‘She Eats, She Pays, She Gets the Fuck Out’

This bit in Vulture macking on T/Swift and eating out is one of the best pieces of cultural observation I’ve read in years. It is po-faced hilarious from start to finish and flat-out brilliant writing. I die with envy.

Taylor Swift does not “need” to “go out to dinner.” “Going out to dinner” is a bourgeois construct that has no obvious draw for her. Civilians with expendable cash go out to dinner to break up the monotony of being alive. Celebrities go out to dinner to be photographed so that these cash-flush civilians remember they exist. Taylor Swift is neither a civilian nor a run-of-the-mill celebrity. She has rarely known middle-class tedium and she has never risked exiting the collective imagination for even a brief moment.

And yet Taylor Swift has, of late, gone out to dinner basically every other night during her recent stays in New York City, and to some of its sceniest spots, the sorts of places tourists go in hopes of spotting someone like Taylor Swift. Last month, over the course of roughly two weeks, Taylor visited the following Manhattan restaurants and bars: Via Carota, Emilio’s Ballato, Hôtel Barrière Fouquet’s New York, Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria, Zero Bond, Casino, and Temple Bar. In the few days it took me to report this story, she also went to at least one football game, SNL, Nobu, and the Waverly Inn. In photos, she smiled like she had a little pleasant secret; she did not look tired or like she was running out of things to talk about with her dining companions, a rotating cast of slightly less famous people, some of whom are her friends, one of whom is her alleged lover, and one of whom is Ryan Reynolds: Zoë Kravitz, Laura Dern, Greta Gerwig, Blake Lively and/or Ryan Reynolds, Phoebe Bridgers, Travis Kelce, and Sophie Turner.

Though all of these aforementioned excursions were documented immediately and at length in the papers of record (The New York Post and TMZ), they still left me wondering: What motivates this militaristically busy, perennially stalked international superstar to put on a good outfit and leave the luxe confines of her Tribeca condo to dine alongside the unwashed masses and staked-out paparazzi, many of whom instantaneously sell her out to “Page Six” and DeuxMoi? Should Taylor Swift — for some unknowable, perhaps fetishistic reason — desire to recreate the plebeian experience of going out to dinner, she likely has a cadre of personal assistants who can bring her food from any restaurant of her choosing at any time, the option to hire a personal chef who can painstakingly recreate any food from any restaurant of her choosing at any time, the singular ability to shut down any restaurant at any time so she can eat there with her pre-selected guests but sans normies gawking at her, the financial ability to pick up a restaurant and put it in her house, and the express permission to eat anyone she wants. So why?

The too-obvious answer is that she wants to be seen, that she enjoys the publicity. But this is a woman who has 274 million Instagram followers and has recently bent both the NFL and the worldwide theatrical market to her will. So what motivates her to risk life and limb to eat slightly elevated antipasti? Does she even eat the elevated antipasti? What kinds? Does she pay for them? Does she share them with her bodyguards? Is she always in a private room? Does she tip? And what do the employees of the restaurants themselves think of it all? To answer these questions, I visited one variably exclusive, variably TikTok-ruined NYC restaurant or bar every single day for five work days. In the process, I would test my own stamina, the limits of a $75 per diem, a restaurant’s ability to recover from the sheer fact of Taylor Swift’s presence, and fate itself.

It’s all here, and totally worth it.

Tip of the propeller beanie to Jonathon V Last at The Bulwark for the find.