Ryan Johnson | Making The Case For Third Spaces For Seven Fifty Daily
April 04, 2018 Ryan Johnson
Here’s another great piece by RYAN JOHNSON for SevenFiftyDaily on “Making the Case for Restaurants as Third Spaces: Beyond offering food and drinks, restaurants can serve as important cultural hubs.” Are restaurants indeed turning into cultural hubs, this one highlights Roberta’s in Brooklyn, a restaurant that is definitely a hub of culture! Amanda Smelt, the writer of the article has a brilliant last paragraph and it’s too good not to share:
“This is what I want from restaurants: I want them to give a home to the talent—the offbeat, the shy but gifted, the funny, the fucked up. I want the operators to make it an integral part of their job to genuinely mentor and guide their staff. No lip service to “education”; I want the real deal. I want restaurants to be a Tiki Bar where people come and sit in the sunshine during warm months for long afternoons because there’s enough space for everyone during the day and no one is kicking them out after only two hours for the next reservations. I want people to be able to drink hard-to-come-by grower Champagne without having to wear a suit or having to pay three, four, or five times markup on the wholesale price. I want gardeners to have resources to plant and teach us more about our food, about how the Earth works. I want staff who can avoid burning the underside of dough and identify volatile acidity and discern differences in coffee—without having their manner of speech or dress or place of origin censored. I want porters actively encouraged to train on the line or in front of house. I want costume Fridays—I want it proved to patrons that a dining experience can be excellent even if executed by a woman dressed as Spock. For people who want to work and play, to be creative, to acquire new skills, to share: I want more restaurants that are like a village, and fewer like a theater.”
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