Instead of Making Turkey, They Make Reservations

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/dining/thanksgiving-restaurants-eating-out.html

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Flip through the folder where you store images of Thanksgiving meals gathered from movies, food magazines and Norman Rockwell illustrations. You will notice that wine lists are missing from the tables, lavishly set though they are, and the cast of characters, though extensive, does not include any bussers or sommeliers.

Now call up your Thanksgiving playlist. Listen closely and you’ll hear that Arlo Guthrie enjoyed “a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat” not at Alice’s restaurant but in the church where Alice lived.

A preponderance of the evidence, musical and otherwise, suggests that there’s no place like home for the holidays. This does not seem to bother the thousands who make reservations instead of mashed potatoes. In fact, it seems to give them the quiet joy that comes from figuring out something that the rest of the country hasn’t.

What they know has something to do with what restaurants can be relied on to provide and what they can’t. On Valentine’s Day, a customer with a long-term horizon may expect a restaurant to create the conditions under which agreeing to get married seems like a terrific idea. One with a more immediate outlook may hope that the truffles and chocolate cake will directly result in a night of unprecedented sex.

The Thanksgiving customer’s goals, by contrast, tend to be easier for restaurants to achieve. Questioned closely, people who’ve made a tradition of eating out on that day reveal that they like it because somebody else does all the planning. And the shopping. And the cooking. They like having a choice of main courses. And when the last drumstick has been picked clean, they like knowing that somebody else will wash all the dishes.

This may sound familiar, and indeed it should. These are the very advantages that lure us to restaurants on any other day of the year. But no other day seems to require so much planning, shopping and cooking, or to leave so many gravy-streaked dishes in its wake.

The first time somebody eats out on Thanksgiving, the reason is usually something other than laziness. That comes later. In the beginning, it may be because offers to join somebody else’s family meal were unappealing or nonexistent.

“When we moved here, we didn’t have family around,” said Rhonda Le Grice, who settled in Atlantic Highlands, N.J., with her husband and son almost 30 years ago. “We’d pitifully say, ‘Oh, it’s just the three of us … ’ but we didn’t get too many invitations.”

So that first November in their new town, they made their way to a local restaurant. Ms. Le Grice declined to give its exact location or that of other places where they have gone for Thanksgiving, perhaps out of fear of offending the voters of Atlantic Highlands, where she is the mayor. But on one point, she was willing to go on the record: “We found that, oh my God, it was so much easier.”

She also found that her young son, who had refused to eat turkey since he was a baby, could order something else. Typically, Thanksgiving menus have a fixed price and revolve around the standard dishes. Almost all, though, offer a choice of main courses for the turkey skeptics, who are legion.

The chef Alfred Portale takes pains with the Thanksgiving turkey he has been serving at Gotham Bar and Grill in Manhattan since the 1980s. (The dark meat is braised in rich stock; the breast is brined, marinated and roasted.) Still, he said, about half the 300 or so customers who come in on that day opt out, in favor of seafood, pork with apple cider sauce or another meat.

At the two RedFarm Chinese restaurants, the chef Joe Ng prepares about 30 turkeys, served by the half, in the style of Peking duck. At Decoy, downstairs from the RedFarm in the West Village, he also makes about 40 Peking ducks. Both birds sell out every year.

Making dinner easy for the customer results, of course, from an effort by the restaurant’s staff that has to be as carefully orchestrated as the invasion of Normandy. At Keens, the steakhouse off Herald Square in Manhattan, sacks of potatoes and mountains of green beans are laid in several days before the event. More than 50 turkeys in the neighborhood of 20 pounds each will be brined in a collection of plastic barrels that are used just once a year.

At 5 on Thanksgiving morning, the cooks file in. If the pies and bread don’t arrive before the police close the streets for the Thanksgiving Day parade, somebody will have to meet the delivery truck. One server will spend the day covering for co-workers on their 30-minute breaks. The staff meal, served buffet-style in the bar, will feed 70 employees. The first of about 700 customers will be seated just after 1 p.m. and the last around 8 p.m.

Bonnie Jenkins, the general manager, has worked 20 Thanksgivings at Keens. In her view, because the logistics have been honed over the years, the dining rooms are filled with something resembling tranquillity.

“The restaurant has a little different feel to it,” Ms. Jenkins said. “It doesn’t have that same New York buzz: rraaahwr, rraaahwr.” She made a noise like a toddler running over a plastic dinosaur with a Tonka truck. “It’s more ‘La la-la, la la-la’,” she sang, and this time she sounded like a child directing a small choir of stuffed unicorns.

Those la la-las may also be attributable to another factor: the civilizing effect of restaurants. Thanksgiving can be a time when relatives express their mutual affection. Or it can be a time when long-simmering resentments, feuds and political differences spill over like the filling in an apple pie.

The presence of other families in restaurants seems to act as a guardrail, keeping the dinner conversation from careening into a ditch.

Even families for whom arguments at the table are as routine as saltshakers seem to appreciate a little restraint. The family of Fran Kessler, who worked for many years as an assistant to the editors of New York and Esquire magazines, gave up on a home-cooked Thanksgiving after the infamous year one of her younger relatives nicknamed the undercooked main course “turkey carpaccio.”

Since then, they have spent the holiday at Rôtisserie Georgette, Houseman, Marea and Locanda Verde, among other restaurants.

Ms. Kessler is active in Democratic politics and has strong views that can cause friction with her Republican relatives. “In our family, we fight over everything,” she said. “But maybe we don’t yell at each other as loud in a restaurant as we would at home.”

Large, squabbling tables are less common on Thanksgiving, though, than two-tops — couples without children, taking advantage of their freedom and escaping a home-cooked meal. Restaurants are also a haven for people who are, by default or design, alone on the holiday. Gotham Bar and Grill sets places at its long bar for solo diners, and if they don’t want to eat the whole, formidable menu, Mr. Portale lets them order à la carte.

There is, however, one disadvantage mentioned by almost everybody who eats out on Thanksgiving.

Ann Viney, a retired health care fund-raiser, began going out for the holiday because her relatives lived in the United Kingdom and her husband’s were “scattered across the United States.” The two of them made a habit of it, eating at kitchens overseen by Wolfgang Puck in Los Angeles or Jean-Georges Vongerichten in New York.

“You avail yourself of the best chefs with every possible component of the dinner, you can sleep in, you can watch the parade, you can watch the dog show,” Ms. Viney said. “But I’ll tell you the one thing you miss.”

As good as they were in other respects, she said, the restaurants never sent her home with leftovers.

“I don’t know that we had anything left,” she said. “And you don’t go to Jean-Georges and ask for a doggie bag.”

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