A Billionaire and a Punk Walk Into a Dive Bar...

Dear Pros,

Kat here, from under a mountain of moving boxes. This week, I had the pleasure of publishing a story from the whip-smart Annemarie Dooling on the inherent tensions faced by a historically creative (and often more affordable) neighborhood when deeper pockets start to become part of the fabric.

She focuses specifically on Philadelphia's South Street, where dive bars, rogue art, and souvlaki joints exist alongside Michelin-starred restaurants and swanky farmers markets. The cultures coexist for now, but some seams — notably in the form of zoning laws and increased city inspection scrutiny of live event permitting — are starting to show.

I was thinking about this story a lot over the weekend as my husband and I were driving through Brooklyn's Park Slope, a neighborhood where I lived from 1997 or so until 2021, when our landlord sold the building we'd lived in together for nearly 16 years, and we were priced out. On this trip back, I spied a not-yet-opened Chipotle in a new high rise that opened down the hill a block from our old place in the lot that used to have the DII discount store where I bought random housewares, decor, dresses, and gloriously random crap. I'm not knocking Chipotle, but the placement hurt my heart.

We're moving from our current locale, a strange borderland of Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights abutted by several gas stations and weed dispensaries, a Shake Shack, and another Chipotle, to Greenwood, home of the nearly 200-year-old Green-Wood Cemetery, aka my favorite geographic location on the planet. This isn't just me being the eldergoth that I very much am; it's also a nature preserve and host to exceptional concerts, historical talks, and an artist-in-residence program.

We'll have the cemetery on two sides, so unless something goes terribly sideways, no one can build a chain restaurant or a luxury mid-rise. Fifth Avenue nearby is a constant string of primarily Mexican markets, bakeries, and cafes, and many storefronts seem to have been the same for generations — at least mostly unchanged since I'd commuted there daily a decade ago.

The robust new development of Industry City is a block further toward the water, but all housed in buildings that had been empty warehouses, so businesses weren't displaced. Not the halal slaughter house, or the workaday delis, or the adult stores that still hawk DVDs via neon window lights. Annemarie's story underscored for me how important it is that I champion the independent businesses that have been here all these years (maybe not the smut shop; I don't have a DVD player) and be a force for helping the neighborhood remain the magical place it is.

Pros, Erika and I would love to hear about what's going on where you live. Do local, independent, and affordable places dominate, coexist with swankness, or are they being snuffed out by VC cash? Let us know at the contacts below, and we might include your response in a future mailbag.

Your birthday girl,
Kat

The F&W Pro Mailbag

Last week, Erika asked whether readers preferred the word "customer" or "guest" — or a different term altogether — when talking about the people who patronize a restaurant.

"I think we are the problem. As an industry, we have overly romanticized the word 'guest.' A guest in your home comes with a different social contract. There are expectations on both sides. You're offering hospitality, but they are expected to behave like, well, a guest.

In a restaurant, the relationship is quite different. It's a commercial exchange, elevated by generosity, professionalism, and genuine care. Calling someone a customer doesn't diminish that, it clarifies it. And customers, regardless of what we call them, will always behave like, well, customers.

The best restaurants in the world don't succeed because they found the perfect noun. They succeed because they've mastered the verbs: listening, cooking, serving, anticipating, apologizing, delighting."

— Andrew Zimmern

"May I suggest a different noun for this debate? How about patron? This word conveys the essence of the relationship between restaurant and diner. The diner is spending time and money in the restaurant and the restaurant is promising the experience will be worth it. Thus, there is responsibility for both sides of the relationship. At McDonald's, I feel like a customer. At the French Laundry, I feel like a guest. But at both places I am clearly a willing patron of each establishment, with each place creating its own version of eating out."

— Bill Phillips

"I am a retired industry veteran of both fine dining and fast food, executive management (40-plus years in New Orleans and Houston). What is wrong with simply using the term 'diners'? It is accurate, inviting, and, most of all, accurate in every instance. Frankly, I do not understand the concept of 'I want my customers to feel like they are a guest in my home.' In fact, they are not! Would you also expect them to pay as a guest in your home or bring the gift of a bottle of fine wine as a guest might do in a congenial gesture?

A happy diner doesn't care what you call them, except perhaps "contentedly full" and anxious to return for another meal/experience!"

— Wolfgang Salingre