I’m in London this week, and have been lucky enough to be invited out to dinner a few times to some very swank places. My rule about expensive restaurants is simple: if you invite me, I will come. I’m not particular or fussy about the food — or even, if I’m being honest, the company — because in my experience the best meal is the meal someone else is paying for.
One thing I’ve noticed, though, about London restaurants — and this may apply to pricey places in other cities, as well — is that wherever you are seated, you are never too far from a table where three very fashionably dressed women are eating with a short, fat guy who spends the whole meal scrolling through his phone. This seems to be a rule for big-city restaurants, sort of like how there’s always one crying baby on an airplane or a person wearing a backpack on a crowded subway car. Modern urban life has a cast of characters — real-life television series regulars, we might call them — and the fat guy on his phone in the restaurant is one of them. Always on-screen, or just off-stage waiting to make his entrance.
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And yes, I know this sounds like a ridiculous generalization, but I defy anyone to come up with a counterexample. Trust me: in London, at least, there is never a moment in an expensive restaurant when there isn’t a table with three women in high-end labels and a fat dude on TikTok. When I mentioned this observation to my dining partners, we all spent a few minutes trying to remember a time when this wasn’t so, but we couldn’t come up with one. It’s become an obsession.
Since that dinner, we are now on a group chat in which we text each other surreptitious photos of versions of that table we’ve spotted in the wild. To be honest, sometimes the guy isn’t fat, sometimes he’s just sending emails, and sometimes the women aren’t all that chic — there are always variations, which is OK because life is a rich tapestry and it’s good to shake up the basic repertory every now and then.
But the real question is: why sit at an expensive restaurant, why pay for a fancy meal times four, and spend the whole time scrolling through your phone? Also: what’s with the outfit? The guy at the table is always dressed down for the event — some slouchy combination of sweats and sneakers — while his female companions are wrapped in silks and clouds of perfume. They must have primped and fussed for hours for this meal, while he put on a T-shirt with “Balenciaga” on it and considered himself dressed for dinner.
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It isn’t exactly newsworthy that people, especially men, are dressing poorly for everything these days. Nor are they playing the Fox News alarm bell — Breaking News! — to tell us that people are always on their phones. But what makes this quartet interesting is how bored everyone looks at the table. How glumly they’re going about the experience of eating out at a nice restaurant, as if it’s some kind of grim duty. No one is getting happy and sloppy with the wine. No one is laughing a bit too hard, or having an intemperate argument, or flirting irresponsibly. No one, in other words, is having a good time.
But the best way to have a good time, I’ve discovered, is first to try to have a good time. To put some effort into the occasion. That was the original impulse behind trying to look nice when you go out — with a fresh haircut and a strip of silk knotted around your neck, you felt like you were in costume on the stage, in a play called A Night Out in London (or Wherever). You had a role to play. You were a star in your own movie, a co-star in the movies about the other people at the table, and a glamorous extra in all the movies being made at all of the other tables. This is as true on the subway or in an airplane as it is in any nice restaurant. When we’re in public, in other words, we’re all movie stars. Isn’t it time we dressed and acted that way?
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
