Debbie Nathan

“It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there… And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”

So said Bill O’Reilly last week of Sylvia’s, a venerable soul-food restaurant in Harlem. He’d eaten there after being invited by Al Sharpton. Later, on his nationally syndicated radio show, he raved about how civilized his dining experience was. This provoked a wave of “duh’s” and disgust over his obvious prior notion that black people don’t know how to behave in eateries. “What was he thinking??” the thinking goes. “Why wouldn’t Sylvia’s be like a restaurant in an all-white suburb, with no kind of craziness at all?”

OMG — I hope not!

Any of you readers been to an Olive Garden in, say, suburban Dallas? It’s not pretty. The servers — invariably oppressed, perfectly coiffed high school seniors — have pasted-on smiles, and they spend excessive time refilling the water glasses, in a shameless, tasteless bid for bigger tips. The menu is nationally standardized in the way BurgerKing’s is, which precludes energetic dinner-table discussion about what to order: decisions are predictable and not worth hashing out.

And naturally since we’re talking suburb, the room is too big. Much larger than in New York restaurants, because all suburban places are hypertrophic. Tables are spread far apart. You can’t listen in on the nutty, intense stranger chat that makes it so fun to dine out in NYC.

Few people are getting drunk, either (suburbs=kids=families=”family style” dining = propriety, ergo Apollonian rather than Dionysian alcohol intake). No tables screeching merrily with the “tequila laugh.”

No haughty waiters with interesting intimations of inner demons.

No dominatrixally competent waitresses.

No feisty negotiations with them over the accuracy of the check.

No swoons over amazingly good food.

No hustle-bustle or buzz. No acoustic drift about politics, the therapist, the next huge deal.

No window view from one’s table onto Seventh Avenue near Sheridan Square, where I once dined on oh-so-civilized Japanese while watching a movie-star-handsome, cheerful schizophrenic remove all his clothes and dance the hula before darting into the crowd to avoid an oncoming cop.

Give me crazy any day with my edamame. And my fried chicken as well.

Thanks for the review, Bill. I think I’ll skip Sylvia’s.