What restaurants mean to me.
By: Zack Fernandes
Tags: Covid 19, Essay, Restaurant

What restaurants mean to me.

Prix fixe as medicine, a long hug after heartbreak, and other reasons I’m very afraid of the possibility of a world without my favorite restaurants. Zack Fernandes Dec 25, 2020·9 min read

Just before Thanksgiving in 2019, I was aroused to a frantic shake of my shoulder at the 1-Michelin star restaurant, Ikoyi, in London’s St James’s neighborhood. I picked myself up, blinked a few times, and tried to figure out why I was waking up in a dining room.

When I came to, I locked eyes with a concerned looking British woman to my left, whose lips moved as she said something to me that never made its way through my ears. It seemed urgent, but my hearing wasn’t quite working. A few sips of white wine in a glass, a set of silverware on the table, and a serviette on my lap suggested to me that I was an invited guest of the restaurant and needn’t panic. I did anyway. Seconds exploded to the length of an eternity in my mind as I registered the stares of everyone in the small restaurant. What the fuck happened?

Earlier in the evening, I suffered a nasty fall when the decidedly not-slip-resistant soles of my Clarks desert boots gave way under the wet wrought iron stairs descending to my basement Airbnb. I fell the roughly 20 feet from the top of the stairs, and was just barely able to crawl my way inside.

An hour later, bloodied, practically dragging my left leg behind me, and with tears welling in my eyes, I limped down the road to Paddington station and did the only thing that made sense to me in the moment: I got on the tube to make it to Ikoyi on time for my reservation. And so it was there where, after accidentally shifting weight to my bum leg on the restaurant’s bench seating, I entered a fit of pain so intense that my vision went white and I keeled over, passed out, just before the arrival of my fourth course.

After convincing the worried couple next to me that I was not prone to seizures, I excused myself to the staff in the most profuse British way I knew and stepped out into the brisk, damp London air to collect myself. Once again, tears welled in my eyes, but this time not because of my leg.

The year had not been a particularly good one for me. Although I had my health (minus the recent fall), a roof over my head, and food on my plate, I felt persistently alone. And in the cold London night, with nothing but an empty Airbnb waiting for me, and more emptiness at home in California, the loneliness and embarrassment of fainting in public triggered rapid emotional regression to an infantile state of whimpering.

Perched on my one good ass cheek atop a wooden fixture in front of the restaurant, I fought a quivering lip as I pulled out my phone, which cheerfully unlocked itself for me, quite unsympathetically revealing a screen absent of messages from loved ones. No digital kiss for my boo-boo.

But this is not meant to be a sad story about being alone at dinner. What I discovered during the remainder of a fantastic meal at Ikoyi (which I ate standing at the bar) was that restaurants were where I most wanted to be when I felt hurt and alone.

The words hospitality and hospital (unsurprisingly) share a common root: hospes, the Latin word for guest. Perhaps it makes sense, then, that I had arrived at Ikoyi with as much a desire to heal my great emotional hurt as I would have at an emergency room to heal my leg. This was not the first time I’d turned to a restaurant for comfort.