The first really nice restaurant I ever went to, I was maybe 14. It was on a family vacation to New York City to see the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center. There were starched tablecloths and gleaming silver, a dizzying array of front-of-house personnel gliding across the hushed floor in tuxedoes or white jackets and polished shoes, and a man whose only job was to keep the water glasses topped. Once we discovered that, my little brother and I tormented him endlessly—drinking probably two gallons of water apiece over the course of a three-hour dinner.
Joshua Huston
His shoes are magic. Honest.
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Il Terrazzo Carmine 411 First Ave., 467-7797, ilterrazzocarmine.com. 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. & 5:30–10:30 p.m. weekdays; 5:30–10:30 p.m. Sat.; closed Sunday.
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Under the soft lights, my blue-collar parents looked like royalty—Mom in a dress, Dad in a collared shirt, jacket, and tie. They were treated as such by the staff: like they were somebody, like this night was important. They told me I could order anything I liked, and the power was intoxicating.
That freedom didn't exist on normal nights out—for hamburgers and fries, meatloaf at some half-scary "family restaurant" full of water stains and fake wood paneling, the occasional steak, Chinese food on my birthday, or rolling into the drive-thru and shouting our order into a giant plastic clown head. I ate what I ate—occasionally what I wanted, sometimes not. But this was different. I ordered lobster. The butter pats that came with the bread for the table were molded like tiny clam shells. The plates were delivered under silver cloches that gave forth mushroom clouds of steam when lifted.
Being a teenager, I was a miserable bastard for the entire trip to the city. But for those three hours at table, in a restaurant whose name I can no longer recall, I was calm, relaxed, and inexplicably happy. My folks looked at me suspiciously throughout the entire meal, probably figuring I'd gotten into the minibar back at the hotel and wondering when things were going to fall apart.
Carmine Smeraldo opened Il Terrazzo Carmine around the time I was being schlepped to Manhattan by my parents, walked into my first fine dining room, set before a cloth-bound menu, and asked what I would like to eat. In the 26 years since, restaurants like Il Terrazzo have been driven toward extinction by economics and changing tastes. But really, American fine dining in its truest form has simply fallen out of favor. Some people would say that these things go in cycles—that a couple years of fast-casual and bistro boom will always be followed by a return to fine dining, then a retreat, then a return. But that's wrong. That idea of retreat and return is based on too broad a definition of fine dining—counting virtually anything with a table, with silverware not made of plastic, with a wine list that doesn't offer "house white" as a viable option. The local wine bar is a fine-dining destination by those terms, as are the neighborhood steakhouse and the hot new pan-Asian curry bar that turns into a techno club at 10 every Friday night.
Real fine dining is something different. There is a weight to it, a heaviness, that in the best cases feels grounding and solid—and in the worst will be translated to the food and the floor and come off as stodginess, or a sad clinging to a bygone heyday when everyone wore top hats and paid in cash. Real fine dining has age. There is an investment—in money, certainly, for the fixtures of luxurious moments, but, more important, in focus and commitment—that sets fine dining apart from casual. Service is a career, a noble calling best expressed in a fine-dining environment. Food, so twisted and tortured in lesser rooms, is given its most loving treatment at addresses where it's not merely stock, but an object of worship. In all elements is a seriousness that is not the denial of fun but a form of respect.
Walking into a fine-dining restaurant, you feel a slowing, a calm, as you are taken into the smooth workings of a house dedicated to your pleasure. When places like that vanish, they can't ever come back. Quiet competence and respect for tradition are things that can't just be grafted onto any new space. They must be learned, kept alive by institutional memories that outstretch trends and live down fads.
The front door of Il Terrazzo is hidden around a corner in a reclaimed alley, facing fountains that burble icily in the cold. Light spills out like warm butter; stepping inside is like dropping back in time, falling into some eternal evening which in its steadfastness denies all changes in weather, style, and age. It reminds me immediately of the restaurant in New York, of the bare dozen restaurants I've known since which have clung to the tatters of formality with admirable tenacity, refusing to give up the ghost of fine dining.
My wife Laura raises a hand and touches the necklace she'd found just as we were heading out the door. She smiles. Like me, she's made a tour of all the lower hells of the restaurant world, and a few of the heights. She understands how rare that instant feeling of comfort and competence can be. With my hand on her back, I feel some knot of tension leach out of her. We're here. That's all that matters. The house will take care of the rest.
