005: Vino Veritas
Location: 486 Broadway Hours: Permanently Closed Date of Visit: July 11, 2025
This was Vino Veritas.
It's Quickly who tells you it's closing, asks you if you want to go before it does. Later she notes that Quince, a mere ocean away, pushed her to get on your case, that you haven't published anything in a while. You have drafts piling up, but none of them you like. Some you are avoiding. They feel like old parts of yourself, like you're digging up bodies sometimes, and have to stare back at familiar faces you once loved, now made into horrors with the addition of time.
Vino Veritas would have been nine in October. The owner, whose name tops the list of lawyers just one building down Broadway, has posted a long, heartfelt message on Instagram announcing it. They are going out on top, he notes. He meets you and Quickly at the door, deftly handles the fact that someone has mislaid your reservation on the sheet--the perils of online reservations interacting with handwritten notes, you think. You've seen him before. Just outside the door there are bowls with water and dog treats, which Saga would avail herself of on the way home from the dog park. He'd been standing outside, and pointed them out to you.
For the couple of hours you're there, a steady flow of patrons enters, who often embrace the host, greeting him like someone who is graduating. It is cramped (and quite darkened) quarters, and when you came in you were seated near an older couple, who've gone and been replaced by a couple of young women. You hear another customer go, "you're not singing tonight?" and one of the women replies, "Not tonight I'm just hanging out." It's not the sort of atmosphere you can just create, you think. It's something that has to be cultivated over years. Nearly nine, say.
There's a rich red and purple to the place, with velveteen curtains that block much of the outside world. Through the bare bit of window you can see out of, you see a passing couple on the street stop and glance up at the sign, gawking at it as though it were a novel oddity, discovering the place. There's a tragic bit of irony to it, you think, of learning a place exists just as it is to be removed from the world. If they return, maybe they'll find it darkened. Or else they'll find its successor, which you learn from the Instagram post will be honoring Vino Veritas gift cards.
Quickly orders the chicken francaise off the menu and you get the veal scallopini which is a special. When the owner reads the specials to you, he notes that it comes with your choice of pasta, but when you order it, the waitress doesn't ask your preference, and informs you the pasta is penne when you ask what comes with the veal. You wonder a little bit about how buying for a closing restaurant goes. Your college, which had a student body smaller than your high school (Classical, just a few blocks away), was heavily dependent on its tuition revenue, and the Dean of Admissions was once described to you as a sort of alchemist who had to balance admitting enough students to make the budget, but also awarding enough financial aid to bring in a diverse student body, without bringing in more students than there were rooms for. You imagine buying for a closing restaurant is much the same: food enough to feed the hungry people who will arrive, a careful weighing of what dishes you know will be popular, versus what might be unexpectedly popular.
The phrase "in vino veritas" means "in wine, there is truth" in Latin. It's something of an irony that Quince is a few thousand miles away, since he is a Latin teacher in his day job. It's wasted on you. As is the wine, since neither Quickly nor you tend to drink. She mentions that she had forgotten that she and Quince had something of an engagement celebration with his family here, once upon a time, remarks upon the oddity of forgetting an event associated with such a central milestone in her life.
Earlier that day you'd been talking to your barber about forgotten things of the past. She couldn't remember the word "cassette" even though she'd grown up as a kid of the mix tape era. You think about how absurdly primitive it sounds, to have put information on literal tape. You have been watching Community and one of the characters uses a Blackberry in the first few seasons (which you erroneously recall as a Palm Pilot). You remember Barack Obama expressed a bit of disappointment that the Blackberry he had to use while in office had to be stripped of all its features. Obama was cool, the character on Community was meant to be cool, that's what Blackberry was—the trendy, hip thing. Now it is forgotten.
A few weeks ago you had been playing archery tag and a song came on that you recognized as familiar, but another player found to be bizarre falsetto screaming. You couldn't recall the song, but eventually you placed the band as Led Zeppelin. You and Quince both had an affinity for Zep when you were in high school. Quickly asks what other bands you remember from your high school days, and you can recall the Decemberists, and Weezer, the Arctic Monkeys, whose music feels so dramatically different from that first album that felt garage band raw. Quickly remembers Tori Amos, and Fiona Apple.
You tell her that the other day the Fleet Foxes' "Helplessness Blues," came up on Spotify's daily curated playlist. The summer immediately after graduating college, you and two friends lived together in a house in East Asheville, North Carolina. You were the only one without a car, so when one of your friends went home to visit her family, she let you borrow hers on the condition that you take her to and from the airport, which was the easiest trade. The only problem was that her car's sound system was broken, and the only thing you could listen to was the last CD that had been loaded into the player, which was Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues. You must have listened to it a hundred times. You couldn't hear the words, "I was raised up believin'" without hearing the rest of the album. It seemed like it was acid etched into your brain.
Only it wasn't, because you haven't thought about that moment for years.
Quickly mentions her iPod, and how long it survived, how many songs from her younger years were still on it. All you can think about, back in the day, is U2's "Vertigo" being the music to a key advertisement for the iPod. You didn't care much for that album, you liked their earlier stuff, War and the album from just before, All That You Can't Leave Behind. It always struck you as a very writerly phrase, that title, but mostly nonsense. But now it strikes you as apt, although maybe not for its intent.
These things can't be left behind. Because they won't stay there. The things that used to matter, that used to mean the world to you, will fade away. The soundtrack of your youth will recede into the darkness, lunging out of the shadows occasionally to keep from getting swallowed up. With them will go the quiet moments--dinners with friends and family, a hand on a hip in a kitchen, reading in bed with the dog and a glass of port. Even the disfigured corpses will go, after you've written them down. It's easier than one would think for you to do—it's like letting go. It's like taking one step forward.
Desserts are brought out to you and Quickly, to tempt you, which they succeed at. You get the flourless torte, Quickly gets the tiramisu. Not to be left out of coffee, you order a decaf, which arrives in a glass mug with a steel wire handle. Quickly notes she has a fondness for custard-based desserts, that at the end of a meal, she's happy not to chew. The torte is like a very soft fudge, which is what you expected it to be.
It's the first time you've ever been here, but you wonder if you would've been luckier if you'd never come, if you stayed like the passersby on the street, merely knowing the place as a name on an awning. The awning will come down, it will be replaced. You have no idea what was here before it, but someday this place will be forgotten just as it was. It will slip into the background, even for the people who made it part of their lives. And now you're one of those people, here just long enough to sing helplessness blues.
This was Vino Veritas.
