The Dining Scene as a Dying Art

It's just a sad, sad, sad, desk salad world now

Hello! Welcome to another (free) edition of The Melt. Things have been crazy hectic around here, but they’re getting back to normal and in the next few weeks I’ll have some big paid subscriber-only news that I think is pretty good. I try to keep most stuff on here free, but the support from paying subscribers is really the only reason I can. So if you can swing it, please consider upping your subscription to a paid one. It helps.

I never ate at the Palm Beverly Hills. I had some visions of maybe “doing lunch” there and letting some Hollywood person build up my dreams of something of mine getting turned into some massive motion picture, then watching those dreams deflate over time until one day I’d realize the dream isn’t happening. I’d have nothing but my memory of when a producer took me to lunch and said I would be huge, but, hey, at least it was at the Palm.

Sadly, that Hollywood dream will never become a reality with the news that the Palm is no more. Where will I go now to have my hopes inflated to insane highs only to have them fall closer to the ground each day I don’t hear back?

But the news did make me think about how the idea of the dining “scene” is a dying thing. I don’t know when it started. Perhaps it was when the original Four Seasons Restaurant closed in 2016, then reopened nearby with designs “built from scratch” by Isay Weinfeld. Weinfeld had the unenviable task of following in the footsteps of Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, and when the new iteration of the restaurant closed less than a year after it opened, it was his work and not other circumstances that the investors pointed their fingers at as the reason things didn’t work. But more likely, it was when 21 Club was shuttered in 2020. If or when it will ever reopen is a mystery. The Palm serves as a necessary L.A. part of this larger story. These aren’t places people just casually went to. They were expensive, certain codes and rules were to be followed, the food wasn’t all that important, and some of the company was probably unsavory. But they served a larger purpose that we seem to be losing sight of more and more each day: the restaurant as a place people simply go to.

What I mean by that is that it doesn’t matter if it’s The Palm or your local diner. It can be high-end dining or the local dive bar, but I fear we’re treating these places too much as an experience. And what I mean by that is every meal you eat or each cocktail you drink in a place should be an experience, one that involves talking, eavesdropping on other conversations, jokes, little details around the restaurant you like, and, of course, the food and drinks. But more often than not, I hear people using terms like “check out” or “try” a place. Then, even if they loved every single thing about it, they may go back once or twice and that’s it. There are so many other places to go to and a thousand other dishes to try. And I get that as somebody who loves variety. But I think we’ve really forsaken the idea of a single place or maybe a couple of them being the center of our going out experience. The scene restaurant is going extinct.

I recently wrote about the anniversary of Dimes, a place that some might argue is the textbook definition of a scene restaurant since a small chunk of Manhattan has been named after it, but I’d argue that in our attempts to make a story out of every damn thing, we overlooked the fact that there isn’t much going on around Dimes Square except for a few great—and also mid, but I won’t mention which ones—places to eat, and some famous people showing up from time to time hoping to have a low-key meal. But I can’t really say it’s a scene as much as it is a place people started hearing about during the pandemic when people in the media needed anything else to write about, so the little area that had the punny nickname became shorthand for where the cool, young, and beautiful go. To do what—nobody was sure. But it stuck and people are still using it the way they did “Hipster” or “Williamsburg” to try and describe certain people or styles a decade or two ago.

I pay pretty close attention to all this stuff. Not only that, but I also like to think I know my history. Enough to know that there used to be restaurants and bars all over the country that you’d hear about and associate with something going on; not something that went on, but that was currently the center of something. Maybe it was a place in Chicago where all the newspaper reporters hung out, or maybe there was some spot in Memphis where the M.G.’s held court after a session. Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote about the old cafeterias of Manhattan where old Jews who spoke Yiddish used to conjugate, and when I was a kid, I’d read about places in cities like San Diego or Atlanta where all the punks or misfit kids used to hang after shows. It feels like all of those kinds of places have gone away. We don’t have them anymore.

My friend Dave Schilling was the one who told me about Palms news. He’s sort of my hookup for the sort of L.A. news and culture I like to know about. We started texting about the death of places both inexpensive and pricey alike, that at least felt like something was going on. I mentioned that to have a place like the Palms or 21 open up now, you’d need a team of publicists and connections to celebrities who could show up for a meal so the paparazzi could snap them going in. He mentioned that was why he liked the Eagle Rock bar Capri Club (which I wrote about a little a few months back): “It felt very natural from day one. The staff is great. The food is actually good. But it just happened through word of mouth.”

The last part is crucial. Word of mouth. Things don’t really happen that way anymore. Nothing has a chance to grow organically. If a place gets even the slightest patina going, it will usually be painted over to keep things looking fresh for the new guests that are necessary for a business to keep going. I have a few places that I’m ride or die for in New York that I think have been able to find the balance, almost all bars. Sharlene’s has always been a good example of this, probably because it’s centered in a part of town where so many writers and media people live. The other is Long Island Bar. I always expect to bump into somebody there and hear all kinds of good gossip, partially because it’s the perfect bar in terms of what they serve and it isn’t disgustingly expensive (at least to somebody who lives in NYC), but also because they’ve let it age gracefully. I’m also guessing that being a little off the beaten path probably helps its cause, especially because Elsa, another bar just a few blocks up Atlantic, has also done a good job of growing into what would constitute an “old favorite” in Brooklyn. That is, I think it has been around a little under a decade, but it looks and feels classic, and comfortable, and a lot of people I know still say we should meet there.

The Palm is on the other end of the spectrum. It was pricey and the gatekeeper thing was a big part of what made it the place it was. Same with 21, the Four Seasons, Elaine’s, or any of the other places where powerful people spent a lot of time sitting around eating lunch or dinner. They weren’t for everybody, and that’s what drew some people to them. But the fact that they existed and you don’t have really anything that replaced them is what’s so strange and sad to me.