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.