Could I Recommend Side Sitting...

If your partner offers to side-sit on date night, your partner is cute...

This borders on being a Co-dependent Papi, but I’m a big side-sitter. When making a reservation for date night, I request in order: booth, table for 4 for 2, two seats at the bar, and only accept a table for two facing each other if I have to.

These are the occasions I’ll accept a table for two facing each other:

1. Business Lunch

2. Business Dinner

3. Non-exclusive Dating, first to fifth dates, any sort of dating before you’re pot committed but… If you don’t side-sit, you have to wonder what you’re doing at all…

4. Homie Dinner where we have to talk about shit. If it’s a homie lunch, I prefer cafe seating on a round table where we can fuck around and shoot the shit for a couple hours. I highly prefer sitting at a bar together as if we’re on the couch at my home. If I’m watching sports and gambling, I absolutely need to be at a table for four for 2 with all our bets laid out. If you are gambling and sitting on opposite ends of the table, it’s like playing the Don’t Pass line in Craps which only miserable assholes do. There’s no point in winning money when every one else loses, at least not in my mind.

5. Tax Planning with my Accountant so I can review my expenses across a table.

6. Dining with my Mom, who is absolutely going to shake me down for something.

7. Any meal you want to be in and out of in under 80 minutes. Leaving in under 60 minutes is offensive. You should generally plan 90 minutes for a meal with another human. I try not to leave in under 60 minutes unless it’s really miserable. But if you want to be the Michael Phelps of lunch and make it in-and-out in under an hour, sit across, go to the bathroom multiple times, get the check at the 45 minute mark on the way to the bathroom and act surprised when it arrives like a 15-Minute warning. Make a remark like, “Sheesh, they’re really turning and burning here!” If you want to leave even earlier, pick up the check and have them deliver it for you to sign. Nothing in life is free, especially not your own time.

Otherwise, I highly recommend side-sitting. Once I know shawty is my shawty, I really don’t like sitting across the table unless we need to negotiate something. BUT, as my therapist would tell me, if you’re negotiating and lawyering, something has gone wrong. So even in that scenario, why exacerbate it by sitting across from each other?

I get it if you are in a hot restaurant where they cannot accommodate a booth or round or table for 4 for 2. BUT, I will say that I’ve very rarely enjoyed a dining experience in that scenario where the restaurant feels like it’s doing you a favor. I don’t care what farm your produce is from, I don’t care how many medals your chef is wearing, there is no amount of heat your publicist can create that will warrant me dining in a restaurant where I cannot hold my partner’s inner thigh for the duration of the meal. I need to knock knees, foot tap, whisper in an ear, all that.

I’d prefer to wait until said restaurant is not-hot, but perhaps warmt, and then they can accommodate me with the seating arrangement that I prefer for that dining occasion. Most restauranteurs probably want to kill people who ask for a 4 for 2, BUT, if you promise to maintain the check average at that dining establishment... Why not? Spread out!

That’s one of the rules of dining for 2 on a 4-top. You should spend like a party of 4 or, at the very least, a party of 3 and tip 20% off-the-rip because they’ve given you the real estate. A booth is different. A booth is really just how a cozy party of two should be dining in any establishment because if you seat 4 at a booth it starts to feel like you’re in a John Boat trying to evade the Coast Guard.

I may be neurotic thinking about seating arrangements with this much concern and attention, but anytime I feel that way I think about Kenny Shopsin and I remember that there are other CIVILIZED people like myself who care about the way we sit for a meal.

One of my favorite poems hangs at Shopsin’s.

A PARTY OF FIVE... by Robert Hershon
*No Groups Over Four - One of Shopsin’s many rules*

You could put a chair at the end or push the tables together...
but don't bother...
This banged-up little restaurant where you would expect
no rules at all has a firm policy against seating parties of five…
And you know you are… A PARTY OF FIVE.

It doesn’t matter if one of you offers to leave,
or if you say you could split into a party of three and a party of two,
or if the five of you come back tomorrow in Richard Nixon masks
and try to pretend that you don’t know each other.
IT WON’T WORK… You are… A PARTY OF FIVE.

Even if you’re a beloved regular.
Even if the place is empty.
Even if you bring logic to bear.
Even if you’re a tackle for the Chicago Bears.
IT WON’T WORK… You are… A PARTY OF FIVE.

You will always be A PARTY OF FIVE.
A hundred blocks from here…
A hundred years from now…
You will still be… A PARTY OF FIVE.

You will never savor the soup… or compare the coffee…
or hear the wisdom of the cook and the wit of the waitress…
or get to hum the old-time tunes…
among which you will find no quintets.

*APPLAUSE for Robert Hershon*

I bring up A Party of Five because side-sitting isn’t just about proximity and intimacy, but sharing a POV. When you side-sit with shawty from a booth, you are seeing the same world. When you sit across from each other, one of you sees the world, and the other sees a painting of Dog’s Playing Poker above the other person’s head. That is a shitty POV. Why should one person only see a painting of Dog’s Playing Poker and how do you decide who gets to see the world and who has to stare at Dog’s Playing Poker?

If you go on a date and your date offers you the view of the world, that person is off to a nice start.

If you go on a date and your date offers you a view of Dog’s Playing Poker, they just need a warm body to sit across from while parsing through the rest of the world.

If you go on a date and your date thinks it’s neurotic that you even consider the seating arrangement, that person is obtuse and not nearly sensitive enough to do intimacy effectively. They may desire intimacy, they may be the little engine that could, but they probably won’t know how to hit the corners and crevices when in the çhíçañe.

BUT…

If you go on a date and your partner asks for the booth, then subsequently offers to side-sit, that partner is cute. You can trust them in the çhíçañe.