The Joys of Being a Regular

Yes, New York is an exciting place, but it’s routine that weaves you into the city.

This is a subscriber-exclusive edition of Brooklyn, Everywhere, a newsletter where I ponder the many meanings of gentrification, and what we lose in our relentless pursuit of “the American dream.” Sign up for the newsletter here, and subscribe to The Atlantic for access to more exclusives like this.

In the month since my novel has been out in the world, a remarkable number of exciting things has happened. Ana Navarro randomly raved about it on The View; it received delightful reviews in The Washington Post and The Guardian; and I became a New York Times best-selling author—a sobriquet that I will demand be used in any and all circumstances: at the dinner table, in bed with a lover, on the phone with Verizon customer service. (“And who am I speaking with?” “New York Times best-selling author Xochitl Gonzalez.”) But by far, the most thrilling of these many awesome things was being featured in the “My Spots” column for New York magazine, doing what it is that I do best: being a creature of habit.

I excel at just a handful of things. Karaoke. Telling people off. Calculating gratuities. Balancing coffee, a book, and an umbrella while standing on the subway. Apparently, this writing thing is working out. But what I consider my real gift is being a superstar “regular” in my neighborhood. Because you see, just as writing a novel takes patience, focus, commitment, and a strong sense of curiosity, so does becoming a regular. But unlike a novel—which can get critical reviews or strong sales or great word of mouth—there are fewer formal and public forms of validation for hanging around my neighborhood and going to the same spots over and over again. So having a major media outlet recognize that, and send a photographer to document it, felt validating in a way that I hadn’t expected.

Of course, nothing is quite as validating as the experience of being a regular. The simple joy of walking into a restaurant or bar and greeting the hostess by name while the bartender makes your favorite drink without a word spoken between you. The minor satisfaction of ordering without a menu, or, better yet, ordering from off the menu. The tiny thrill when, on occasion, the owner or manager comps your bill—just as a thank you for always being there. And of course, the warm sense of belonging as you get updates on the lives and dreams of the people who make the place a place you’d want to go to again and again: the staff. Being a regular can extend past restaurants and bars to coffee shops, the butcher counter, the dry cleaner, your local shoe-repair guy, your bra lady, and, naturally, your bodega.

I’m a regular at a bunch of places. But if I ate at this place Dino any more frequently, to paraphrase Goodfellas, I’d be a fucking stool. My friends and I have had countless birthdays there, drinks there, dinners for no reason at all. I have cried, literally, into my pasta there after breakups and deaths. I have also laughed too many times to count, with my friends, with family, with other patrons, with the owners and the staff. I have seen servers come in, often new to Brooklyn, and tell me of their dreams to be actors or doctors or filmmakers and, over the past decade, I’ve watched so many of them go on to do it. I worked on my own novel there, cheered on the whole time by these “neighborhood friends” of mine, as, without saying a word, my martini and chicken Milanese would, like magic, appear next to me.

Growing up, being a regular somewhere was something that one aspired to. Brooklyn was a place full of common things and regular people, more alike in our day-to-day existences than different. Getting the red-carpet treatment that a regular got—the acknowledgement that you, and your commitment to a place, were “important”? Well, it provided a form of validation that made you feel special while concurrently connecting you more deeply to the community that surrounded you.

A couple of years back, I was getting my nails done at the Fort Greene nail salon I had been visiting for more than a decade, and I asked the owner if business had been booming since all the new high-rises went up. Hardly, she lamented to me: “There’s no loyalty anymore.” This struck me as true, not only as a sad characteristic of new Brooklyn but of our current era as a society. People come to this city because they want to experience the new, not the same old. From restaurants to, yes, even manicures, these transactions are now less about patronage and relationships than they are about participating in trends and getting a good pic for the ’gram. (For the record, my old nail salon? Out of business.)

Being a regular requires following exactly the opposite instincts. It means eschewing a night at the hottest restaurant to go have your favorite comfort dish … again. It requires doing more than keeping your head down while you have that drink at the bar, and instead asking how the person serving you is doing, or what they are reading, or how their day has been. It requires thinking of the spaces around you not as backdrops for the life you are living but as integral parts of the quality of life that you enjoy.

Between the content of the book and this newsletter, I’ve been asked a lot about gentrification while doing press for Olga. One of the best questions was from Maris Kreizman of The Maris Review podcast. She asked how someone who has moved here can be a better gentrifier. Get to know the people around you, I suggested. But I’m thinking I’ll up the ante on that advice: Become a regular somewhere. Its rewards are greater than you can likely imagine.