NYT editorial on the restaurant scene in NY

quote:

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Restaurants symbolize not just high points and low points but also whole chapters of our lives, whole facets of our identities. They’re part of the topography of our journeys.

Many decades after the fact, my siblings and I still reminisce about Remington’s, a restaurant in Southern California where we often celebrated Christmas Eve in the years just before our mother died. “Remember the size of those steaks?” one of us will say, but we’re not talking about beef. We’re talking about grief — or, rather, about the joy and innocence that preceded it.

Remington’s closed long ago, because that happens to restaurants. They fall out of favor. They fall on hard times.

But they don’t fall with this suddenness — bustling one day, barricaded the next. They don’t fall in these numbers. It’s as if pages of a cherished scrapbook are being ripped out and thrown away, one after another after another. We’re losing the past along with the present and the future. We’re losing the very refuges we might have gone to for solace.

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