Restaurant owners talk about how hard it is to survive, but they keep one gripe pretty much to themselves because the public might take offense: They’d like us to act more like our parents and less like the tourist who backed into and damaged a painting while taking a selfie at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy.
To put it in gentler terms, they want us to be more mindful and less performative — to regard dinner at a restaurant as dinner at a restaurant, not as a backdrop for our “notice me” lives. You know: to live in the moment.
Influencers toting selfie lights started it, letting their food get cold while they set up their shots, but this is bigger. We cater to our shrinking attention spans even as we bemoan them, and restaurants bear the brunt. We forget how to sit still; a beautiful plate of food and the chance to catch up with friends is no longer the sufficient thrill it used to be.
A party of eight settled in next to my table of two, recently, and managed to order, take lots of photos, graze distractedly through some small plates, call friends and leave before we finished our meal. What they did not do, because they were loud enough to overhear, was have a conversation of any length, or stop long enough to register how good the food was.
I watched the server struggle to make sense of the happy confusion. In the before times, when restaurateurs like New York’s Danny Meyer banned cell phones at the table, food and conversation drove the rhythm, and servers monitored their tables so the kitchen had the entree ready when a table of four finished their pasta. Today’s diners raise a new question: How can you provide that level of service to people who act like you’re interrupting them — and how can you keep from interrupting when they’re constantly interrupting themselves?
On some level this was inevitable. Ten years ago, a young chef warned me not to take his opening-week crowds seriously, because they’d quickly move on to the next new place. Now they’ve figured out how to be here and not be here at the same time, to disseminate rather than experience. It recalls the Philosophy 101 question about the tree that fell in the forest: If no one was there to hear it, did it make a sound? In the culinary version, if no one pays attention to the meal and the company — if no one’s listening because they’re so busy sharing — maybe the good time never really happened.
To be fair, many trendy restaurants encourage this behavior, as you know if you’ve tried to enjoy a meal sitting on a purposely uncomfortable chair at a table wedged too close to its neighbors in a room that encourages lip-reading. But there’s a point at which being boisterous stops being fun. I recently asked a server if she could turn the music down, which I’m reluctant to do because it confirms that I am an older person who doesn’t know how to have a good time — and to my surprise she thanked me. The customer is always right, so she could blame me for something she’d wanted to do all along.
If we are patient, having a less frantic meal might someday develop a retro cachet, but right now I know people who’ve cut back on going out, complaining that hospitality has declined even as prices rise. Rather than break up with restaurants, we might consider how to help salvage the relationship, starting with a better mindset: A good restaurant is not the equivalent of an electric car charging station, not a place to fuel up while we scroll, make calls or watch TikTok videos until we hit 100%.
Sure, it can be fun, sometimes, to disappear into a noisy room and settle for an Instagrammed evening of being watered and fed — but we shortchange ourselves if that becomes the default. There are more lasting experiences to be had, if we just slow down for a second.
I read the ambivalent reviews of Season 4 of “The Bear,” but Carmy brought me up short in the flashback opener, when his brother asked him why he wanted to open a restaurant, given how difficult it is to succeed.
“Every one of our good memories, they happened in restaurants,” Carmy said. “Because restaurants are special places, right? And people go to restaurants to be taken care of.” He wasn’t talking about the latest tough reservation but about childhood favorites, including Homer’s Ice Cream, north of Chicago. I know exactly what he meant: I, too, spent some summer evenings at Homer’s with my parents and younger sister, with nothing but the breeze and conversation to entertain or distract us. That’s what I’m after — a brief interruption in the day, a downshift from what now passes for reality and feels too often like chaos. The experience of being taken care of, if only briefly.
Restaurants these days too often feel like the culinary equivalent of doomscrolling, and we all know we’re not supposed to do that if we want to sleep well, stand up straight and protect our ability to concentrate on anything lasting longer than three minutes. But we can make it better. Dining out the old-fashioned way might be as good for us as stuffing the phone in a drawer for two hours a day.
Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. Take a seat. Don’t take a photo or talk to people who aren’t at the table with you. See how it goes. Your neighborhood spot says thank you.
Karen Stabiner’s most recent book is “Generation Chef: Risking It All for a New American Dream.”
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