An Elegy for All the Restaurants I Can No Longer Review

The last restaurant review I wrote, on March 11—for a Chicago Chinese dumpling and noodle shop run by two brothers—remains just a draft, frozen in time before COVID-19 decimated our city’s dining landscape. Days later, as state-issued shelter-in-place orders and dine-in bans stopped the pulses of cities around the country, my weekly New Yorker arrived, discomfitingly light. The sevenish pages mapping that week’s cultural goings-on and critiquing the latest eateries had simply…...