A Love Letter to Restaurants

Writing & reading this letter was one of the highlights of my fall so far...

As the holidays approach, I’ve been looking back at the fall, and there’s one thing that rises to the top as an absolute highlight for me: the Welcome Conference. Will Guidara (remember how much I love his book?) and his excellent team convened over a thousand restaurant people at Lincoln Center—and you know how I feel about restaurant people.

Will and my old friend Brian Canlis asked me to speak, and I was equal parts honored and, to be honest, starstruck/massively nervous. I wrote a love letter to restaurants, and I read it that day.

As we go into the holiday season—a notoriously grueling stretch for anyone in the hospitality industry—I hope this communicates to you how deeply I value your work and the sacrifices you make for all of us of us who are lucky enough to sit at your tables. THANK YOU!

A Love Letter to Restaurants

I’m so happy to be with you today. I’m a writer, I live here in New York, and while I’m not a part of the restaurant industry in any way, I have attended the Welcome conference several times, because I think the restaurant world is just absolutely magical.

I have a list a mile long on my phone of places I’m excited to try. I have been known to recommend a couple things on the menu to the diners next to me, and also next to them, and also next to them.

If we’re at Ci Siamo, and I happen to look over and see that you didn’t order the onion torta, I’m going to very politely intervene. If you’re at Fini Pizza and you don’t get the white slice with lemon, I’m just going to get one for you. If you don’t order the frena at Shukette, an alarm goes off in my apartment, and I run down 9^thAvenue to change your mind.

I get texts from friends all over the country—

I’m in Santa Barbara, where should I eat?

I’m in Chicago, who makes the best pizza?

I’m in New York for one night—where should I have dinner?

The answers are, respectively: La SuperRica, Lou Malnati’s, and Laser Wolf.

I love the worlds you all have created. I’m so grateful for the work you do. I benefit so deeply from your creativity, your talent, your brilliance, your hospitality.

And so when my great friend Brian Canlis asked me to speak to you, I couldn’t say yes fast enough, and I asked permission to write a love letter, and that’s what I want to read to you today.

This is a love letter to restaurants, and to all of you who run them, work at them, manage them, labor over them—a love letter to the extraordinary work you do, on behalf of all of us whose lives have been changed and enriched and made more beautiful and more delicious because of the work that you all do.

Thank you for feeding us, on the most fundamental level. That’s where we’ll start. Feeding someone is perhaps the first and most elemental act of love. Thank you for allowing us to enter hungry and leave satisfied.

Thank you for giving us a place to celebrate, to mark special milestones and memories. My husband and I planned to go to Italy for our twentieth wedding anniversary a couple years ago, and then a global pandemic put those plans on hold. And so instead, on the day of our anniversary, we walked down to Via Carota and had a perfect Italian meal. We told stories and laughed together and held hands across the table.

We did eventually get to Rome, and it was an amazing trip, but it’s so  special now to have that memory of that night in that beautiful space, a reminder every time we walk by…your tables and flavors and faces become a part of our most treasured memories

And thank you for giving us a place to cry and fight and grieve.

Thanks for doing that thing where you circle near the table and then notice that one or both of us are crying and then pretend that you are urgently needed back in the kitchen. Thanks for asking “another round?”  in an extremely neutral voice when it’s very clear that we are married and we are in a fight.

Thank you for being a place that tastes like home, but where we don’t have to do the dishes.

Thanks for holding our memories through foods and flavors. I’m from Chicago, and there’s a very specific set of food memories that I carry with me from my life there. And when I took the first bite of a burger at Au Cheval here in New York, it was like a magic carpet took me back to a city I love, to a very special set of memories and moments and flavors.

You do that for us—you transport us, you hold our memories and our histories.

Thanks for taking us to other worlds, other continents, other traditions. Thanks for taking us into your childhood homes and letting us sit around your tables.

Thank you for the seemingly little things you do that aren’t little at all, when you’re on the receiving end:

There’s a restaurant on our corner that I think is basically perfect. It’s called Cookshop. And I always start with the focaccia with whipped lemon ricotta, and then I pretend that I’m going to order like a grain bowl or the chicken, but one hundred percent of the time I get the pizza, so it’s a carb followed by carb meal, and I’m sure our server is like, “you’re here all the time, you have never ordered a grain bowl, but yeah, let’s go ahead with this pretense.”

When my pizza comes, I always keep the ricotta, to dip my pizza crusts. And recently I was there, I asked for the few last pieces of pizza to be wrapped up…because the only thing I like more than hot pizza for dinner is cold pizza for breakfast.

And the next morning I realized that our server packed up a little extra whipped ricotta for my breakfast time crusts—are you kidding me? I almost cried in my kitchen.

That’s what you do, that’s the magic of a great restaurant, of a great server—you see us, you notice our quirks and our funny little habits, and you know what? It feels a lot like being loved.

Every summer, all my life, we’ve been going to this little lakeshore town, and there’s a restaurant there that I love. After a particularly hard year, when we got to the lake and went for our first visit to this restaurant, my order arrived with a cinnamon bun I didn’t order, with a little flag in it, made with toothpicks and napkins, and it said, Welcome Home, Shauna. That’s what you do: you welcome us home.

And speaking of home, thank you for being away from your home and your family so that we can make special memories with ours—especially on holidays. When we eat in your restaurants for Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve or go out for Mother’s Day brunch, I know that if we’re around your restaurant tables, that means you’re not at home around your family table.

I see the weight of that, and I’m grateful. Thank you for giving us a place to celebrate meaningful traditions, even though it means you’re away from the people you love while we’re around your tables.

In my little corner of the world, I’m generally the one who feeds people, the one who sets the table, refills the glasses, thinks through the details of all the things that make someone feel comfortable…and when I come into one of your restaurants, I’m so grateful for the way you do that. I go to restaurants for the food, of course. But I also go to be cared for in the thousand little ways that you all care for us when we’re in your spaces and around your tables.

Some people get pedicures. Some people get facials or massages. But when I want to be tended to, when I want to be put back together, when I want to be cared for, I get a martini and some oysters at the Mermaid Inn on 10^th. Or a Manhattan at the bar at the Highline Hotel, which is also an excellent place for dog-watching.

When you ask if we’re warm enough, refill our glasses, ask us if we’ve saved room for dessert. When you recommend your favorite or ask if I’m all right or find me a spot at the bar. When you adjust the lighting or ask if I like my drink or answer all my questions about what kind of butter you serve, you tend to me in a way that very few people do.  Thank you.

My husband and I have two sons—they’re almost twelve and almost seventeen.

My older son is a diner and lunch counter guy, and so most of the best conversations we’ve had in the last couple years have been over eggs or burgers or milkshakes. He’s now at that age where he finishes his whole plate before I’m even half-done with mine…are you going to eat your toast? Can I have your fries? Are you going to finish your burger?

And when we’re at Le Bonbonniere or S &P Lunch or Three Decker Diner, for a little while at least, I’m not a mom bugging him about his room or college or whatever. We’re people who talk about art and music and Bob Dylan and Alex Turner and street photography. We become something else in your spaces—that’s part of the magic, too.

My younger son and I both feel pretty strongly that while we are Scandinavian, particularly on our faces, we are Italian in our hearts, so we’re always on the hunt for the best pasta—he’s a fettucine guy, and I’m always on the lookout for the best vodka sauce.

We love to go up to Arthur Avenue, the original Little Italy, and at our favorite butcher in the West Village, when he orders his mortadella and soppressatta, it comes with a heavy side of baseball trash talk, because we’re Cubs fans and the butcher is all Mets, all the time. And I love it.

You all give me a chance to be with my kids where I’m more than just a mom, where we talk about more than school and chores. You give us a shared language, a world to talk about and dream about and inhabit beyond our apartment, beyond alarm clocks and homework.

Thank you for getting us out of our roles and routines, into a place of laughter and storytelling and discovery. And thank you for giving us a soft place to land when we need it.

Several years ago, I had to end a relationship that was really important to me. My close friends knew that that day was going to be very difficult for me. One of them said, hey, I made a reservation at our favorite spot. We’ll all be there at 9pm, so however the day goes, just know you’ll end the day sitting around the table with all of us.

And that’s just what we did. And the servers and cooks and bartenders had no way of knowing what I’d faced that day, but they kept my wine glass full and they served my favorite foods and for a few hours, surrounded by friends, in a restaurant I love, you created a place for me to believe that it was going to be okay. That I was going to be okay. That’s what you do. You give us a soft place to land when everything else feels hard. Thank you for being a much-needed soft place to land.

And I wouldn’t be a mom if I didn’t end a love letter with some completely unsolicited advice:

Because I love you, I want you to take good care of yourself. I want you to take care of yourself the way you take care of every person who comes through your doors.

The work you all do is hard work, physical work, with long hours and late nights. You’re giving to people, absorbing their energy, soothing their irritations, smoothing over the bumps and bruises of their days.

You’re managing a million details and making it look easy, remembering our preferences needs, keeping a thousand plates spinning day after day. 

You’re working when we’re celebrating. You’re working when we’re sleeping. And that takes a toll.

So please tend to yourselves, the way you tend to us, the people who sit at your tables. Nurture yourselves the way you nurture us when we’re in your spaces.

This is my mom voice: go to the doctor. Get a good therapist. Take sleep seriously. If you’ve forgotten how to play, spend some time with little kids—they’re really good at it, and they’ll teach you.

Life is a long game, and we need you—whole you, healthy you, creative you, joyful, connected you, for that long game.

It’s easy to think that what the world needs from you is the product you make, the thing you do for us-- that we need your hands, your food, your ability to grind and hustle.

But we need so much more that: we need your full and thriving hearts and spirits. We need people who tend to themselves so they can keep tending to others. We need people who nourish and nurture themselves so they can keep nourishing and nurturing their communities.

We need you. We love you. And we’re so, so grateful for the magic and meaning you bring to our lives through the moments you create around your tables. Thank you.

I want to tell you one more story:

There’s a restaurant in the town where I went to college, and they have this tradition: every night, they play the song What a Wonderful World, and everyone in the whole place stands up and sings and toasts one another.

They tell you beforehand that it’s coming—they hand out cards with the lyrics, and they top up your glasses, and everything stops for just a few minutes, and you walk from table to table and sing and toast. It’s absolutely like something out of a movie.

I think maybe that’s what we’re all longing for, that’s what we all want for our families and for the people we love—that sense of celebration and connection and tradition. We want someone to remind us what matters, someone to remind us that it really is a wonderful world, at least for a few perfect minutes.

That’s what you all do.

That’s the magic you create.

That’s the beauty of what you’re building, day by day, meal by meal.

You remind us, for a few minutes or a few hours, that it really is such a wonderful world—THANK YOU.