by Merrill Shindler
Like so many of us, I’ve been living on takeout during the dark days of the coronavirus pandemic, trapped in my home and weary of subsisting on turkey meatballs and quiche Lorraine from Trader Joe’s. I was buoyed, almost cheered, when some of Los Angeles’ most upscale and hard-to-get-into restaurants transitioned to to-go service. And yet I find myself deeply conflicted about the experience.
Yes, it’s a treat to be able to get a bento box of exquisite morsels from n/naka, a fabled Japanese restaurant with no sign in front and a waiting list that stretches into infinity. And an abbreviated tasting menu from Dialogue, a microrestaurant hidden in the back of a mall that’s spoken of in reverent tones by those who have been lucky enough to get in, makes for a unique and memorable meal.
But while eating restaurant food at my dining-room table, with a good bottle of wine drawn from the refrigerated cabinet in my garage, is fine on a culinary level, it lacks on a social level. It reminds me that the restaurant experience is about much more than what’s on the plate. In a way, food is the McGuffin of dining. It’s Rosebud, the sled in Citizen Kane. It’s the Maltese Falcon. It’s the pivot around which the story revolves—but it’s not the ultimate point of the story.
As a journalist, I’m basically an observer—a social lookie-loo. I like to watch the action in a restaurant: the servers, the bussers, the sommeliers, the bartenders, and of course my fellow diners. The show going on in the dining room can easily be more memorable than that well-turned veal piccata or perfectly grilled ribeye. I’ve seen things that, let me tell you, have served as topics for witty dinner conversation months, even years later. Restaurants and their clients do the strangest things.
Which may be why, in the end, I find myself craving not fancy meals but the old reliable: fast (or at least casual) food. Pizza has long been the sine qua non of delivery chow. It still is, especially from small, independent pizzerias crafting pies with a tasty choice of toppings: Pizzana, for instance, makes a seasonal mushroom–and–caramelized onion pizza with fontina or cauliflower besciamella for vegans. Why not?
Sushi? Well, of course! There’s a chain in Los Angeles called SugarFish that’s done incredible takeout for years, delivered in beautiful white boxes with the restaurant’s fish logo on top and many little compartments within, filled with rolls, nigiri, ginger, wasabi, soy, and ponzu. They’re not quite as elegant as the train-station bento boxes of Japan—but close enough for dining well at home during a pandemic.
There’s more: Fish-and-chips from Ye Olde King’s Head (which needs a bit of reheating but comes back to life well enough); chicken soup from Brent’s Deli (which actually improves a bit with age, as do most long-cooked dishes); and of course, Chinese food, which, along with pizza, has long been a takeout standard. Though I miss the noise and tumult of Din Tai Fung—where bamboo steamers are carried around the room by an army of runners—the soup dumplings and the cold noodle salad taste just fine.
There’s been a further benefit to takeout: It has given me a chance to get out of the house, joining the masked crowds in front of a restaurant and waiting for our names to be called. At Cuban establishment Versailles, I got into a lively (socially distanced) discussion with strangers about whether there was anything on the menu worth ordering besides the garlic chicken. It turned out no one knew, having never ever ordered anything else! The opportunity to tour the postapocalyptic streets of Los Angeles has also been eye-opening. The San Diego Freeway, empty at rush hour? Memorable…if a bit terrifying.
That said, I look forward to getting back to dining out. I look forward to returning to those traffic jams. I look forward to having conversations without N95 masks and to peeling off my Nitrile gloves. I want to go back to the days when my dining-room table was a place to put a coffee cup and nothing else. I’ve long believed restaurants are essential to our very being; now I’m more convinced than ever.