Where To Dine With Someone You Can't Stand
The place to dine in highly specific situations, like when you have a secret to spill, with a new lover, etc.
Published
Private Dining is a monthly discourse on restaurants, who’s eating at them, and what they’re serving. Our Anonymous Food Critic brings you reviews, scene reports and deep dives into the current state of New York’s food world.
I’m sure you have all types of buddies in your life. I certainly do. There are my best buddies, old buddies, fuck buddies, buddies of buddies, buddies who are also blood, buddies I sort of wish weren’t my buddies. Each and every one has a special space in my heart, and also a certain place in the real world where we go to catch up. Friends, lovers and arch enemies all need to be met in very different settings from one another, and because I care about you all deeply, I’m handing over some restaurant solutions to highly specific situations with highly specific friends that you might find useful one of these days.
1. You texted back “hell yeah, let’s do it” to someone you absolutely do not want to see.
I feel you, brother. If you can manage to sit through an entire dinner with this person, find a way to get them to Cafe Spaghetti. You’ll be in and out in no time, won’t spend a ton of money, and will be entertained whether you’re seated in the bustling dining room or charming backyard. Order the cheap house red wine, a perfectly sized plate of sweet spaghetti pomodoro to eat after a delightful pile of arugula tangled with thin sheets of fennel and slick, salty Marcona almonds. Simply being at Cafe Spaghetti is such a treat that it will redeem the fact that you don’t actually want to be there.
If you can’t fathom sitting through a meal with this person, again, I feel you, brother. I have found myself in that situation many times, and the best advice I can offer is to stop pretending. You’re not an actor. And if you actually are an actor, well, don’t work for free. Stop enthusiastically answering their texts, stop responding to them altogether. If you’re not feeling strong enough to do that, may I suggest something I wish I had started doing a long time ago: skipping dinner and suggesting dessert instead. One hour is all you need to wait, order and finish a scoop of ice cream at Caffé Panna, and you can spend at least half of that time discussing which flavors of the day to try. And if you need an escape plan: add a pint to your order. “I’ve got to run this home to my freezer before it melts! See you around!”
One cocktail, one bottle of cold wine, an order of smoky grilled prawns in their shells and a side of French fries to dip into their brothy olive oil pool. That’s the tried and true, pre-going out order from Cervo’s. You could try to make a reservation, but I’ve found waiting (almost always at least half the time I’m quoted) for bar seats actually sets me and a friend up for a perfectly timed evening of gossiping at dinner, showing up to the function late enough to miss that early, empty lull and just in time to say hi to everyone I came to see at their peak.
3. How to turn “dinner” with a “friend” into a date with a lover.
4 Charles Prime Rib is an undeniably sexy restaurant. A set of stairs on Charles Street takes you down to a heavy velvet curtain that when pushed aside reveals a dark, golden, opulent dining room. There are less than twenty tables in the entire space, each one covered with plates, bowls and cones of rich, expensive food. It feels like a tiny palace. It’s also incredibly difficult to get into, a lot like those people in your life who never let you out of the friend zone. But if you manage to make a reservation here, it’s very possible the ability to do so and a few absurdly expensive martinis might help shift things in a more sensual direction.
The first time I ate there, my friend-slash-crush spotted me and got up from the table, pulled my chair out for me and whispered“hey, beautiful” into my ear before their lips pressed into my cheek. We let the waiter think we were a couple all night and made out in the cab home. I like to imagine 4 Charles as the Narnia of New York City — pass through that curtain in the doorway and you’ll tumble into a mystical land of leather booths and lethal negronis. Suddenly you’re sitting across from someone you’ve always thought about fucking, watching them bite into a beefy burger, cheese dripping down their fingers, the fluffy bun falling apart.
4. So, it’s time to tell a secret?
I recently revealed a dark, dirty secret at Roscioli, a transplant from Rome, which, although underground and dimly lit, I would strongly advise against doing. A couple at the neighboring (but so close it felt communal) table who were completely uninterested in my conversation when it was about how who I was dining with made it home from Nantucket the night prior in a thunderstorm, suddenly fell silent when I started spilling my juicy secret over our bowls of carbonara. Which was, by the way, delicious.
The incredibly small-seeming portion turned out to be the perfect amount thanks to expertly engineered levels of salt, silkiness, fat and starch. While killing the last sip of my quarter-glass of wine — another reason this is not an ideal place to share a secret: the mandatory tasting menu allots what totals to maybe two drinks over the course of the night — I vowed that next time I’d pick a place without any unsolicited confidants. Perhaps a tall booth at Minetta Tavern or corner table at Balthazar, where everyone is too busy telling their own secrets to eavesdrop on mine anyways.
The first time I went to dinner with my now-lover, I cried because I wasn't ready to order another drink when they were. "Have another negroni,” they said while the waiter stood above us. I don't want ice to melt into a new negroni while I’m finishing my first, I thought. I don't even want another negroni, I want wine! Ordering at a restaurant with a somewhat stranger always feels unnecessarily complicated, especially when it’s someone you’re really starting to like and are consequently trying to prove your easygoing attitude and amazing taste to. Despite the tears, I always think of that night as one brimming with angst and lust and possibility, which I attribute to us having dined at King, which is the loveliest, most intimate restaurant in the city.
Every single day, the cooks write a new menu. But the two things you can almost always do are eat a crispy olive oil-covered and rosemary-sprinkled cracker with your hands and feed your date long, hot sticks of creamy, deep-fried chickpea batter. There’s always some sort of pasta made with fresh, eggy, deeply yellow dough. Some nights it’s an oceanic bowl of spaghetti, bottarga and sweet, tiny, orange tomatoes that pop on your tongue. Other times, paper thin sheets of pasta are stuffed with creamy cheese and something like arugula (which they call rocket — sexy), then brought to your table in a warm butter bath.
The main dining room is beautifully lit by the warm kitchen light, its sounds drowning out everyone else’s conversations. Gorgeous and mysterious bartenders take drink and dinner orders from anyone in a bar seat. If you sit outside, try to do so while the setting sun casts a sexy saffron glow over your date. It will absolve you both of any sins (re: unnecessarily dramatic tears) from earlier in the night. And after dinner, walk a few blocks west and complete your perfect New York night by making out with your date on a pier along the Hudson.