About a Lost Restaurant
Last week my friend Zoe texted me with sad news: The Islands, a Brooklyn restaurant specializing in Caribbean food, had closed. It was a beloved, unassuming spot on Washington Avenue, a mom-and-pop shop with a legendarily relaxed vibe that translated to unpredictable delivery times. I last went there just before the pandemic, to have lunch with a writer. Over jerk chicken (for him) and curry vegetables (for me), we came up with the idea for him write a reported essay for Eater about poop, that food writing Rubicon. It took literal years for the story to get published, and in that time I moved far enough away from the Islands that I no longer thought to go there.
It apparently closed two months ago; according to a random person on Reddit, the owners decided it was simply time to move on. As restaurant closures go, it was unremarkable, insofar as restaurants in New York close every single day without fanfare.
But sometimes it's the quietest departures that inflict the deepest cuts. Because of the memories we attach to them, of course — when I think of the Islands, I think of evenings spent around takeout at my friend Lauren's apartment — but also because the speed and silence that characterizes most restaurant closures is a reminder of not only the built-in obsolescence of everyone and everything we love, but also how quickly relevance can be downgraded to irrelevance.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the perilously thin line between relevance and irrelevance. A couple of weeks ago I filed a story to my friend Jess, an editor at SELF. Twelve days ago she texted me to say that Condé Nast was closing the magazine and laying off its entire staff. Jess published my story anyway (if you're reading this, Jess, you are my hero), but warned that she didn't know how long the SELF site would remain operational. Just like that, a 47-year-old leading health publication was gone, and while the closure was reported in the news, the reaction was relatively muted. Many of us are so used to sudden media implosions that at this point there's little left to do but shake our heads and get back to work.
If, of course, we're lucky enough to have work to get back to. That's another reason I've been thinking about irrelevance: I, along with thousands of other journalists and editors, am looking for a job. To describe the indignities, absurdities, and futility of the current job market would require more space and energy than I care to expend here. Suffice it to say that there is nothing like a job search to make you question your own relevance, and to ask yourself what exactly the end game is: to fight to the death for whatever scraps remain, or to fade away ever so gently into the good night, or a career change, whichever presents itself most readily?
But back to the Islands. It was a very good restaurant. We were lucky to have it in our corner of Brooklyn. It is missed, and in that way, it will always be relevant to those who loved it.
What I'm Consuming This Week:
Watching: Boardwalk Empire. I didn't see it when it originally aired on HBO back in 2010-15, and now I fall asleep thinking of ruthlessly violent bootleggers and disfigured World War I vets.
Reading: The Paris Review's 1957 interview with Truman Capote.
Listening: "The Weight," the Staple Singers.
