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.