The Great Indoors

A critic reacclimates to the now-unfamiliar terrain of the dining room.

- ADAM PLATT

FORGET ABOUT TRENDY SIDEWALK DINING, cocktails alfresco, and all the other beloved tropes of the outdoor-dining craze. During this strange tail-end, the twilight era of the Great Pandemic, it’s indoor dining that’s all the rage. If you don’t believe me, walk the streets of Fort Greene or the West Village, where you’ll see raucous dining rooms and people lining up to get into restaurants that just a few months back they would have paid good money to avoid. Scroll your social media feeds and you’ll see the newly vaxxed hordes tweeting out triumphant indoor meals (“Had dinner at Keen's… New York is back, baby!”) and posting images of toasts and maskless diners who appear to have been beamed in from a more carefree time.

“Save the outside seats for the unvaccinated, Platty!” cried one of my bon vivant friends when I called to ask whether he felt it was safe to go back inside. The city’s great dining rooms were just as magical as I remembered them, he said, and he’d be happy to host me at his old hangouts, such as Le Bernardin when I felt like returning to the real world. Others were warier, and why not? According to the covid dashboards and pandemic heat maps that we’ve been addictively clicking for the past year, the risk of disease around the city remained “very high.” There were all sorts of grim variants afoot, along with stories about the newly vaxxed getting sick, and with the cold spring weather finally warming, dining out under the stars was beginning to seem attractive again.