes like flowers and LOVE IT? Will anyone else approximate that Cherry Shrub soda?), it was not a mainstay for us.

We've lost five mainstays. One after the other. After each one, it seemed like that had to be the last - it seemed like that last one had to be the capper, the final outrage, that it just can't get any worse. But the toll continues. When will it end? What is going on? Is there a single underlying cause? Did rents rise for restaurants?

Three of them just vanished without warning - leaving nothing but an empty building and maybe a paper sign in a window to greet you, as you walked up hungry with dreams of favorite and irreplaceable dishes dancing on your mind's tongue.

A mind can have an eye; it can have a tongue.

One of them is still there in name, but the new ownership has eliminated or changed all of the things we loved that made the place beautiful and drew us back again and again. Oh sure, they still have a bolognese. A now totally ordinary bolognese. What the fuck good is that to us, particularly?

The fifth - we just found out about it yesterday - is still in business. For days perhaps, maybe a few weeks. The owner has sold, and the old chef stays on just for the transition. The whole menu and theme will change. But at least we had a chance to say goodbye! It was awful. I mean, it was great as always, transcendent, but what a heartbreaking celebration it became! We could not order everything, but we tried to order the things that just nobody ever did as well, or that nobody else even had. We had the tricolor flan, the hearts of romaine salad, the beet and mandarin salad, the hangar steak and the roast chicken - every one of these is just a best-in-class execution*, and many of their menu items defied classification entirely! Yet never experimentalism for its own sake. Never a "what the hell was the idea behind this supposed to be?" Every dish always seemed an ideal embodiment of some theory or tradition that had been perfected over decades if not centuries, even though you knew damn well that you'd never seen it anyplace else before and that surely they must have just come up with it themselves.

It may have been the best meal we ever had there, but perhaps the heightened emotional circumstances played into that. Plus the extra drinks I ordered.

Morbid as it seems to me now, this series - Restaurant R.I.P. - was conceived as an effort to at least give some tiny bit back, or if not "give back," at least bear witness. Make some small testament to the worth of the efforts of chefs and restaurateurs who poured their hearts' love and all the cleverness of their minds into designing so many wonderful dishes and evenings and breakfasts and moments that I am literally crying as I write this.

Bon appetit, and rest in peace.