Famous People #80: Opening a steakhouse
Kaitlyn: Well, New Year’s Eve in New York City is never what you expect it to be, especially if your earliest expectations of New Year’s Eve in New York City came from the end of When Harry Met Sally. … you reluctantly attend a black-tie gala in SoHo that is apparently free and open to the public. You look sad and hot and play hard-to-get for 40 seconds while someone berates you with a speech about how iconic you are. You kiss, you cry, you listen to people sing “Auld Lang Syne,” you endure your new boyfriend’s stupid observational comedy about its lyrics. (The building they filmed that scene in is now an REI store.)
Well, this isn’t our first New Year’s Eve in New York City, so our expectations were lower and weirder, but we were still surprised when Nathan tested positive for the coronavirus three days after Christmas. It was a plot twist because he and I had already gotten the coronavirus at the same time, two weeks before Christmas. We had waited out our isolation period, had taken our tests, had moved on with our lives. Science can’t explain how he ended up with the coronavirus again so quickly, or it doesn’t want to, and Tamar’s latest mantra is one of her best: “The information is not available to us.” By December 30th, Nathan could not smell garlic. This was disappointing and upsetting and it was also ironic, as Lizzie and Matt had invited an intimate group over for the one-night-only New Year’s Eve grand opening of their new New York City steakhouse: Lizzie and Matt’s Steakhouse. (That’s not what they actually called it but I don’t know if Matt wants his last name to appear in the newsletter.)
Lizzie: Every New Year’s Eve I want to avoid doing anything and then somehow I get conned into doing something and I usually regret it before and sometimes after too. This year my only two ideas were “workout party” and “steakhouse party” and since I thought the first might be too interactive, we went with the second.
Planning for a steakhouse-themed party involved looking up steakhouse menus, deciding on “some kind of beef,” baked potatoes, and creamed greens, and then going to the butcher store and asking for an embarrassingly large beef tenderloin that cost more than any meat I’ve ever touched before. I thought about getting a chicken instead, but I felt I had to commit to the original plan. The guy at the wine store thought my cut of meat was a giant sandwich, because it was very long and wrapped in white paper. “Oh, it’s just beef,” I had to say.
Kaitlyn: New Year’s Eve Day is great. I love to hustle around town doing errands and crossing things off of a list: “wine,” “tights,” “coin return at Western Beef.” I did it all. I went to Target and was asked to type my birthday into the computer in order to buy a $5 box of shiny “party crackers” that you rip open and there’s a puff of smoke or a tiny parachute man inside. I made Caesar salad dressing. I thawed frozen shrimp. I had two glasses of champagne while I was getting dressed up in my steakhouse outfit, then called Nathan to sympathize, and called my mom to sympathize, and called my sister Sophie to sympathize. They were having Wegmans Chicken French, an Ops pizza, and I don’t know… probably popcorn, respectively, for New Year’s Eve dinners at home. I was going to a steakhouse!
Lizzie: Before everyone showed up, I made a custom playlist but quickly abandoned it for a premade hot bar Spotify playlist called “Manhattan Steakhouse.” I lit two tea candles and then laid down on the couch because my little calloused feet hurt from doing shit all day.
I got a sweater on sale at the sale that everyone is shopping right now, the one with 400 pages. The sweater had two cut-outs that I thought were going to end up on my midriff but unfortunately rode up quite a bit higher so that I couldn’t move my arms in any way without having a double nip slip. I decided to put it on backwards.
Ashley and Bran showed up first with a beautiful and massive Baked Alaska that needed to be high-tailed into the freezer immediately. Ash was concerned that Kaitlyn hadn’t arrived yet, since she’s usually right on time or a little early. Ash looked for Kait’s little Find My Friends icon in the map and told us she was pretty close.
Kaitlyn: I was drunk when I arrived, so I was very amazed to see everyone. I took a long video of Ashley using tongs to mix the dressing into the salad.
At Lizzie and Matt’s steakhouse, there was a martini bar and little plastic martini glasses from Party City. Lizzie didn’t like them because she thought it was perverse that liquid went in the stem of the glass as well as in the actual coupe part of the glass. I didn’t really grasp that issue, but they also kept leaking.
Lizzie: There was something gross about the whole aesthetic, but the leaking was the main issue. It wasn’t so much that the liquid went into the stem that bothered me, it’s that the stem had a hole at the end where it screwed into the flat bottom part of the glass, meaning that if the stem and the bottom pieces weren’t screwed together perfectly — and they never were, because they were from Party City — they’d leak on you with every sip! Why not just close up the hole at the bottom of the stem?
Kaitlyn: Dinner conversation centered on the genius of serving your guests individual foil-wrapped baked potatoes and the sadness of funerals. (Sorry!) Bran and Ashley took the time to forbid me and Lizzie from going to a bingo parlor in Park Slope that they went to one time before the pandemic. They were serious. They were like, you cannot go in there. I want to say that they were being dramatic and that we plan to disobey them, but they’re right about so many things. And Bran grew up in Sheepshead Bay which means it’s gauche to quibble with him about Brooklyn.
We also discussed Carole Radziwill of The Real Housewives of New York posting a decades-old letter from Joan Didion on her Instagram and captioning it something like I have never actually read this letter because the handwriting is illegible to me. Would someone tell me what it says? Lizzie hates Carole, so I was hoping she would have thoughts on this hilarious choice. She mostly wanted to talk about unrelated reasons for why she hates Carole.
Lizzie: I feel the need to correct the record here — I don’t hate Carol, I just think she got really annoying and try-hard, especially near the end of her run. I’m not saying it wouldn’t happen to me either, if cameras started following me around. I tried to find her post just now, but I couldn’t find it. Must’ve been on Stories!
During dinner, one of Matt’s very nice friends asked “what our plan was” for midnight. He meant like a countdown, or fireworks (at least sparklers), a live cover band, or something like the New Year’s Eve parties in the movies. We lock lips with our loves! We laugh and laugh at how great this year turned out and the promise of a whole new year stretched out before us. Unfortunately, we had no plan. The glittery party blowers we bought at Party City were strangely silent, either because of a manufacturing error, or a decision by the Party City big wigs. They made no noise at all. Just an impotent little paper crinkle.
Kaitlyn: At midnight, I called Nathan but he couldn’t really hear me. After midnight, Lizzie danced for us. She twirled around alone to “When You Were Young.” She was really cutting a rug—I mean, the rug was up in the air multiple times. It was so exceptional, I would have cried if my face hadn’t been totally numb from five or six different types of sparkling wine. At 1:30, I walked home and thought about the same thing I’ve thought about every night for the past week: Nathan’s cousin says he feels lucky to live in Richmond, Virginia because there are two different indoor golf places there.
Lizzie: Maybe we should go there next year.