Become A Regular

Notes on the simple joy of being known

Over the weekend we had a late Valentine’s date at a trendy Vietnamese place a short walk from our house.

We were seated at the bar next to an older gentleman dining on Cá Chiên Sốt Cà, a whole fried fish posed as though swimming on a bed of banana blossoms and rice. I told him how good it looked and apologized to him for how close we’d been forced to lurk behind him while waiting for our seats, and he laughed. He knew how busy it would be on a Saturday night, he said—he only eats at two restaurants in the city, this being one of them, and he never minds the crowd.

He wasn’t exaggerating, either. Everyone there, from the bartenders to the hostess, seemed to know him well. Any time there was a lull in the line to be seated the hostess would drift back over, throw her arm around his shoulders, and chat him up like an old friend.

It put into focus something I’ve been feeling ever since we left Seattle for Detroit: that I really miss being a regular somewhere.

When I went back to Seattle for a weekend in December, after four months away, my very first stop off the plane was to my favorite coffee shop.¹ I walked up to the counter and instead of being asked for my order, I was asked “Still doing cold brew, like last time?” Since it was cold and raining, I went with drip, but it still meant a lot to be remembered, months later, even just by the coffee order I was making every day over the summer.²

In Seattle I had the coffee shop, and over the years had also waxed and waned as a regular at a handful of restaurants, bars, and breweries. There were even cashiers at the neighborhood grocery store I said goodbye to by name as we made our final pit stop before leaving the city for good. You spend enough time and money somewhere and you start to get attached to the place and the people, you know?

Being a regular feels like one of the only ways to mediate the generalized discomfort of the transactional nature of life under capitalism. We all have to spend money to get our needs met, so you might as well make a little effort to be friendly along the way. And it feels good to be known, or to have your desires understood, by someone else, even if you’re paying for the privilege. As long as you’re not weird or over-familiar, or expecting special treatment, it can be nice for the people working there, too. There’s a sense of community that can form that makes work more tolerable, even something to look forward to. (There are exceptions. Once in a while it’s nice to be politely ignored, on the pretense that you’ve never been to a place you’ve actually been a lot of times.)

Detroit doesn’t feel quite like home to me yet because there’s no place in the city I can walk into to buy food or drinks or books or whatever and be recognized, identified by face or name or large black coffee. I’m not sweating it—these things take time, and I’ve started to find places I enjoy enough to make a habit of returning to—but I am eager for that sense of community, of being known, to return to my life.

If I am qualified to give you any advice, it is simply this: be a regular somewhere. (And don’t be weird to the people who work there.)

This all has me wondering about you: Where are, or were, you a regular? What makes the place special? Feel free to sound off in the comments.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

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1. Lighthouse Roasters — check ‘em out.

2. In the colder months during my time there the ask would simply be “Big drip?” or even just a silent point toward an empty cup.