When I first moved to Sacramento I lived in the fixed-up garage (not fixed up to building code, mind you; that’s why rent was affordable) of a nice couple in their early 40s. They’d done the city party scene for some years, gotten married, and bought a home just off the grid together and now I was living in their backyard and they were offering me some local pointers on where to go and what to see and do and eat.
“Pangaea, down at the other end of Second Street, is pretty good for beer,” said Liz. Her eyelashes were big but her eyes were bigger so it all balanced out. “And there’s Riverside Clubhouse around the corner, but it’s sort of greasy pub food.”
I first went to Riverside Clubhouse with my dad, who moved me in, then with an ex, who visited once and only once. The third time I went was with a friend and we ordered a bottle of wine. The place had a lot of specials, like $12 mojito pitchers on Fridays and $25 two-meals-and-a-bottle-of-wine on Wednesdays. It was Wednesday. I’d forgotten my I.D., and being just out of school and only five-foot-nothing, the waiter wouldn’t budge.
“I live just around the corner,” I said. “Can I go grab it? I’ll be right back.”
When I came back the waiter had the wine open and poured in two glasses alongside our just-out-of-the-kitchen meals. My friend and I enjoyed whatever we ate, and then the waiter came back not with the receipt but with a dish of ice cream.
“Thanks for being understanding about the I.D. situation,” he said. “It’s on the house.”
Stuff like that, as you’ll read in business psychology books until your face turns purple, is what keeps people coming back to places. So I came back. And then I came back again and again and again. I’d rotate friends and dates on a weekly basis through that two-for-twenty-five Wednesday special, then started toying with the appetizer menu on days I got there earlier—everything was half off every day from three to six—or the regular menu if my parents were visiting and buying. I became chummy with that waiter Simon (who would later start to hit on me occasionally and eventually get fired for something else perhaps not that unrelated—probably being a bit too casual with regulars and guests, or giving away too much free stuff) and the other bartenders and wait staff, knowing most of them if not by name (Joe, Timmy, Gina, Drew) then by familiar demeanor. I loved many things about Riverside Clubhouse: the outdoor water and fire features, the cow-skin lining underneath the U-shaped bar, the way the demographic fell just right so that any single men there would hit on older, more-blinged-and-Botoxed women and I could sit there quietly, ignoring and ignored. But the best thing was the wings.
“Dude, they changed the wings,” said Drew, when my husband and I ran into him at Beast and Bounty, a fancy new restaurant on the trendy new R Street Corridor in the heart of town, where he’s been bartending since he left Riverside Clubhouse since they got a new owner several months ago. We stopped in for a quick drink because we were in the neighborhood with 45 minutes to kill and heard the place had great cocktails, and it wasn’t until we walked in that we realized we were severely underdressed—so Drew coming over to us from the bar, all smiling and welcoming and excited, put us right at ease.
“What?” I said, hugging him hello, but feeling shocked in many ways.
“I know,” he said, looking the hipster service industry part in his button-up white shirt and waist-high canvas apron, black plug earrings switched out to a neutral bone color that you wouldn’t even notice if you didn’t think to look. “But get this.” Drew gets excited about stuff. He flies drones. He’s studying coding and engineering at some drone academy or something on the side. “They make them the same way at Suzie Burger. The chef who does them like that moved over there. Go see. If I’m wrong I can try and get you the recipe.”
“Drew!” I said, emotional. We ordered thirteen-dollar drinks, drank them too fast, and left, waving bye at him from behind two layers of bodies at the bar.
At first I didn’t believe it. Like a moth to its flame, I returned to Riverside Clubhouse days later, disgusted when my plate of wings arrived and looked almost exactly like every other plate of wings I’d ever gotten there—the big white plate, the neat pile of watery celery, the little cup of bleu cheese—except for the actual wings. They hadn’t looked appetizing before, to be fair. You had to trust your instinct or your previous experience. But now they looked like any shiny, gloppy neon-orange pile of meat you might get delivered with your pizza, or find at a place like Buffalo Wild Wings or Chili’s or even—God forbid—Wing Stop.
I don’t like hot wings, I have to explain to people, when I tell them what my favorite food is at an icebreaker or personality quiz or general spacefilling conversation. But these wings, I say, sighing like in love. They’re extra crispy, with just the right amount of sauce, and the sauce isn’t buffalo, it’s something else, I’m not sure what exactly. They saved my life week after week for nearly five years—through draining long-term relationships and several rounds of online dating, job transitions, just bad weeks, election cycles, funerals, waiting on test results, days where I had too much going on and days when I didn’t have a single thing on my to-do list, fights with old friends, or awkward moments with acquaintances. You know how it is with whatever that thing is that’s become your security blanket: when it goes missing, you do, too. In this way I’d been without myself for several months since they changed the wings, just getting by, sustaining. But Drew had cracked open a window of hope I thought had been sealed shut, and now I had a mission. As much as I wanted things to never change, they had. Would I be so brave to change along with them, or at least to see?
When people ask you what your favorite food is, they’re not really interested. They just want to be able to be like “Oh, I’m vegetarian” or “How funny, I as well consume hamburgers” or “No way, I love (X Y or Z edible good) too! Have you heard of (X Y or Z trendy restaurant)?” No one ever cares about my wings. So why talk about it? Why write about it for an arts and culture magazine? I don’t know, I ask myself. Why did you tear up tonight, at Suzie Burger, when you ordered the hot wings and they came out exactly like the ones at Riverside Clubhouse used to be, just like Drew said they would?
Wings are a thing to write about because of appetite, and taste, and disappointment. Because when something is so particular and good, you move your entire world around it. Tonight we went to Suzie Burger, a place I’ve never been to in my entire five-year span in this city, because it looks like an old Sonic Burger but redone in Wendy’s or McDonald’s colors and 2000s-Nickelodeon-cartoon fonts and pictures, and because a lot of the time when you drive past there’s a bunch of old hot rods or motorcycles out front, and that’s just not my scene. But Riverside Clubhouse wasn’t my scene either, until the gravity of something particular and good pulled me into it.
I was pleased to see that Suzie Burger served beer and wine, until the wine they handed me was packaged in a plastic single-serving throwaway container. I muttered under my breath on the way to our seat some inaudible snobby rage-fuss about how I wouldn’t have paid $5.50 if I’d known it was going to be this sort of wine. We picked a table by the wall and I pouted: the place was over-airconditioned, too brightly fluorescent, with too many giant posters of the Kim Possible-esque restaurant mascot Suzie looming everywhere, her space-hamburger theme not matching one iota with the obvious fact the room had once been an oil change or auto body shop. I don’t understand anything, I thought, looking around at the Suzie Burger population sample: an older, larger couple taking up a whole picnic bench, sitting very far apart but obviously together, facing the room’s single TV screen but fiddling with their phones; a man reading a book about animation by himself at a high table near the window; a girl in just-off-work clothes, texting over a half-eaten philly cheese steak in the corner; a couple with extremely mismatched nationalities and body types (which is of course perfectly okay, you xenophobes) sitting very close together near a fake plant; a woman with one earbud in drinking her own plastic single-serving throwaway container of red wine over a burger. Maybe you’re my people now, I thought to them, as my husband walked over with the tray of food. Maybe you’re my place.