Dining Out II Dateline: Patio

There was a time, in March of 2021, when the pandemic seemed to be ending and you ate, for the first time, in a restaurant. Of course, you did not really eat “in” a restaurant, but outside it, on a patio. So many things changed during the pandemic, but one of those things was the meaning of “in” and “out.” The difference between those two words meant everything, but also nothing at all. During  lockdown, you have spent a lot of time eating on your porch; this is clearly dining out for the few friends in your bubble, but for you is it dining in or dining out? Sometimes you think of yourself as a Jane Austen character, puzzling over whether a particular (female) character is “out” and therefore eligible for the marriage plot, or “not out” which is never expressed as “in” although those characters stay home with their mothers when their sisters meet their future husbands at dinner parties. Often you ponder that great binary that has pursued you all your life: is it better (or rather worse) to be locked in or locked out?

You and your friends, who were your bubble and who are now, in the idiom of restaurant culture, your “dining companions” or even more thrillingly, your “party,” have emerged into the Houston spring. The flowers are blooming, along with the pollen that in past years would have kept you inside. You are a butterfly; you have left behind your chrysalis—or perhaps it is a cocoon; you don’t remember the difference. You wonder if butterflies feel quite as vulnerable as you do on their first flight. Perhaps you are instead a hermit crab caught between shells, naked to the air that might be full of virus that is  masked by the scent of jasmine. But it is not really that the air feels infectious. Rather, it feels, even on this beautiful no-temperature day so rare in Houston, slightly solid, a medium to be negotiated, along with the parking and restaurant reservations.

You and your friends have, it appears, forgotten how to do restaurants. You are at one of your local favorites, the Indian-fusion Pondicheri, where you went so often in the before times. One of the great things about Anita Jaisinghani’s eatery is that it is open all day; you can have an egg dosa for breakfast, return for a frankie at lunch, and feast on a dinner thali. You can even go upstairs to the Bake Lab for tea, where the pastry case is filled with the sweet and the savory, the gluten free and the glutinous. The restaurant, which has always seen itself as a neighborhood hangout, never took reservations—a slight annoyance that made it impractical for professional dinners. Now, mid-pandemic, that annoyance has bloomed into an anxiety. Will we get an outside table? After all this waiting, will we really be able to dine out?

Of course, the reservation rules have changed, along with all the other rules. Pondicheri accepts reservations now, but you are stuck in the old ways and the old annoyances. You could have checked the restaurant website  to see if reservations were possible, but you would rather do anything than look something else up on your phone when the whole point is that you will be, for this one night, eschewing the digital  . In any case, you are so early that your party is the only one on the newly expanded  patio. You and your party are not so much butterflies as early birds; you lean into your age, which is over 60, something of which the pandemic reminds you daily. 

This is a new and more colorful world. There are umbrellas and potted herbs in planters that you do not have to weed. There is a masked waiter, whose eyes and eyebrows are strangely familiar. It turns out that he used to serve you in the before times, on Wednesdays after your seminar, when you stopped for the dosa special at the halfway point of your commute home. On the table are glasses that you will not have to wash, and also crisply folded napkins with no stains on them.

For once, you don’t care much about the food. You have been ordering takeout from Pondicheri throughout the pandemic; the disaster-streamlined menu is as familiar to you as your own kitchen. You have probably, in the last year, eaten every item on the menu and have assessed each item for how well it survived the drive home from the restaurant where you picked up your order. They never did do delivery—another slight annoyance, although the drive was an outing of sorts. Today, you will not have to worry about durability.  You can order the naan, which got kind of limp, and the samosa which could not be fully revived in your oven. For once, however, you are very interested in the wine. You have certainly drunk wine during the pandemic, but not very much. Wine for you is for festive occasions, and there have not been many of those. You realize that you have only had wine outside, on the porch, when your bubble-mates came to dine.

The waiter comes over and makes a joke you cannot hear through the layers of cloth that constituted a mask in those pre-N95 days. Shockingly, you remember the name of the wine you liked: something Cannonball. They do not have it. You do not care. You are not sure you remember the waiter’s name from so long ago, but you do not ask, because he feels like your best friend and you feel like you should know, even though you last saw him a disaster ago. “Andrew,” you think, but do not say out loud. Andrew, if indeed this is his name, tells the group his pandemic story, about how the restaurant dealt with staffing shortages, illness, and the lack of customers. His story, as he tells it that night, is all about work. You do not know, have never known, if he has cats or  a human family, or what his hobbies are. He does nto tell you if he has caught COVID, if he has been ill, if he is mourning a friend or a family member. You counter, half-ashamed, with stories of remote teaching.

The waiter, perhaps Andrew, brings everyone a glass of wine. You look around the table and watch as early evening light makes the glasses glow. You think of Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, a book you taught every-year for twenty years until you decided you could not stand listening to her upper-class voice in your head.  You look on your phone for this passage that details the luxurious provisions at a men’s college, contrasting them with the fare at their new counterparts for women : “Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.” You have remembered the first part, the one about flushing, but not the part about rational intercourse.  You sip the wine which is just the right non-temperature and reflect that a glass of it costs about the same as a bottle that you would drink—or not drink—at home. Tonight it is worth it; you are Virginia Woolf at a men’s college, you are a butterfly or a crab, you are a professor at an elite college with the option to stay at home, you are an old lady: vaxxed, masked, and dining out.