That is the world of which I still, despite everything, want to give you a snapshot. And the answer, as I had already guessed, is: all of the above. (Would Po'boy Prix Fixe or Grand Buffet du Grinder have the same power? I think not.) In the draft of this story that was already wending itself through the publishing process when COVID-19 tilted the world on its axis, I put it this way: “They are words to send you immediately to a future in which cultural historians might look back and see…what, exactly? Postcapitalist decadence? Joyful sybarites? Witty masters of multicultural pastiche? Straight-up suckers? Would they marvel at our exuberance and creativity, or be convinced we had all lost our damned minds?”Īs it happens, the future has arrived, ahead of schedule.

So I can really only consider the Private Hoagie Omakase Room as an abstraction, a set of words. Seems the Esquire food critic was in there. I asked for a peek within but was told that was impossible. I myself did not dine in the Private Hoagie Omakase Room, not having the requisite five to seven friends on hand in the City of Brotherly Love prepared to pay $75 each, before tax, tip, or beverage (beyond a welcome cocktail), for a “two-hour private pizza and hoagie Omakase experience.” I did see the door, an anonymous blond-wood portal disguised to look like an office or an employee dressing room. It is officially the Hoagie Room, in Philadelphia's justly acclaimed Pizzeria Beddia. Such a room actually exists, or at least existed. The words are these: Private Hoagie Omakase Room.

They linger at the edge of my consciousness, float to the fore at unexpected moments, whispering like a distant melody or a koan-or an elegy. When I think of the last days of the old ways, the months last winter that I traveled the country in an attempt to see America through the lens of its new restaurants and name the best of them, four words stick in my mind.

Private room brave new restaurant