024 — Zeek’s

(Justin ⇒ Jasdev, 11/2/20)

> On the face-mask date note (and reading through the Veuve Clicquot section on arcana.computer), do you and H have a favorite type of date y’all keep coming back to? > > — Jasdev, in letter #23.

H and I have exactly two types of dates:

1. The Fancy Date. When I say fancy, I mean as fancy as Seattle (or wherever we are at the moment) can get: we’ll dress up, spend a whole lot of money on steaks and cocktails, get a pre-ordered ride to and from the restaurant, the whole shebang. I abhor the genre of premium mediocre restaurants, or any establishment that refers to itself as, say, a “gastropub” or “upscale dining.” I don’t want to pay $25 for a hamburger that is inferior to one of my own making! I don’t want to pay $15 for a martini that pales to one of my own! So if we go out, we go, uh, all out — special occasions only, and it’s a night to remember.
2. The Cozy Date. H once described this as the “culinary equivalent of a weighted blanket” — something warm and comforting and familiar that probably isn’t great for us, but is a quiet extravagance during which we can bask in each other’s company.

It has, for reasons that are boring and self-explanatory, been a while since we’ve had a Fancy Date. (We are storing our metaphorical acorns for 2021.)

However! Quarantine has brought a delightful and powerful new iteration of the Cozy Date, and ushered in a ritual which is my new favorite part of the week.

Every Sunday night, I trundle off to Zeek’s Pizza and pick up a large Dragon pizza; I bring it back, we eat half of it (okay it starts off as half, and then inevitably goad each other into having more), and watch an old pre-code movie.

(A brief sidebar about Zeek’s: Seattle has many delights and a definitively great pizza joint is not one of them. We have tried, to my knowledge, almost every single pizza-serving establishment in this city and none of them are, you know, bad, but none of them are elevatory and/or revelatory enough. Zeek’s is just Good Pizza: it represents the terminus of our journey for finding truly mind-blowing pizza and settling for a pizza that we find very good and enjoyable.)

I feel as though I’m losing a couple hundred Boyfriend Points by answering the prompt of “what is your go-to date” with “oh man, peep this brilliant strategem: I get a pizza and then we watch a movie together.”

And, like, yeah, that’s true. There’s nothing fascinating or quirky or game-changing about this. But it’s so nice. H and I both get some iteration of the Sunday scaries (that classic neologism for a regularly-scheduled existential crisis); we both have a lot going on on weekends, and we’re bad at systemically carving out time to enjoy each others’ company. Having this weighted blanket waiting for us at the end of every weekend functions as a perfect nightcap for a long week and an amulet for the one to come.

Another little joy of this Sunday night ritual: for the first time since moving to the northern parts of the city, I’m a regular somewhere! We’ve been doing this since pretty much the start of quarantine and since mid-August I haven’t even had to order the pizza online or announce myself as “Justin, picking up a large Dragon.” The fine folks at Zeek’s (again, sorry for damning your pizza as merely “very good”!) always have one ready for me to take out every Sunday.

This is obviously incredibly trivial — chalk it up to the sitcom binging of my youth — but it’s important for me to feel like a regular somewhere, whether its a coffee shop or a cafe or a bar (or ideally all three). Do you have any places in NYC where they know you on a first-name basis?

■