I first felt it at a long table with a furious rainstorm blanking out the window behind me. This was back when it was possible to get into. With a little bit of counterpunching and willingness to wait at the bar next door, my wife and our friends and I could get into a restaurant that was already both a scene and part of what we only faintly understood then as a moment.
Over the course of the last decade, that sort of food—simple in the sense of being more about ingredients than technique, pegged not to classic tropes but the local realities of seasons and sources—served in that kind of setting—dark wood and ostentatiously humble Edison bulbs and all those chalkboards—became something like a movement. The idea behind it had if not quite a coherent politics then a palpable political valence that seemed to align with our own.
For a while, we would try to get it together for one last visit to the places we used to go. Back Forty could be justified on the spur of the moment after a good week, Northern Spy was more of a special-occasion thing, Battersby was for round-number birthdays or anniversaries.