What Americans Missed Most About Going to Restaurants. (It Wasn’t the Food.)

As New York City allows full-scale indoor dining, it’s clear that the magic ingredient was the random thrill of seeing other people.

On Wednesday, dining rooms in New York City will be allowed to fill every seat for the first time since last March. This is big, in theory. In reality, we will probably keep seeing six-foot spaces between tables and plexiglass partitions for as long as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps recommending them. But if you’re curious about what restaurants are and what makes them click, it’s been illuminating to watch them come back one piece at a time. In the past couple of weeks it’s been possible to see that a half-empty dining room, if it has people sitting at the bar, can feel more exciting than one that’s almost full. So many modern restaurant interiors are designed around their bars that we take their contribution for granted. All those shakers clattering and bar stools swiveling and bartenders reaching for a bottle or a rag; the customers sitting down and getting up again: Bars are perpetual motion machines that help turn the larger, slower gears in the dining room. Turn off the lights at the bar and it’s hard to get any momentum going in the rest of the space. The restaurant feels hollow at the core.