In a Paris Review restaurant review, Sophie Haigney writes about what New York’s Cafe Spaghetti means to her. The joint sounds divine, not because of its food (which Haigney notes is “actually quite good”) but because of its welcoming space. Haigney “kept going back, again and again,” she says, “until I became that wonderful thing, a regular, greeted by name and occasionally given free glasses of amaro or ricotta toast with pistachios on top.”
If you’ve ever found your own spot and become a regular, you know how comforting and communal it is. My spot is a pizza truck in Michigan, run by a jolly man who has an obsession with Hawaiian-themed décor. I followed him to music festivals, food-truck conventions, and eventually his mainstay storefront, which opened last year. My designated Snoopy stool sits by the fire oven — it’s where I went after breakups, deaths, and my first eight-mile run. So Haigney’s appreciation of her spot resonated with me:
I tried to write a whole long thing about all the different times and circumstances under which I have been to Cafe Spaghetti—with friends to celebrate, with friends to commiserate, on dates, as an apology dinner, for a birthday, for another birthday, on Sunday nights alone to fight off the blues. This description turned out not to be very interesting, because my Cafe Spaghetti evenings are at their core mundane. Most of the times I have been to Cafe Spaghetti, it has been more or less the same; I go, in fact, because it is generally the same, even as I am myself different, or in different states of being me. I am alarmed by minor changes to the menu. In fact, I feel a sense of quasi ownership so keen that I was annoyed when Pete Wells put the rice balls in his list of New York’s top five dishes last year, revealing my little secret, but I couldn’t be that annoyed, because I was also very proud of my friends at Cafe Spaghetti. I once got so irritated that my not-boyfriend went to Cafe Spaghetti without me that he became no longer my not-boyfriend. (There were a lot of other, better reasons, too, but you have to understand that this was a provocation.) The joy of being a regular is of course in the constant comfort of the familiar, but also in integrating an institution into the texture of my life.
To find food and love and community all in one place — it really is a treat.