Where Everybody Knows Your Name
What the "Third Place" has to do with Culinary Culture
It’s rare that reading something related to my dissertation brings me genuine joy nowadays (them’s the breaks as one enters the home stretch of drafting prior to defending). But right now I’m relishing The Great Good Place, the fantastic 1989 book by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in part because it gives me the imaginative freedom to imagine myself in the public sphere again in a post-pandemic* world. (*Asterisk offered because, if we’re wrong, it’s not the worst thing to hedge one’s bets.)
In this book, Oldenburg articulates the significance of “informal public gathering places” that are not only distinctive to urban environments, but crucial to the creation of social ties unaffiliated with the workplace or domestic sphere. Such “third spaces” as the coffeehouse, the pub, the local soda fountain or lunch counter facilitates places that could allow people to casually encounter one another, to make acquaintances in an genial, community-oriented fashion before involving extended planning or strategic merging of social spheres. When such spaces are taken away, or never created in the first place, Oldenburg argues that undue burden is placed on the two remaining spaces of the home and office to serve the full physical, social, and emotional needs of the individual. “In the absence of an informal public life,” Oldenburg writes, “people’s expectations toward work and family life have escalated beyond the capacity of those institutions to meet them. Domestic and work relationships are pressed to supply all that is wanting and much that is missing in the constricted life-styles of those without community.” (Oldenburg 1989: 9) Moreover, the third space also allows us to encounter one another on value-neutral terms—not as mothers or wives or employees (senior or junior), but as individuals. Freed from categories of obligation and meaning-making, we are simply fellow coffee-consumers, whiskey-drinkers, enjoyers of hot pots of tea and broken-in armchairs.
So many dining spaces are “third spaces,” especially in urban centers, and that should come as no surprise to anyone who has lived in New York City, even for a brief period. When I was first out of college and living by myself on the Upper West Side (in a beautiful studio that I couldn’t afford), I rationalized that a tiny living space meant that I would have to make the city my living room. So I sought out third spaces that I would go to, notebook and pen in hand, seeking creativity and insight at a low low price—the local Chinese restaurant where the food was terrible but the white wine was cheap and copious, the Haitian bakery with ample seating and astonishingly great croissants, and eventually, the great Hungarian Pastry Shop on the Upper West Side, where so many writers (aspiring and established) found themselves in the thrum of abundant espresso and collective aspiration. To live in New York is to constantly be aware of one’s own hunger for greatness, and to be cautioned that a full belly of success is anything but guaranteed. Yet that such spaces also served food also meant an acknowledgment that ambition was never quite enough—one also occasionally required a piece of cake, preferably German Chocolate.
Though I didn’t know myself as a “food person” right away in the city, I could also recognize that some of the value of being in these third spaces was the chance to peer into and interpret other people’s orders. The student drinking shot after shot of espresso next to me while also swirling their finger in the sugar left over from an elephant ear was undoubtedly a poet—someone who took their craft, but also personal pleasure, deeply seriously. The man scribbling with charcoal in an oversized drawing pad while awaiting his third profiterole of the day was an established artist, working towards an upcoming exhibition. This kind of imaginative projection between one’s art and one’s order was even better explored at a bar. Single women ordering whiskey neat, groups of men ordering drinks with umbrellas, these spaces allowed me to see my fellow New Yorkers as complicated, contradictory individuals, each of whom used food to signal something in the public sphere.
As I write (in my dissertation) about how cooking knowledge became seen as cultural knowledge, I have tried to resist returning to the question of taste and consumption as a means of signaling cultural capital, something so well-covered by so many other brilliant scholars. Consuming food is quite a different act (both publicly and privately) than preparing food, and both acts have very different consequences as things that make us as individuals intellectually and aesthetically intelligent. But I don’t know how we talk about food knowledge becoming a form of culture without first talking about the spaces in which we see each other consume food, the spaces in which such consumption becomes profoundly visible and, subsequently, symbolic to the selves we wish to create. Ordering a piece of cake is not the same thing as making a cake, and yet dedicating oneself to the concept of the act in either scenario constitutes is a important and intentional act of signification. Cake, we seem to say, matters, whether we make it or order it, to the constitution of the self.
At this point in 2023, still masking most of the time, I haven’t yet returned to my myriad of former third places, and unfortunately a number of them have closed since my last visit. But if and when I return to them, I have to ask whether I am ready to brave such spaces of comestible visibility again, to order my cake and coffee, open my laptop and state, unequivocally, that I am there.
Recommendation: Due in no small part to Karina Longworth’s brilliant podcast, You Must Remember This, and its recent focus on the “Erotic 90s”, I had a chance to revisit Pretty Woman, a movie I didn’t watch until I was well into the Julia Roberts renaissance (which I generally chart from My Best Friend’s Wedding to Erin Brockovich). To say that this is a film that simplifies the concept of sex work is to understate the obvious; instead of questioning its realism (because, why bother), I’m fascinated by how one-sided it is as a romantic comedy—in part because it fuels almost no erotic appreciation of or enthusiasm for Gere’s character, and instead allows us, the viewer, to fall completely and unreservedly in love with Roberts’ Vivian, which then complicates the way moralizing puritans might feel about empathizing with a prostitute. Yet, as Longworth points out, this is a profoundly capitalist narrative, one in which two skilled businesspeople find an erotic charge in testing the limits of their own monetizable arrangement. Viewed through this lens, I found it a surprisingly provocative and enjoyable film (even though I still found the shopping sequence to still be, as always, hugely cathartic.)
The Perfect Bite: During our last class session on Tuesday, one of my students made a batch of focaccia so good I’m still thinking about it. I didn’t ask her for the recipe (yet), but I’m guessing that the secret is somewhere in the olive oil-to-salt ratio that makes it so impossibly delicious, and so I’m thinking about this as a potential dish to master over the summer. Maybe I’ll start with Samin Nosrat’s version and then build from there—perhaps by August eventually developing my own perfect batch to go on rotation.
Cooked & Consumed: For reasons slightly unclear to me, this weekend has been one full of lime juice, soy sauce, and fish sauce. First a beyond-delicious skirt steak on Friday (served up with grilled peppers, squash, and tortillas) and then tonight, a twofer of Vietnamese-inspired grilled chicken and tomato salad. As we transition into grilling season here in the Northeast, I find that the umami richness that develops through slow cooking in the oven has to transition to faster modes of cooking, which is where this magic trio of flavors adds so much depth and complexity regardless of the length of cook time.