Fait La Force will not win with Valentine’s Day, Valentine’s Day in the United States this Friday (14). On the one hand, it is a brewery, which, at risk of generalizing, does not signal romance. Its pub in Nashville, Tennessee, is open and industrial, has no candles or fixed menu, and food – sandwiches from a local store – is notoriously difficult to eat attractively.
“We are not the place for a sophisticated romantic encounter, that place for a thin dinner,” said Parker Loudermilk, co-owner and founder of the brewery. “But we are not so simple that we are ironically sophisticated.” The brewery is not so casual as to enter the joke market about Valentine’s Day (as one about table service at White Castle, a US fast food chain).
All of this represents a problem – or an opportunity: “Tired of Cupid’s Melosian mischief?” Says the bar’s festivities leaflet on February 14th. “Join us to Valentine’s anti-Dia, also known as Emo Night.” The event revolves around a playlist with My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday and Good Charlotte, to name a few. The bar will also serve Margaritas with Chamoy running down the side, called bleeding hearts.
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“We were thinking that a boyfriend’s anti-dias party kind of relieves what can be a heavy day for people,” said Shanley Deignan, brewery’s director of marketing.
No one can completely escape Valentine’s Day. To celebrate is to recognize; Not emphatically celebrating is also a form of recognition. Having a casual approach to the day requires deliberately ignoring that the whole world has been temporarily covered by red and roses stuffed bears.
Perhaps more than any other business, restaurants tend to take advantage of the holiday. But while it is one of the busiest nights of the year, it ignores a significant part of the population.
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“Everything is pink, and your menu needs to be pink and red and cliché, and for two,” said Sydney Buck, a private chef in the Queens neighborhood of New York, and skeptical compared to Valentine’s Day, which this year, this year, this year It will perform your fifth class of manufacturing cookies “discard your ex”.
“People have this kind of strange feeling about it,” she said. “Especially if they are single.”
Thus, the internet is full of people, both married and single, desperate by other options. And not all establishments are prepared for the high novel of Valentine’s Day, either by practice or by nature.
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“Like Restauateur, I’ve never been a fan of people kissing the table while the others next door try to enjoy a meal,” wrote Jamie Boudreau, owner of the Canon restaurant and cocktail bar in Seattle in an email.
For 14 years, Canon marked the occasion with an event called Valentine’s Day Massacre. Leaflets warn that “any couple who openly show affection (such as holding hands, kissing or whispering sweet words)” runs the risk of the anger and judgment of other clients, expressed through “one (or all) of the 24 water pistols placed through the room ”.
The event, explained Boudreau, aims to “provide a safe refuge for those who do not want to be surrounded in an environment that resembles a set of a set softporn“. But it is also an intelligent business: with six tables, two counters and seats at the bar, Canon “literally loses thousands” of dollars, he said, if he encouraged the type of tantric permanence associated with the holiday.
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There are even special dinners aimed at single customers. The Valentine’s Day edition of Chef Charlene Luo’s Sichuanese dinner club, Baodega (or this weekend, “Bao-Bae-GO”), accepts only individual reserves. No couples. No longtime friends. It is not a dating event, but, as Luo explained, “everyone is ideally looking for someone,” which creates, if not romance, at least camaraderie.
“I just wanted to create a safe space for people, without pressure,” she said. “It’s not that serious.” Still, she has secret ambitions. “It’s my dream to be invited to a Baodega wedding someday.”
Not all alternative programming for Valentine’s Day is directed exclusively, or especially to singles. Everyone, regardless of relationship status, can rebel against the tyranny of tradition at Laundromat, a pizzeria and wine bar in San Francisco. At Valentine’s Day, it will offer live painting and a balloon artist, as well as a DJ; It may be the scenario for a meeting, but the intention is a broader celebration of love in its various forms.
This is more or less the same idea behind “Love Stinks”, an annual event at Hart’s, Brooklyn, which Nialls Fallon, one of the owners, describes as an alternative to fillet and champagne programming. There is a fixed menu of poignant dishes (polenta with strong cheese, puntarelle with anchovies), and the theme is adaptable, depending on your needs. Sharing a waterfall of exotic dishes with your beloved can be the height of intimacy. Alternatively, it is a recognition that “love can literally be unpleasant sometimes,” Fallon said.
For Fait La Force Loudermilk, the apparent appetite for alternative programming like Emo Night suggests that people are tired of Hallmark’s hegemony (card and wrapping company with standard messages). They are “really trying to oppose the corporatization of everything,” he said. Celebrating without the classic traps is, if not revolutionary, “perhaps a little countercultural.”
“We are not trying to be excluding,” added Deignan. And how could they be? In a contradiction that did not go unnoticed by them, Loudermilk and Deignan married last year.
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