10/4, 6pm—New York NY, Times Square

Musical accompaniment for this edition:

People have asked me what the deal is with the whole Olive Garden thing. They assume that it’s ironic, a hipster affectation, celebrating enthusiasm for an extremely square restaurant with great gusto. “Any mom-and-pop checkered tablecloth Italian place is better,” friends who live elsewhere insist. And elsewhere, that is probably true. In the parts of Texas I’ve spent the most time in, though, a statement like that sounds ridiculous. It’d be like telling someone in Delaware who like Chipotle to just go to their local taqueria for tacos, or mocking Dickey’s BBQ Pit and insisting someone in Connecticut who visits one that the food at any gas station BBQ joint in the neighborhood would be better. In Austin—or San Antonio, or the Rio Grande Valley, or even a lot of Dallas (sorry, Dallas)—if you want red sauce and pasta, the Olive Garden is as good as any, and better than most.

But I’m in New York right now, and I ate at the Olive Garden this evening. In my defense, it was free, because of the pasta pass. And also, I was there to meet up with my friend Graham, who is the person who encouraged me to start this newsletter—a challenge I accepted on the condition that he join me at the Times Square Olive Garden location when I was in town. Because, heck—I do like the food, but I’m also curious and a fan of novelty, and seeing the people at the Times Square Olive Garden did seem novel.

Here are some observations:

• The views are good, if you like looking out over Times Square, which I do, since that’s also a novel experience for me. We were sat by a window on the third story, and it was a nice place to spend a couple of hours.

• People in New York, generally, are not nearly as friendly as people in Texas, or even in Southern California. Check into a hotel and the person at reception will be courteous, but they might not smile. Your server at most restaurants will bring you your meal, but you should not expect them to be solicitous toward you in the way that you might have become accustomed, in other parts of the country. The Olive Garden in Times Square, though, is an exception to that. The spirit of hospitaliano is and was very much alive this evening.

• The place is crowded, but not, like, crowded-crowded. A dinner hour meal in Austin will usually come with a wait, maybe 20 minutes on a Thursday. There was no wait in Times Square.

• It was mostly just people? Like, they didn’t all look particularly Midwestern or uncool or sheltered. There were older people and younger people, families and couples. They were, presumably, all aware of the existence of other restaurants. I don’t know why they chose the Olive Garden for their meal, but they didn’t seem to fit a pattern, at least not at a glance.

• There was a group of cosplayers who entered at one point, but Comic-Con is in town, so that isn’t a huge surprise. I spotted a Harley Quinn and a Raven from Teen Titans; I don’t know if the dudes were in costume.

Our server was very friendly, although he did charge us $5 for each bowl of marinara sauce we requested for the dipping of breadsticks. In my experience, that’s a decision made at the discretion of the server—I don’t recall ever being charged for it before, but it it does appear on the menu, so fair enough. Graham asked what was good there, and I said pasta; we each wanted spaghetti and meatballs with marinara sauce, because the classics never go out of style. We were brought our salad, breadsticks, and the marinara sauce quickly, and while we were serving ourselves the salad, our server returned and said that, while he knew we had just received our starters, they already had our pasta ready, if we wanted it. We told him to wait.

Graham’s in a similar position right now as the one I’m in—he moved here from Austin in the spring to be with his fiancée, who is a playwright and television writer. We talked about what it’s like to watch your partner’s career begin to take off, especially when it’s in a field as competitive as television—mostly it’s very exciting, although we each have had work to do in acclimating to the role of being a +1. We talked about Brett Kavanaugh and Beto O’Rourke, as most conversations seem to end up doing for me right now, and sports, theater, books. An hour or so into the meal, our server asked how we were doing, and I placed another order for spaghetti and meatballs, because I enjoyed the first one and was enjoying the conversation, and wanted it to continue.

I only ate about half of the second portion—I was already pretty full—but it was a leisurely meal, in a very famous part of the country’s most famous city. It was also comfortable, and easy, which is probably the largest appeal of the Olive Garden to tourists taking a walk around Times Square. This city can be overwhelming, and the Olive Garden is not an overwhelming place to be.

I’d never been to the Times Square Olive Garden before, but thinking about this reminded me of the first time that I ever came to New York. I was 24 years old, touring as a performance poet (a story for another time) with my friend Tony, who was playing music. We’d had a stressful week or so getting up to New York, playing uneven shows (or not playing them—I remember a night in Baltimore just before where our show got canceled and we had to befriend some young people in a coffee shop in order to avoid sleeping in the car that night, as asking people who came to the shows if we could sleep on their floor was our primary means of obtaining lodging)—and we had another ten weeks to go before we would return home.

We came to New York and the city did, in fact, feel overwhelming. I remember saying to Tony our first night in town, as we were wandering Manhattan, that I wanted to find a restaurant to eat dinner. Tony pointed to a pizza place or a hot dog stand or a deli or something and suggested that we get something there if I was hungry—but that wasn’t exactly the issue. It wasn’t necessarily that I was hungry, it was that I wanted the experience of sitting down in a restaurant for a meal. I wanted a respite, a break from the constant stimulation of the city. It wasn’t about being hungry so much as it was about meeting the emotional need to have dinner. I don’t remember if that need was met that night—money was too tight to mention, and I doubt I was able to articulate that need in a way that would have made sense in the moment, so probably not. But when I think about what I wanted, sitting down in an Olive Garden for a couple of hours probably comes pretty close to describing it perfectly.

Tonight, the circumstances were less stressful. I have a room in New York for the next few nights. My travel schedule is relatively hectic these days, but nothing compared to being on tour and hand-to-mouthing across America for three months, and I’ve learned how to find quiet spaces even when things are busy anyway. This visit to the Olive Garden was more of a novelty than a need being met, but let’s not underestimate the power of novelty, anyway.