Philadelphia, I cannot forget your sublime cruelty

on the city and the French restaurant I'll never forget

Breakups are so Halloween. “My ex is a monster!” “That bloodsucking bitch!” and perhaps the most narcissistic proclamation, “He will live with my ghost until he dies.” 

I’ve learned endings aren’t worth all the darkness, even the cheap plastic kind you buy at Spirit Halloween three months of the year. And so my exes never stood a chance at haunting me. It’s not that they’re forgettable, or that I’m above some passive curiosity about What We Could Have Been, but that the one that got away for real, the one that actually drives me to dark purple gothic lunacy… was the oeuf.

Now, let’s flip the calendar and pretend it’s Christmas because what I’m about to say only sounds good if you imagine me as the protagonist in a Nancy Meyers movie: you never know when you’re eating at a place for the last time. Unless the reservation is made with the express purpose of one final hoorah—Goodbye to All That, right?—you’ll never know to behold that smudge of tarragon cream on a licked-clean plate with proper gravity. To remember its pale yellow incandescence like a lighthouse: Mussels. Poached egg. Toast. Home.

I first tried the oeuf du pêcheur (French for ‘fisherman’s egg’) from Bistrot La Minette in 2017. I’d never had French food nor had I heard of a “tasting menu” but there I was, fuzzy purple sweater hanging off my shoulder; black corduroy mini skirt; clearance section Forever 21 thigh-high boots a size too small, toes overlapping for a man whose affection seemed to hinge upon that sliver of exposed thigh. I had a gnarly cold and could not breathe through my nose and I vowed to be as sexy as anyone could be with a pack of kleenex in their purse. Ten courses later, I was so full I couldn’t breathe, period.

We broke up as two people with mostly vowels in their names do—a stiletto to a wine glass on a Roman street. And because he cheated on me, the terms were mine, all mine.

I got Bistrot.

It was always Christmas at Bistrot. Or Valentine’s Day. Or your anniversary. Or in the case of Kathleen and I, Tuesday. For about eight months, we lived four blocks from its string-lit post at 6th & Bainbridge. We always ordered the oeuf du pêcheur, bumping toast as we clumsily plunged into the tarragon cream at the same time like oui oui, another pitcher of the house red, we ain’t drivin’! Then we’d waddle back to our apartment, drunk and bloated, to watch Sex & The City while mice parkoured around our ancient kitchen—our friendship, the endless summer of our lives.

Kathleen and I were the perfect people to live in Philadelphia squalor together because everything made us laugh. I mean, we’d been inseparable since meeting on the playground in first grade. No one else got the joke. And we knew that any curveballs life threw at us could be solved within the trinket-lined walls of Bistrot, along the tufted red bench, over the oeuf. Had I known one of us wouldn’t see 30, I wouldn’t have ragged on her so hard for ordering the chicken as her entree because damn, if I didn’t grow into someone who’d order the chicken as my entree. She was always 10 steps ahead of me.

That year, 2017, was also when I launched my first blog: the release of pent up creative tension I’d been too scared to address back home in Montour County, the smallest county in Pennsylvania. I think I subconsciously moved to Philadelphia to become a writer. To escape the perceived limitations of rural insularity—those questions of, “Who do you think you are?” and “Where do you think this could go?” I bought a clunky DSLR camera and shot my first “author photo” on our fire escape with the self timer. I wore a long faux fur coat, skinny jeans, and purple leather boots that the cheating ex bought me. My hair was box dyed too dark. Lip filler was a distant consideration. I called the blog 6th & Bainbridge after Bistrot.

I could be embarrassed of this but frankly I’m proud of her

The Mouse Trap aka our decrepit apartment building got bought by some Israeli developers and we opted to break the lease. Kathleen moved to Nashville with her boyfriend. I moved into a studio a mile down the road. 6th & Bainbridge became Broke But Moisturized. Kathleen got sick. Kathleen died. Philadelphia grew violent and depressing, or maybe that was just the lens through which I started to view the world.

Bistrot stayed the same. Well, as much the same as any place can stay after a pandemic… and after you lose the person who made it what it was.

–

This past January, my friend Rita texted me that she would be in Philly for an academic conference. “I’d love to take you to dinner,” I proposed. I hadn’t seen Rita since high school. Since double dating at Applebees with our scrawny boyfriends, where I’d find myself more enraptured by this bookish Bratz doll than my scrawny boyfriend. Rita was a ballerina. A writer. High priestess of girlish incantations about shit you did not understand at the big age of 15, and thus, could not turn away from. She was gonna go to New York. She was gonna be someone. I wondered if I could be someone.

(She made it. I’m still wondering.)

I had a gut feeling Rita and I wouldn’t miss a beat. So when it came time to pick a restaurant, I knew I didn’t need to impress her because she already knew exactly who I was and where I came from. So I picked what was most special to me.

I remember taking a bite of Rita’s trout meuniere and thinking it was a little too salty, but that I like a little too salty. Rita and I are both a little too much of a lot of stuff and that’s why I like us. “I’m so proud of us,” Rita said. Two Pennsyltuckians who’ve soared beyond the quaint offerings of our hometowns, but held our roots all the same. I think we laid down roots that night, the kind that lock an old friendship into whatever ground it treds. We had the oeuf. We had three pitchers of the house red. It felt like Christmas, New Years, Valentine’s Day, and the 4th of July. It was the last time I ate at Bistrot.

(Rita texted me last week, “I think you should apply to the Randolph MFA.”)

It was mid-June when they broke the news on Instagram. After 16 years, Bistrot La Minette would shutter, serve its last terrine de foie gras. Speaking of which, I wondered if all the vegans who’d been posted up outside of Bistrot protesting foie gras over the last year had anything to do with its closure. If, perhaps, when compounded with the crumbling economy, Peter Woolsey got fed up with having his morals questioned on his own doorstep. (I’m probably just projecting.)

Anyway, you can read his letter on Reddit along with the heartbreaking reactions. Bistrot was special to so many Philadelphians. That was comforting to me. When something is alive and it feels like yours, it’s natural to bristle at anyone who claims they’ve experienced it with the same intimacy. But when it ends—when your best friend dies and 300 people show up at her service; when your favorite restaurant closes and suddenly, it was everyone’s “hidden gem”—those shared memories are rose salve on the heart. They reaffirm its specialness in a way you didn’t know you needed to move on.

I saw that Bistrot was taking reservations through the end of July, and immediately told Andrew, “Make one for my birthday!!” We never know what to do for my birthday because I mostly pout anymore but this felt like the easiest one yet. A plan fell right into our laps!

Here’s the thing about Andrew and I making nice dinner plans: they fall through like, 75% of the time. He’ll get me a wonderful gift (this year, a signed copy of A Book of Common Prayer) and I’ll consider the financial implications of going out to dinner, too, and it feels like big to do for a day we won’t remember. I’d rather cook, or order burritos and watch TV together at home, maybe go for ice cream at our neighborhood spot. In fact, I’m more likely to remember that. So naturally, Bistrot wasn’t spared.

“I don’t want to go to dinner anymore,” I said. 

“Are you sure? It might be your last chance to have Bistrot.” 

“I already went out to dinner with the girls. You got me the best gift. I have eaten there 1000 times. I’m good.”

And I was good for a while. Until one evening I was sitting on the couch, writing maniacally when it hit me that I had to get there one last time, and it had to be alone. You dream of doing everything in life with a partner when you’re single, and when you’re married, those solo cafe memories transmute into something far more romantic than they actually were. Your “hungover and lonely” reads more “wild and free.” I was, momentarily, hellbent on this Last Supper. I wanted to go right that second; I hadn’t eaten yet. And as to be expected, Bistrot was booked solid… all the way through their final day, July 31st.

I called it fate and turned the page.

via the Inquirer. I think it’s really poetic that over the years, no one could get a decent photo of this beautiful place.

That weekend, I went to Boston with some friends for the Noah Kahan show at Fenway Park. I don’t really know any of his music but he seems like a good person to get famous. He seems genuinely surprised by the whole thing which is maybe the only sane way to digest pop stardom—a kind of “huh?” plastered on your approachable crooked human little face.

I had an extra ticket, and I gave it to my friend Mark for free. I don’t know, we’ve just been close for like, 12 years and he makes everything fun. It wasn’t that deep. When I arrived at the airbnb, though, Mark told me that, to thank me for the ticket, he tried getting me a gift card to Bistrot La Minette, but that they were no longer selling gift cards. I told him my sob story about booking a reservation and canceling and trying to go alone etc., but I was mostly distracted by the fact that he remembered my favorite restaurant. Or someone told him. Someone remembered.

–

My memory is nothing to write home about these days. Lots of “repeating the thing seven times” or whatever they recommend to make it stick. I put everyone’s birthday in my iPhone calendar the second I learn it knowing it’ll otherwise be absorbed into that amorphous braincloud where birthdays and anniversaries go to die. Memory is one of those brainpowers I’ve only cherished since feeling mine slip.

At the end of Lisa Taddeo’s short story “Grace Magorian,” she writes:

“Somewhere, someplace forgettable—Philadelphia—a pretty girl played Debussy for an auditorium of throat clearers, having only learned, thus far, to wait for the clap.” 

There’s something uncanny about Bistrot and I leaving Philly at the same time. And I don’t expect anyone to clap for me the way they (we) clap for Bistrot. People get older and move to the burbs every day. Save up for a Le Creuset. Buy a couch in “performance linen.” The show goes on.

But I will tell you that amid my mind’s frustrating lapses, I cannot forget Philadelphia.

I cannot forget the brutal lines to get into Morgan’s Pier, watching our 20s unfold through the obsidian mirror of the Delaware River: denim shorts and crop tops and curled hair and Corona buckets and “can we get some extra limes?” and “maybe tonight I’ll meet my husband.”

I cannot forget chicken and waffles at North Third, learning that brunch was more verb than noun. Weeks straight of brunching both Saturday and Sunday. Pro tip: if you wonder where all your money’s going, tally up your bloody marys and plates of chicken and waffles for the month. Do not step on the scale.

Jawn this, jawn that. Yous thirsty? Yous need some wudder? Yous headin down the shore this weekend?

The way the air shifts when you cross Washington Ave. South Philly is its own continent. Its own planet. Everyone has been there for 100 years, even the 30-year-old transplant who just bought his first fixer upper that he’s gonna paint mental illness gray and flip for $500,000. Trust me.

Running along the Schuylkill River Trail, the exact spots where you can hop off the paved road and onto the gravel, closer to the water, bouncing along freely like you were somewhere more beautiful and remote than where you were.

Breezy June Sundays in Rittenhouse Square, searching for a free patch of shade to read in, iced coffee melting into a pale beige waste of $4.

Storming the streets when the Birds won the Super Bowl, watching guys with beer bellies and receding hairlines climb the light poles and set cars on fire.

Nights that could only end in Voyeur at 3 AM. Sweaty gay intertwined screaming to a Jersey club mix of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” everything dappled in pink light.

Mornings that could only begin at Cafe Lutecia with a big dollop of whipped cream on a shot of espresso, a buttered baguette with ham, egg, and brie.

Fleets of dirt bikes and quads illegally vrooming down the Parkway, forever the first sign of summer in the city.

Delancey. Addison. Saint James. All those cobbled streets with exorbitant brick homes that transport you into a novel, the really corny kind where you get your heart broken and emerge victorious, hopeful, splayed out on the floor in a vintage nightgown with a bottle of Bordeaux. Laughing at the unseriousness of love.

McGillins. 

McGillins. 

McGillins.

RIP THE FUCKIN URINAL OFF THE WALL, we’re goin to McGillins!!!!

Dollar dog night at Phillies games. The way the people erupted when they took it away. You can’t take anything away from Philadelphians without a resounding “BOOOOOOO.”

Flying through downtown Manayunk during the marathon, feeling like I finally belong to this city after all, wondering why I had to run 26.2 godless miles to realize it.

House parties with Temple frat bros, one who would become my husband.

Walking around Fairmount in the still of the morning, taking stock of everything I’m leaving behind. The brownstones that will become New Jersey bungalows that will become neighbors whose children will play with mine.

— 

There are people who desperately try to make Philadelphia more than what it is. They want to fancy it up into something that commands your attention, doesn’t let you forget it. But this ain’t your bachelorette destination, nor is this the social climber’s gilded ladder. And it’s probably not on your bucket list unless you’re dying to see the Liberty Bell. 

No, you have to live in Philly to remember it. To let it etch itself into your soul with a rusty pocket knife. You must get gnarled by old Irish chainsmokers whose cones you moved from their parking spot, whose porch you passed wearing a Steelers hoodie. Slam a citywide—a shot of Jim Beam and a PBR—in a Fishtown dive, chanting “NO ONE LIKES US, WE DON’T CARE.” You must give yourself up to its small-townness, to its singular vulgarity.

It’s kinda silly, my getting all sentimental over moving a 15-minute train ride from the place, blubbering about “no longer feeling like part of the fabric of the city” to whoever will entertain my theatrics. But the reality is, you leave Philly and you are no longer a grease spot on a big, crumpled napkin—which should, for all intents and purposes, be a step up in life. But I watch oil drip from an Angelo’s cheesesteak (best in the city, for the record) and I know things will never be the same. I know I’ll never find a shade of green uglier and more irritating than Eagles green and I mourn its loss like it was my very own three-legged, cross-eyed mutt..

And I guess that’s what I’ll miss the most: the way something so rough could possess so much beauty. 

I saw myself in Philly. I saw myself in Bistrot. I saw everyone I love in the skyline receding from the Ben Franklin Bridge, one last au revoir to the oeuf.

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