She had taken two trains to Penn Station, got on the Red Line and transferred at Freeport for the Purple Line, then called a local cab company to take her to Merv’s beach house. When she arrived, his aide answered the door. He’s really excited to see you, she said and took Julie through the house that she had lost so many days and nights fantasizing about: her summer home with Merv once they became a real couple, her weekends in the Hamptons while all those other bitches geotagged their lattes. God, she was even more basic than basic. She was a frigging amoeba. Walking through the kitchen, she saw a DO NOT RESUSCITATE notice signed by Merv’s ex-wife on the fridge.

She and Merv had bonded over that at three in the morning. They were laughing with recognition. Everyone was implicated. Julie was Merv, Merv was his wife, his wife was Julie. The more they made fun of themselves and people who were addicted to being unhappy, the more Julie became convinced the future of her happiness rested entirely on doing the impossible: she had to make Merv understand that he had been running scared his whole life but he didn’t have to run anymore, she was here now to stand still with him, and if he would just let her, she could show him the softest of all loves . . .

It all made sense. She hated all the wannabe saviors because she was a failed one herself.

I was 12 and accustomed to being at the mercy of adults and their judgment. I had no power over my own person, no autonomy. Custody had outsourced the matter of where to be, what to eat, when to sleep, what to watch, whom to see, and where to settle. If this aspect of childhood felt tolerable, it was because it came with a sunset. Children were supposed to grow up and receive the keys to their lives. But after hauling our suitcases between inns and hostels, being jerked around like the silver balls in a pinball machine, I wasn’t sure I still believed in that handoff. Poverty superseded age and it swallowed up choices. It turned us into people who were happened to.

After a spring of uncertainty, the housing authority found a leafy corner of Willesden just for the two of us. It was a pleasant flat, except for the mold in the kitchen. My mom bleached the black patches and opened the windows wide. Still, the mold persisted. We hated to seem ungrateful—this flat beat the hostels by a mile—but my lungs were sensitive and my mom’s cleanliness bordered on compulsive. She mentioned the issue to the authority, hoping a professional would treat the wall in a few months. Instead, the authority had offered us the Harlesden flat.

My bedroom was no room at all, but we were exhausted and steeled against discomfort. The landlord and his fudged math were safe with us. Besides, escaping was as easy as shutting my eyes. I lay in my closet, splayed amid borrowed catalogs, and stacked imaginary bookshelves to the ceiling of imaginary homes where no one cared about what anything cost.

When I eventually made it there a few years later, Carbone was exactly as advertised: an exercise in pure kitsch, a kind of theater restaurant offering the food, decor, and waiterly patter of an Italian American dining hall of the 1960s, only at many times the price and with none of the neighborly bonhomie. The restaurant existed as a riff on the Cockaignian theme of abundance: a long, leather-bound menu, carts carrying cocktails and condiments, shrimp and lobster and steak done “as you like it.” But it was all for show; transformed into culinary cabaret, these “moves” illustrated only the chasm between a true society of abundance and the reality of an American economy tailored to the whims of the rich. “What can I get for youse?” the waiter asked after my dining companion and I were seated, and for the two rote and underwhelming hours that followed it remained difficult to detect the line between reality and simulacrum. Was this guy really a crotchety Italian American wiseass, or just playing one? There was something joyless and cynical about Carbone’s evocation of the American restaurant’s—and by extension, America’s—bountiful history. Here stood a restaurant with the self-confidence to treat its patrons like idiots. Here was all the richness of the Land of Cockaigne, but only for those who could afford it. Here was America as a land of plenty, whose best and most generous days were firmly in the past.

All this in search of pleasure and escape! Instead of delivering shelter from the storm of too-late-stage capitalism, the anonymizing maw of the delivery apps brought the storm home. Rather than bringing us together—the restaurant’s nominal function—the delivery economy encouraged us to move further apart and eat in isolation, undisturbed by human contact, weakening whatever measly bonds of social solidarity had survived the post-Reagan apocalypse. Eating during these years became less an exercise in replenishment than erosion, a relentless food-lubricated bruxism mirroring the grinding deterioration of old social certainties. The “mechanics of movement has invaded a wide swathe of human experience,” Richard Sennett once wrote. “Ease, comfort, ‘user-friendliness’ in human relations come to appear as guarantees of individual freedom of action. However, resistance is a fundamental and necessary experience for the human body: through feeling resistance, the body is roused to take note of the world in which it lives.” Seamlessness, the freedom from resistance that was at the core of the new gastronomic escapism, was not the coping mechanism against the depredations of the economy that many of us—thumbing for the delivery app in end-of-day debility—may have imagined it to be. It was only ever a strategy of avoidance and delay. Hovering over all this was the elemental question: Who gets to eat? Or rather, whose eating deserves to be witnessed, chronicled, elevated, and celebrated? The answer: The eating of the famous and the rich. The pre-Covid restaurant gave us David Chang, who once filmed an entire documentary series whose sole premise was that celebrities eat. The rest of us were exactly where the masters of the competition economy wanted us: in their miserly employ, or if we were lucky, gorging on takeout at home, left to fend for ourselves, alone and unseen.

Of course, people will still need to eat, they will not always want to cook for themselves, and the restaurant will survive. But in what form? As the pre-Covid restaurant became, like many other social institutions, a tool for economic dominion, resistance was gathering. The food-security and food-justice movements gained strength, amid a broader resurgence of the left, pointing the way to another path for the restaurant once the pandemic passes. During these long, strange months of the city’s somnambulism, one of the few joys, for me at least, has come from helping out as an occasional line cook at various pop-ups run out of semi-resuscitated bars and restaurants around Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. What these exercises in culinary improvisation have taught me is that food still has the power to knit communities together, but only if the institutions delivering it have a stake in the local outcome—if the aid between restaurants and the people they host really is mutual, anchored in a hospitality whose highest calling is always the duty of reciprocity. As Rebecca L. Spang has shown, the earliest restaurants fulfilled something like this function: during the French Revolution, restaurants emerged as sites for the fraternal suppers and people’s banquets that helped establish, however briefly, the egalitarian ideals of the new republic. Restaurants became, during these years, venues at which the people could figure out how they wanted to rule themselves, the kind of society they wished to live in. Questions of collective subsistence and collective government were coterminous.

Today the opposite is true: the restaurant is a depoliticized realm of pure pleasure-seeking, a refuge rather than a front line. With the coronavirus raging uncontrolled across the country, the New York Times chose as the subject of its first pandemic-era restaurant review . . . a wildly popular New American bistro in gentrified brownstone Brooklyn serving food around the back-to-childhood theme of “summer camp.” The lure of infantilizing nostalgia remains strong. Plainly, repoliticizing the restaurant—restoring its place at the center of local public life, engaged with questions of common welfare and material redistribution—will not be easy, requiring courage, imagination, solidarity, and generosity at all levels of the hospitality industry, from chefs and owners to journalists and diners. But for many restaurants, recovering a lost political vocation—along with the exigencies of resistance, discovery, and human contact that are critical to the act of feeding people—might be the only hope for life after the virus. The future is seamful.