WE RUINED THE WEST VILLAGE
The worst is over. So is the best
New York’s been edging towards the 60s lately, and nobody enjoys a premature Spring day more than young urban women. We’ve reaaaally come out to play these past few days. Last Thursday, at approximately 2:15 pm, I saw a lady in a striped navy dress that hit just above the knee, walking away from the Hudson River and heading east on 14th Street with a friend. Matching pink tumblers in hand, which I really loved. A woman skipping out of her Bank street apartment in chinos on a 48 degree Friday morning. Emma Stone in a baseball cap! Leather pants making less and less practical sense. “It feels like summer,” says the woman trying to sell you a bikini. More FaceTimes before 4pm telling you to just come out, it’s beautiful right now.
Winter was not at its kindest this year. Personally, I hosted a birthday party that preceded the December Omicron surge by four days. My knuckles were so dry that a barista offered me Aquaphor. My credit card bill hit a record high, because cold weather = more inside time = more screen time = more Depop/Instagram carts. Naturally.
I feel like women my age tend to suffer more than everyone else in the first two months of the year. On the most vain level, there’s the tradeoff between looking good and not freezing. Like tampons, bras, and every other feminine thing that has improved at the most pre-modern pace—because it’s feminine—tights are still never warm enough. If you’ve never feared that you might develop frostbite while waiting in line for a dive bar in Bushwick, you should consider yourself very lucky.
Second, we don’t have football. Sunday’s are God awful whichever time of year you cut it, but when straight men are spending them in sports bars having what honestly appears to be the time of their lives (namely, more fun than they seemed to be having with us a mere twelve hours ago), it just feels like mockery.
With no weather-permitting activities that don’t involve overspending, we’re stuck with the ever-so joyful project of ‘getting one’s life together’. That means erasing any mess in our lives, literal or metaphorical: cloroxing every surface of the house, attempting to “sweat out” last night’s cocktails but instead nearly vomiting it back up onto your SoulCycle bike. We need an activity so badly. I feel like the boys should go scrub their sinks for the first time ever and we can go eat rotisserie chicken or something. Also, if you are a girl who likes football and you’re reading this thinking, “Not all women!!!!!!!!!!!”, I ask you to consider the possibility that maybe football doesn’t like you.
I am absolutely thrilled that warm weather is inching upon us. To me, the promise of Summer by way of 6-hour sunshine flukes feels like Mother Nature smoothing her hands over our shackets, cooing, “Just hold on a bit longer, girls.”
With that being said, I want to address a certain behavior I saw last summer in a particular neighborhood of Manhattan that I would like if I didn’t have to see again. I’m talking about a special kind of Seasonal Gentrification, and that’s the white girl-West Village-restaurant takeover.
Like every other neighborhood in New York, the West Village is quote-on-quote dead. It’s a tale as ancient as Olmestead: in come luxury chains with French names no one can pronounce carrying equal amounts of homeware and nap dresses, out goes your favorite—and the last place in the city—to buy stamps. Graydon Carter seems kinda charming now, and Corner Bistro begins accepting credit cards. This problem obviously isn’t unique to the West Village, and there are much more dangerous forms of gentrification across the city.
But at this point, we’ve conquered every Italian restaurant between West Houston and Horatio. And by now it’s not even worth calling out which social media accounts are responsible for creating the certain circumstance we find ourselves in now. What I do know is that it’s time we stop texting the maitre’d like she is a personal friend, and let the real adults eat in piece.
Before you say it I will. The group of people I’m talking about occupy an enclave of astronomical privilege within our society so acute that perhaps we should stop affording ourselves satirical dimension. But this is not an attempt to wash out that privilege with humor. I’m being funny because a) it is funny and we deserved to be laughed at a little, and b) you’re supposed to “write what you know”, and if you’re really privileged, that writing has to be somewhat self-effacing or else it’s pretty unbearable. I am, of course, the last person on the island who ought to be criticizing extravagance.
And before you say the other thing, I’m not addressing boys because anything white men do in a group is automatically embarrassing and offensive.
There are a few key points I want to make regarding the takeover. For one, I think we like the act of expensive westside dinners less than we think we do. The pandemic changed the way we spend and what we spend on, and given the fact that women are under constant marketing subjugation, it’s worth hypothesizing how we ended up spending so much time and money eating out, of all things.
Influencing plays an important role here. When the pandemic barred concerts and nightclubs, dining out wobbled upright as one of the only experiences that could remain in the rotation of what used to compose normal social life. Desperate to escape the watchful eye of our parents, my friends and I would skirt off to dinner outdoors, promising to socially distance while we’d guzzle bottles of wine and pass joints around the table, elbow to elbow, sad and comfortable. I can all say this stuff now I think?
Then there was a shift that I think changed dining demographics indefinitely. Cutting themselves a well-deserved amount of slack, restaurants did away with phone lines—a change gone unnoticed by Resy/OpenTable loyalists, but one a less technologically-inclined guest might not exactly revere.
Meanwhile, upscale restaurants had lost a substantial portion of their clientele, many of whom didn’t want to risk infection or had fled the city entirely. No more client dinners, anniversaries, or family graduation parties.
Influencers, with far fewer venues to influence from, took over those big round tables in swaths. A great indicator of just how impactful influencer marketing was here is the Outdoor Villages project, a project led by American Express and Resy (owned by Amex) that helped subsidize outdoor dining architecture at New York’s “most sought-after restaurants.” Heated cabins popped up at favorites such as Altro Paradiso, Anton’s, Cote, ATLA, Balthazar, Charlie Bird, Dante, Don Angie, The Dutch, Lure Fishbar, Shuka, and finally, my beloved Via Carota. The program held tables exclusively for American Express Platinum Card Members. My Instagram feed was filled with these yurts, and they made dinner look cozy and exclusive and warm.
The same stuff has continued through our present moment, only everyone’s back inside. I saw a couple of influencers get promoted from American Bar guests to #AmexAmbassadors, posting close-ups of cobb salads and plugging the extra points you could earn through Resy. They weren’t loitering there much any longer—parties were back on—but they were getting paid to bring you in.
What began as a lone star of urban life has become a defining form of social currency. At house parties, I hear reservation slots rolled off the tongue like name drops. Of course nobody engages in an actual working discussion about these places. “Yeahhh, I went…” you’re supposed to float demurely—God forbid anything tastes as good as exclusivity feels. “It was okay,” because you have an individual taste, for crying out loud. You did actually cry about this, though, after you got into a second fight with your best friend for taking your Hinge date instead.
Is food at Saint Theo’s that groundbreaking? Or is it the way her fresh blowout casades over one shoulder as she double fists a forkful of truffles and a glass of red wine, revealing an intact manicure? They’re not letting you in on a local’s best kept secret, they’re just eating for free.
I’m not saying we need to re-channel a Girl Boss ethos where feminism means empowerment and empowerment means capital. In fact, I don’t really have any opinions on robust financial habits, and I definitely don’t know how to build them. At the end of the day, we don’t deserve to feel guilty for engaging in spending behaviors that have been aggressively marketed at us. We should instead push each other to recognize those habits, to speak honestly about them.
Here are three more fantastic reasons to head North/South/East this Summer:
We’re lowering our chances of meeting new people. Forget finding summer flings! It’s like an all-girls BBYO event in these joints, only with prawns and guanciale.
I know I don’t need to tell you this, but the city is bending sideways with great places to eat. If you need a place to start, New York magazine has its very first Diner-At Large Tammie Telcemariam. Telcemarian is writing a newsletter called “The Year I ate New York,” and she’s the reason I tried Burmese food for the first time last week.
The bars in the West Village suck. Cook and then blow your money at one of these cocktail bars instead. Or go roller skating!
On that note, I’ll leave you with a passage from “Goodbye to All That,” where Joan Didion wrote famously of her departure from New York after an eight-year stint in her twenties:
I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all like that for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
Also,
If you like my newsletter, you should also read this one.
Don’t forget, Sometimes it Snows in April!
My very talented friend Clara found Bella Hadid’s Depop account.
Have a great weekend.