The Lost Art of Date Night
Something was off the other night as my wife and I sat in the corner banquette at Four Twenty Five on Madison Avenue, just a few streets shy of the Upper East Side.
As we ate the last of the season’s tomatoes and admired the army of light fixtures dangling from the high ceiling of the 62nd restaurant opened by chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, I asked Emily if she knew why it was different. She looked around at a dining room packed with men out on dates with much younger women, and then she joked it was because I appeared too young to be there, and my wife—who is seven years younger than me—was too old. But that wasn’t it, I told her. As I watched our food make its way from the kitchen to our table, I nervously checked my phone again. The deal with our dinners is that we try our best to block everything out—not look at our phones or talk too much about work. A dinner date is supposed to be just us and nobody else. I was breaking the rules because somebody new had come into the picture. No, it wasn’t an affair, nor did we become one of those Brooklyn couples that turned into a throuple. We became one of those Brooklyn couples that has a baby.
I wearily reopened the baby monitor app on my phone and apologized. Emily, who usually lets me know when I’m spending too much time refreshing my email or scrolling Instagram, told me she understood, that she was also nervous.
“This is our first real dinner out-out since the baby,” she said. “We’re in Manhattan, it’s almost 10, but everything is fine. Just enjoy being here.”
It was hard to argue. Our baby Lulu was nearly five months old and we had a babysitter. I decided it was Date Night in America, dammit. Getting the glass of red Burgundy to go with my veal—even though I’d already had a martini—was fine. Date Night only comes once a week, after all. Maybe I’d even have a digestif with our dessert.
For the last few years, Emily and I have had something that we call Date Night in America. (At first, we viewed it as a joke; there was no Passover question of Why is this night different from all other nights that we’d ask beforehand.)
There was something so chic about date night when I was a kid. Every Saturday evening at around 5:30, my dad and his wife would start getting dressed. He’d wear a suit and tie with a few (too many) spritzes of Polo cologne out of the green bottle. My stepmother always had her best dresses saved for their one night out—the way some parents have their Sunday best for church. They’d get dinner, see a movie or a show, and usually arrive home just before midnight. Everything about it seemed like the epitome of class; I envisioned their meals taking place at spots that looked like the snooty French restaurant Jake and Elwood crash in The Blues Brothers. Along with other middle-class totems, like getting to go to the mall without a parent or finally getting asked to man the grill in the backyard, date night seemed to me something you earned.
Then I became an adult and the idea of a night out started to take on a different meaning. At first, in my unmarried 20s, I played with the idea that couples who made a point of having a date night needed it. I based that idea solely on the fact that my father and stepmother had eventually ended their marriage, and I started believing that they’d used the one night a week to tell themselves that they were doing everything they could to keep things going, that those Saturday nights would keep their marriage humming along despite the heap of personal problems that they couldn’t hide. I harbored that idea well into my 30s—even five or ten years into my own marriage. My wife and I have always had a good time, and we often went out together multiple nights a week—why would we need a date night? Shouldn’t every night be one? Isn’t that what romance is?
Emily and I like going out. We enjoy being around each other. Shouldn’t that suffice? After a decade of marriage, we had worked out our own unspoken system for going out. We knew the other one’s likes and dislikes, could always compromise on where to go, and if we both wanted the same thing on the menu, I’d tell her to get it knowing that I would end up finishing her plate anyway. We could go out two, three, even four nights out of the week—and it was normal. But eventually it became too much: I hit my 40s and ran the risk of higher cholesterol and hangovers after a single drink. She’s got a career that’s more 9-5 (or 8 to who knows when, depending on the project); I’m a self-employed freelance writer who feels the need to always be working. Going out got tougher, physically and mentally, so we dialed it down a notch.
There was something sad about realizing I could no longer down a Red Bull and stay out until 4 in the morning. I love the night, and part of the appeal of living in a big city is experiencing as much of it as possible. Emily and I had made going out such a big part of our lives that I worried that something was being lost by our doing it less. So while the idea of Date Night in America started as a little joke I shared on Instagram, it soon became a very real and important part of our lives. We could still go out whenever, but saying it was a thing, a weekly tribute to the pleasures of dining out together, really helped to zhush it up. The truth is, any time we go out is a date night, but Date Night in America is just a little more special because we say it is.
For two years, we made a point of having one official Date Night a week, and it did make things more fun. I’d been to Carbone a few times, but Emily hadn’t been and really wanted to, so I put on a blazer, she bought a new dress, and that famous spicy rigatoni really did hit different. Sometimes there would be curveballs that we’d hit out of the park: a reservation problem at an over-hyped place in the West Village one Date Night turned into Well, we could probably get a walk-in at Balthazar. Although we’d both been to Keith McNally’s famous brasserie countless times, that night ended up being the best one. We both got pomme frites and listened in as tourists had some of the silliest conversations imaginable while a girl two tables down kept trying to film the same stupid video for her TikTok for nearly an hour. It was great.
In the weeks leading up to our dinner at Four Twenty Five, we had a few test runs. The first happened at Leland, our favorite neighborhood spot. We’ve never had a bad night there, and the fact that it’s a five-minute walk from our apartment is a bonus. Still, Emily and I knew we’d be on edge despite being able to watch the baby from our phones. We rushed through our chicken jook porridge and did the unthinkable by skipping dessert, then rushed home to find Lulu doing exactly the same thing we’d been watching her do on our phones: sleep.
After reminding that we had to carve out a little time for ourselves, we made the bold decision to try our first Manhattan excursion, taking the subway to get the outrageously good duck and the offal trio of veal kidney, liver, and sweetbreads at the newly refreshed Le Veau d'Or on East 60th Street. I had the “Our Way” martini with a sidecar of vermouth, Vichy Catalan mineral water, and dirty ice. I was nervous when we arrived for our reservation, especially because cell service inside was spotty. But I was calm (and slightly buzzed) after a few sips of my drink.
While both meals were wonderful, I look back and see them like a training montage—my wife and I as the athletes getting back into shape after some time off. We wanted to see if the tradition could survive parenthood.
While Date Night in America isn’t some exercise in gluttony, and neither of us tend to over-imbibe, the decision to host our first official Date Night in America at Four Twenty Five was deliberate: we’d both eaten at plenty of Jean-Georges’ places (my wife and I are especially fond of breakfast and lunch at his ABCV near Union Square). But getting dressed up after a long day and shlepping from Brooklyn to Midtown to try a new place—it felt like a big step. And it was special, even if we didn’t do anything crazy like splurge on the Golden Osetra caviar. Sure, I checked the camera app on my phone a few times too many, but I was also reminded of how beautiful it is that my wife and I have this little tradition, plus now we have the bonus of a beautiful baby to come home to.
You can read all the books and watch countless YouTube videos on parenting, but the thing nobody tells you about having a first baby later in life is that your rituals and traditions have to be excavated out of their calcified positions and reexamined. Getting home at 1 or 2 in the morning evolves into bath, book, and bed every night at 7; those spur-of-the-moment jaunts out of town become lessons in over-planning and over-packing like you’re crossing the ocean, even though your drive is only two hours away on the Long Island Expressway.
That’s why Date Night has taken on new meaning. We love cooking for each other, but every now and then it’s nice to have a night off from playing chef, server, and dishwasher. We also have skill and time limitations working in our own kitchen, so when we sat down at Four Twenty Five we immediately agreed that the foie gras served with corn madeleines was something we couldn’t enjoy at home. We also ordered the broccoli coated in a pistachio crust because it was a nice change from the basic garlic-olive oil-and-lemon preparation I take out of the oven at least two nights a week. We ate and drank, talked and listened—to each other, but also eavesdropping on all the conversations around us. And when the server asked if we wanted to see the dessert menu, I remembered the one constant rule of Date Night in America: “It can’t hurt to look.”
We got the strawberry vacherin and a flight of cookies with a glass of milk. I checked the app once more to see the live video of our baby still sleeping soundly, then put my phone away for the rest of the meal. I looked over at Emily and realized how glad I was that we’d started this silly thing called Date Night in America, and how important it is that, no matter what life changes we have, we’ll always have one special evening a week. My little glass of Fernet arrived, and I took my time with it.
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