News Reporter: Act Four: Before you get in that line, be sure you want what's at the end of it

Wednesday, 31 May 2017

Act Four: Before you get in that line, be sure you want what's at the end of it

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

After the last wave of visitors to the Obliteration Room on the final day of the “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” exhibit, museum staff members mingle among the art at the Hirshhorn Museum on May 14 in Washington. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

In the July issue of Washingtonian, Michael Schaffer has an interesting meditation on the city’s obsession with line-standing, whether it’s at no-reservations restaurants like Rose’s Luxury and Bad Saint, or exhibits like the Hirshhorn’s “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors.”

“Time was, hitting an exclusive restaurant for a birthday meal meant expecting to be pampered, or at least treated like any other customer spending several hundred dollars on a nonessential product,” he writes. “But there are few scenarios where spending a couple of hours shivering on the sidewalk outside Bad Saint is considered luxurious. That doesn't change the fact that the meal you're about to eat may be mind-blowing. It does, however, change the meaning of a mind-blowing meal. It's about adventure, not comfort.”

I think there is another framework that applies here: Line-standing is meant to be democratic. The logic is that not everyone has the money to buy access to experiences, but a lot of people can commit at least some time to queuing for a table or a seat at a bar, or to getting up early to claim a limited number of day-of tickets to popular museums or exhibitions. Of course, this system can be co-opted, too: People who can afford it sometimes pay line-standers to do their waiting for them at places like Rose’s Luxury.

If it’s a matter of commitment, then I wish Washington restaurants might switch from line-standing systems to ticketing ones. If restaurants want to give diners an incentive to show up, they could ask diners to pay for prix-fixe meals or experiences in advance, as a place like the Columbia Room does, or charge a reasonable fee to be applied to the tab. Line-standing may help people with fixed budgets but unrestricted schedules, but not everyone who wants a special experience has infinite time.

If it’s a matter of suffering for a coveted experience, as Schaffer suggests, I’ll take a pass. Turning all aesthetic or culinary endeavors into a test of perseverance strikes me as, well, perverse. I say this as someone who happily went to “Infinity Mirrors,” but got into the Cherry Blossom Pub pop-up and left before ordering a drink, deciding the claustrophobia outweighed the taste of a new cocktail. Rather than attuning us to the experience we genuinely want to have, whether that means white-glove treatment at a fine-dining establishment, the taste of a dish that sounds like a dream, or a transcendent moment inside a mirrored box, making everything a status symbol to be Instagrammed or tweeted about takes us further and further away from a clear sense of our own personal taste. That’s not to say those lines can’t be worth it. But before we get into them, we should try to be clear with ourselves about what we really want.