regularity
Jul. 23rd, 2022 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
totientTse Wei Lim blogs that to be a regular at a restaurant, you have to live near it. This is in a context of creating community, and how some restaurants do it and some don't, and how there are kinds of welcoming that can only be done by a community and not by the restaurant itself.
I certainly agree about what it is to be welcomed into a restaurant. It also takes openness on the part of the diner, but I still vividly recall being welcomed by the community at the New Sheridan Chop House in Telluride, CO over a decade ago. This was largely customers, but also most of them were workers at other restaurants, that being the chief industry in Telluride in the summertime, and they were clearly friends and peers with the Sheridan's bartender. I've similarly been welcomed by the regulars at other bars and diners across the country.
But I don't think I buy that you have to live nearby. Certainly it's not sufficient. For over a year I lived about as close to Christopher's in Porter Square as you could live, and ate there several nights a week, but I was never a regular either in the sense of being part of a welcoming community of patrons there or by other measures such as getting to know any of the staff or having a standing order. I was certainly a regular by any measure at Emma's Pizza (now sadly closed) in Kendall Square, three miles from my house. And there was a while there when I'd have called myself a regular at a little Korean breakfast place in Gaithersburg, Maryland, some 450 miles from my house. Yes, that's becausenosebeepbear lives nearby, but she doesn't (and couldn't afford to) live in the tony mixed-use development for which the Gazebo Cafe was, all too briefly, part of the curated restaurant list in the way that Tse Wei describes in his post.
I certainly agree about what it is to be welcomed into a restaurant. It also takes openness on the part of the diner, but I still vividly recall being welcomed by the community at the New Sheridan Chop House in Telluride, CO over a decade ago. This was largely customers, but also most of them were workers at other restaurants, that being the chief industry in Telluride in the summertime, and they were clearly friends and peers with the Sheridan's bartender. I've similarly been welcomed by the regulars at other bars and diners across the country.
But I don't think I buy that you have to live nearby. Certainly it's not sufficient. For over a year I lived about as close to Christopher's in Porter Square as you could live, and ate there several nights a week, but I was never a regular either in the sense of being part of a welcoming community of patrons there or by other measures such as getting to know any of the staff or having a standing order. I was certainly a regular by any measure at Emma's Pizza (now sadly closed) in Kendall Square, three miles from my house. And there was a while there when I'd have called myself a regular at a little Korean breakfast place in Gaithersburg, Maryland, some 450 miles from my house. Yes, that's because
nosebeepbear lives nearby, but she doesn't (and couldn't afford to) live in the tony mixed-use development for which the Gazebo Cafe was, all too briefly, part of the curated restaurant list in the way that Tse Wei describes in his post.
