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About 14 years ago, my friend Eren and I were eating dinner upstairs at the bar of some two-story restaurant in New York’s NoHo neighborhood that was supposed to be the new hot thing. We’d been downtown running errands, gotten hungry, and autopiloted there on a wave of online restaurant reviews. Looking around the deafening dining room’s banquettes full of overengineered outfits, lamenting the apparent extinction of the under-$10 glass of wine, Eren and I admitted to each other that neither one of us was into this. At all. The restaurant, the name of which I’ve forgotten, is long gone, but at that moment in time, it was marketed everywhere as cool. But cool, when i

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