This article deserves some kind of award for peak pretentious smugness, a la South Park fart huffing. I'm not sure what the point is. Restaurants are nice. Muh facemasks.<p>>"restaurants are where life is lived"<p>As opposed to ... the rest of where life is lived?<p>>"Restaurants bring humanity to a city. They’re central to my memories. "<p>I'm pretty sure bringing food to a city is more central to restaurantness than bringing "humanity" to a city.<p>"Eating out in Houston is an exercise in acceptance." -are you shitting me? Do people actually feel virtuous and beatific because they bought a bucket of pork fried rice from someone not of the same race as them? What the hell is going on here?
Point of clarification: "Latinx" is not a real word. "Latino" serves perfectly well, and should be used instead of some made-up word created to assuage notions of wokeness.
> Eating out in Houston is an exercise in acceptance. Someone who probably doesn’t look like you—whether that’s the waitstaff, the back of the house—is letting you into their home.<p>This is just a wild sentence. People don't become less racist after eating foreign food. People should not feel proud about themselves just because they spent money on a bowl of ramen.<p>> In Houston, most days out of the week, I’ve found myself in the company of family that wasn’t my own, that’s adopted me nonetheless.<p>There has to be a way to express, "restaurant workers are struggling financially because of COVID", without projecting that the minimum wage workers at your favorite Korean restaurant think of you as an adopted family member.<p>They just want to do their job and earn a living without contracting a contagious disease. They shouldn't, on top of that, be forced to emotionally validate their customers.