Welcome back to hot takes and deep dives, and I am here with the author of Dining Out,

first dates, defiant nights, and Disco Fries at America's Gay Restaurants.

I'm here with Eric Pippenberg.

You've written for the L.A. Times, the New York Times.

I mean, would you call this a memoir or a travelogue?

Yeah, this is my first book, and it is definitely a memoir, there's reportage, it's essay,

its first person, it's just pure journalism.

I wouldn't say it's like a guidebook necessarily, but for people interested in visiting

gay restaurants that are open, there's a ton of them in the book that are still open, and I really recommend checking out. So the origin story behind the book,

you wrote this piece in 2021 for the Times titled Still Here, It's Still Queer, the Gay Restaurant

Endors. Now, the lore of this article is that you were dismayed by the closing of your

beloved Chicago favorite restaurant, the Melrose, and you were just setting out to kind of report

on that? Yeah, when the Melrose closed in 2017, it was a real loss for me. And I think anyone who loves a restaurant,

loves the people who work there, loves the food, I call it in the book a kind of a dispossession

when a restaurant closes. And so that was kind of the, for me, the personal angle here was my beloved

milrose closed. But also, I came out in the 90s and came of age in the 90s when gay restaurants

were a dime a dozen in neighborhoods here in New York and in Chicago and D.C. where I lived. I hadn't

been seeing that really so much anymore. And I thought, well, what's up with with gay restaurants?

Where have they gone? What do they look like today? And I think that was really

the impetus to sort of explore that and say, yeah, I need to answer that question. And not just now,

but also a hundred years ago. Where were people eating then? And how has gay dining changed since then?

Now, the obvious question to lay out here is what is a gay restaurant?

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