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Neighbourhood Joint

I like to eat locally.  For some people, that means buying foods produced in their own country, and for others it can be even more specific, right down to the hundred-mile radius. While I am overjoyed to get local produce, eggs, milk, and anything else I can find, I see no reason to give up coffee, European wine, or truffle oil.  To be fair, the good folks of the Eat Local Challenge don't require an all-or-nothing approach, and have done some excellent work in raising the profile of the idea of eating to support your local foodshed.  So, while I don't flinch at or restrict the number of imported items that I enjoy, there's one way to eat locally that really warms my heart: the neighbourhood joint.

It could be a coffee shop, a pub, or a greasy spoon café where there's a cheap breakfast and a permanent fixture at the counter, head bent over newspaper.  It could be a little Italian or Greek restaurant where the owner has been serving up the same dishes to the same people for twenty or more years.  It's a place where you feel comfortable. It can be the new, unassuming little Indian restaurant that slowly morphed into being where a succession of coffee shops were born and died, changing the character and karma of that building, and thereby the neighbourhood.  Bringing something, as Alton Brown would say, to the party.

I was in just such a little place the other day.  The owner is the sole chef and, despite the bustling atmosphere and plenty of hungry customers, always manages to greet people who are coming in - hailing them from the kitchen when it's really busy, and coming around to tables to chat and bring his personal touch to your dining experience.  When it's slower - later in the evening, he's happy to be drawn into a discussion about cooking, ingredients and health, and the interplay thereof.  Earlier this week, however, he was kept rather too busy for such expounding, although he did manage a quick pass by our table.

He always acknowledges us, when we come in (admittedly often), even if it's just a friendly wave from the kitchen, but we're certainly not the only ones who get excellent service.  Everyone gets treated a little like extended family - if your family happens to have slightly formal manners and serves up delicious Indian food.  I look around at the motley "family" around me, and realized that this place had, in fact, become a neighbourhood joint.  The people around me had not driven for miles to have their dinner made by a TV star chef, they hadn't flocked in to the latest see-and-be-seen hotspot of the moment, they were people who live nearby with their friends and family.  It was an odd collection of faces that I see around the neighbourhood, shopping in the same produce markets and bookstores that I do.  Sometimes, we discovered, it can actually be a family member who happened to go there at the same time as us, quite independently, and ended up sitting at the next table.

The neighbourhood joint must meet certain parameters: one must be able to walk to get there (although, I suppose, if you have to drive it might just be some other neighbourhood's joint), it needs to be affordable (because you'll want to go their fairly often), it needs to be a place that you can feel comfortable chatting with the owner and/or staff, and it needs to have its own character.  The ideal neighbourhood joint can be something of a fall-back position, when you don't want to be at home, but don't feel like dealing with the stress of going someplace new or impersonal.  You may go there sometimes because you don’t know where else to go, but it ends up being exactly where you want to be, whether to have a drink, grab a meal, or simply kill a few hours.

I’ve seen places that try to work this special kind of magic, and the harder they try, the more dismally they fail.  Yet, sometimes the most unexpected place can become your local neighbourhood joint. It can be (and once was) a dimly lit coffee-shop-come-pool hall, accessible only down a dark and narrow staircase (or through a desolate back alley), where unexpected games of chess might happen in one corner, while on the other side of the room a well-known author might be playing his guitar, and between them a few friendly games of snooker separating conversations into lively, yet fluid pockets.  There could be an odd assortment of people you recognize from the bus ride to work, or that time you went to the lantern festival, or a local convention.  Somehow, everyone is more disposed to meet new people, or be more open to those around them, than they would be in their ordinary day-to-day lives.  It is the magic of the neighbourhood joint that pulls everything together, and makes that happen. 

You can’t force it.  The locals have to adopt a place, for it to really integrate into the area in that particular niche.  There needs to be something unhurried, but with enough energy that patrons don’t slump over their beverages.  The right mix of music can help, but it is not the only component.  There is one thing that I’ve noticed, time and again, though:  the neighbourhood joint is never a big chain.  It’s never a place that has the word “Restaurant Group” or “Corporation” in the owner’s title.  It’s never a place that had a design team build the atmosphere, a focus group build the menu, and a staff of impersonally bright-smiled, identically uniformed servers.  It is the one-of-a-kind, quirky, personality driven places that make you want to go back and be a part of them, to participate in your own community.  They don’t have to be perfect (perfection may be antithetical to comfort), but you simply shrug your way around the minor defects and hope that the place, too, is forgiving of your shortcomings.

I have begun to notice a recurring theme in my perception of all things artistic. It comes back to a line I read in a novel when I was fourteen: committees don’t win wars.  The extracted idea really is about the importance of a single vision to any kind of success.  The music that I enjoy, the food that I most like to eat, all have in common the fact that a single person was the driving and creative force behind it.  Sure, there may be collaborators and contributors, but at the end of the day, there is one artistic dictator saying “this is how it should be.”  Now, I may not like every example of this autocratic approach that I come across, but if I am to find a place, a song, or a meal that really speaks to me, it will be something from this type of single vision that I connect with most strongly.

June 2006