I’d read Our Town just once before, in a hurried, obligatory way. It’s one of those things you wind up reading at some point or another, I knew; one of those things collectively considered worth reading. When I told friends that my dad was going to perform in it, I heard story after story about friends’ first encounters with Our Town: how one woman returns to it every year, when she’s feeling sentimental about her son’s — and her own — aging. How one man got to act in it at several different points of time through his life, playing older and older characters each time. How another can’t read it at all anymore. “It’s too sad,” he said to me.
“Because everyone in the play dies?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Because everyone dies.”
The no-tipping policy lasted just six months at Chang’s Momofuku Nishi. Claus Meyer, a Noma co-founder, announced in February that he was ending the no-tipping policy at his own New York restaurant, Agern, after two years, citing slow business as a result of the higher menu prices. Gabe Stulman reversed course at his restaurant, Fedora, after four months without tips, telling Eater that guests were ordering less food than they had before. And last week, Andrew Tarlow — the owner of Brooklyn restaurants like Roman’s and Diner — revealed to his staff in an email that the no-tipping policies at his businesses had “created new challenges that we are unable to sustainably resolve. Ultimately, we ended up serving an ideal at the expense of taking care of you, our staff, which is a trade-off I didn’t fully anticipate and am unwilling to continue to make.”
“Andrew was very disappointed,” says an employee of Tarlow’s restaurant group, Marlow Collective, who asked to remain anonymous. “But when we went to non-tipping, we pretty much lost our entire staff that had been there for ten years. He wanted to make it work, but it just became really difficult.”
Tip-free dining was supposed to be the future of dining in New York and beyond. Instead, many owners are now scrambling to revert to the old way of doing things. There are holdouts — especially in the upper echelons of the fine-dining world — but it has become clear in just over three years that, for the time being, they will remain the overwhelming exceptions, not the rule. Here’s why.
You can read a lot of police procedurals. You can read a lot of police procedurals set in the United Kingdom. You can read a lot of police procedurals set in the United Kingdom that feature female protagonists.
But you won't read any police procedurals set in the United Kingdom featuring a female protagonist that are better than the ones Val McDermid writes, and that's because her DCI Karen Pirie books manage to balance all of the above elements — and more — with great compassion and elegance.
Kennedy’s prose — like the endlessly unreeling speculations of her most interesting characters — is simultaneously logical and illogical, sad and funny, simple and profound, turning over and over in endless permutations, like an elegant small snake wrestling against the constraints of its own shiny and menacing skin.