The Real Thing

Wine bars and other simulations of American cosmopolitanism

Wine bars—the kind that attract people who call them a third place—have become a neoliberal cultural indicator for me when traveling abroad. There are post- and pre-wine bar societies just as there are post- and pre-warp societies on Star Trek. The pre-wine bar societies are primitive. They have not yet discovered that hanging out with your friends can be called “community,” and that community is something you can make money from. Post-wine bar societies are far along on this spectrum. They are in late-stage community building—the part where you realize that having friends is expensive these days.

At some point in the last year, I started making a list of wine bars across America with names signaling the vibe of community—Friends Bar, Community Garden, People’s Wine, things like that. I gave up after six months because it was getting rather depressing.

There is an aesthetic uniformity to post-wine bar societies, so when I’m seated at a wine bar in Mexico City, it feels as if I have just beamed over from a similar-looking Federation American wine bar in Austin. There are key differences, of course—the wine is cheaper because the labor and fixed costs are lower, though still priced high enough to attract only those seeking third places. If you just want to hang out, you could go to a cervecería, where for $2.50 you get a michelada and a free snack on the house.

The service feels different, too. In Mexico City or Tokyo, you’re a customer and the people working there are doing their job. In the United States, I’m at a wine bar to fulfill the hopes and dreams of the person who started it, along with the expectations of the people who are paying $15 a glass to tolerate my presence. The people I find in places like this often like to use the word passionate. There’s an aesthetic literacy and a certain vibe I’m supposed to bring to the place community. Sometimes I see someone accidentally walk into a spot like this and I feel bad for them—they look perplexed by the prices, the crowd, and why is the person taking my order being obnoxious.

I was wondering what explains this difference when I stumbled upon a PhD thesis turned book by Joanne Finkelstein titled Dining Out. The book is an ethnographic survey of the booming restaurant industry of the 1980s, when people began having more meals outside the house thanks to increased disposable income and more dual-income nuclear families.

Finkelstein’s thesis is that dining out is an uncivilized behavior because it allows us to act in imitation of others—in accord with images, in response to fashions, out of habit, without need for thought or self-scrutiny. We are relieved of the responsibility to shape sociality or pay close attention to anything or anybody. She views restaurants as avenues where social rules are displayed rather than formed.

Her analysis focuses on Western and Western-inspired restaurants of the 1980s—what she calls Bistro Mondain. This was the premium mediocre aesthetic of the time: Euro-inspired interiors that felt formal but relaxed. Think Keith McNally’s joints in New York City like Balthazar¹. These were dioramas of heavily vetted idiosyncrasies, places that tended to feel more real than reality itself².

There is something to be written about how the restaurant culture that Finklestein describes is an extension of chivalric culture vs how the dining out culture in places like India and Mexico is an extension of large family dinners. I would have written that, but I’m interested in wine bars, and the wine bar I’m thinking of in Mexico City is a simulation of something that exists in Brooklyn or San Francisco. Simulations operate by a different set of virtues.

There is a Henry James story titled The Real Thing, where an artist is frustrated by the realness of an upper-middle-class couple who come looking for work as models. He infers they’ve fallen on hard times and wants to help them, but soon realizes they are too much of the “real thing.” When the artist first encounters the couple, James writes:

Combined with this was another perversity—an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure.

He prefers a poor young woman who can dress up as upper-middle class, or a young Italian man who can barely speak English, to the genuine WASPs who have walked into his life. Perhaps the virtue of a simulation is that it can be a more innocent version of the real thing. Not being real gives the freedom to imagine an idealized version of the real—and to add more interesting elements to it. This might explain why I’ve found that places outside America now do America best. They reimagine an American version of cosmopolitanism that spread throughout the world from the 1980s to the late 2010s.

You can see this influence not just in restaurants but also in music and entertainment. One of the albums I’ve enjoyed listening to this summer is Big City Life by Smerz. Most of the lyrics in the album are the stuff of Americana teen romance, but the singers—who are from Denmark—clearly haven’t experienced these things the way they’re singing about them. They are nostalgic for an Americana they absorbed culturally, through songs and movies, but never really lived. Because of that, there’s a freshness and innocence about it that perhaps American audiences nostalgic for the “real thing” have latched onto.

This is not a new phenomenon—Japan’s long-standing obsession with replicating Americana makes that clear. But in these terrible times in the light of the empire’s fading influence, such simulations may become the starting point of a new type of cosmopolitanism.

Jack Kerouac re-imagined in the Tokyo city boy aesthetic in Mexico City

1. From the book, I also began to understand the restaurant scene of the 1980s and ’90s, epitomized by TV shows and establishments like Keith McNally’s Balthazar. I had picked up McNally’s memoir I Regret Everything a couple of months back and found it curious that he skips over the key details of what made him a good restaurateur. For example, he writes about moving to the United States to become an actor and working in restaurants to pay the bills. Then, one day, seemingly out of the blue, he starts a restaurant with his brother and wife. He doesn’t explain why that was the next logical step.

In Dining Out, Finkelstein describes how the restaurant industry grew by over 50% in the ’70s and ’80s, so for someone who had been working in restaurants for a few years, starting one yourself was the obvious move—it was the thing to do at the time. Perhaps McNally is right to skip over this because it’s the least remarkable part of his story, and takes some charm away from the mythology of “making it” in America.

2. This also explains The Bear to me. Everything in The Bear is more real than reality itself.