“Is this the best night of our lives?”
A friend and I crawled into a Nolita Uber last Saturday night, elated, buzzing, full. Hours earlier, logistics had forced a last-minute reservation shift, pushing us from an early dinner at Eel Bar to a haphazardly open 7pm table at Semma. She ordered her first ever snails, stir fried and served over kal dosa. The room hummed and so did we. A light August rain followed us from 6th to Bleecker, down to Mulberry and up the stairs to Torrisi. I get a dumb little rush from trying something stupid, like walking into one of these never Resyable spots for a primetime nightcap and seeing what happens.
“Y’all have any room for two?”
“Hmm, not until 11:30.”
“What about just drinks and dessert?”
The hostess peered around the corner.
“Yeah, we’ve got you.”
For the next hour, we stood around an island throwing back espresso martinis and a frozen yogurt too good to comprehend. The staff treated us like the most important people in the restaurant, the way they do with everyone else. I swayed with happiness, without hearing any music.
During a brief silence in the car ride home, it hit me that I’m entering my third year in New York. I fled a specific kind of LA loneliness to end up here, and got dropped into an even worse New York loneliness when I arrived. Then I found homes on both coasts through nights like this, through meals in big restaurants and small dives that at first felt impractical and indulgent and disconcerting. Through dinners with people who became family because I finally let them.
LA is a particularly disorienting place to be lost. For months you can convince yourself that ease is equivalent to joy. That using all day on forms of self care and restoration — reading, swimming, tanning, cooking, running — is blissful. That having a well-paying, little-demanding tech job is a blessing. That compounding those easy mornings with random dates and third wheel dinners is a simple, fulfilling pleasure. And that, you know, acting put together will make it so. But without any real center or ambition, the ease eats away at you into its own kind of emptiness.
In a blur, I sold all my stuff and left, driving from LA to Santa Fe to Marfa to Austin. I bounced around for a while before spending a week in Hudson with my phone shut off, convinced that I’d figure out what I wanted and what I needed if I eliminated every possible digital input. There were no real revelations. I sat alone at the bars of nice restaurants reading Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior, wondering if maybe my version of guarded distance was better than whatever horrible connections her characters had constructed.
A week later, settled in New York, a different form of loneliness hit. Krissy Jones would joke with me that no one booked more Sky Ting classes in August of 2022 than I did — that no one even came close — but besides doubles at that Chinatown studio, Metrograph, and wherever Raya took me, I felt unsure of anywhere else to go. I had friends in New York. Very good, wonderful friends. Yet just like in LA, I wouldn’t concede to them that I had no idea how to navigate the city. The pervasive LA feeling of there being nothing to do was replaced in New York by knowing everything was happening, but not knowing my way to break into it. I’d go on solo walks or flirt with strangers. I’d chase something new or drift into nothing at all. I’d front like everything was great and easy.
Around this time, a new friend asked me my secret to being so chill. They found it aspirational.
“Oh, apathy,” I responded, with a smirk, lying to them and myself.
If you want a picture of what it’s like to radically run away from your insecurities, look at my calendar for a stretch in September 2022.
I was a few weeks into moonlighting as a line cook, living that thing Chris Storer captures so well in season 3 of The Bear, where every day is simultaneously monotonous and exhilarating, where you alternate hours between experiencing the biggest rushes imaginable and the crippling sense that you might not make it to midnight. (The unaccounted for blocks in here are a compilation of sleep and sending enough Slacks to not get fired from my old day job). When my friends would ask what I was up to, I’d make it sound like a cool adventure or a fun stunt. I’d say I’m basically getting paid to go to culinary school. But I was really just making extreme attempts to find a lifeline because nothing else had worked.
The loneliness dissipated almost instantly in the kitchen. All I cared about was shucking oysters a second faster, slicing fluke a little thinner, not letting anyone down, and surviving until the next day. The simplicity streamlined purpose. And I couldn’t act tough or confident, because it was too obvious I was scared and incompetent. I pushed myself so far that I finally forced myself to break.
Over the past two years I’ve had a hundred memorable meals in New York and LA. A new job celebration at Yoshino, dinner parties in Echo Park, long overdue reconnections with old friends at Stir Crazy. But many of the most meaningful are the ones I’ve shared with my restaurant family, like that Semma & Torrisi night from last weekend. Before I met them, I was used to working in environments with soft, considered language, and living with a personal disposition that everything was always fine.
On the line, blunt feedback is essential. That translated to our dinners together. Over family meals out on the restaurant patio, invites to friends’ new spots, or late night pizza runs, I’d start to spill what I was feeling. They’d already seen me at my worst and had my back. They’d watched me splash sauce all over the ceiling or fall embarrassingly behind on prep. They never let me fail. So, sure, they could hear about everything else going on.
They did what anyone else would have done: They listened, they hugged me, they told me they loved me, they made me laugh and move on. In that environment, the openness became easier to accept. The bonds strengthened. I grew to like it, and let the transparency slowly spread into the rest of my life.
I’ve lost some things by living in New York. Mostly habits. I can’t find the right groove to consistently run or cook at home or finish a book each week. I can’t maintain all of the things that made LA so easy. I miss that. But as I’ve sat at Horses and Ten Bells and All Time over the past month with the people closest to me — whether I cooked with them or not — I’ve found that I take for granted how long it’s been since I felt that same loneliness from two years ago. That freedom from reserved aimlessness. Restaurants gave that to me, and New York gave that to me.
Love this Austin! Can relate to so much of it. Thank you for sharing
Really nice