A poster at the entrance welcomes refugees. Sbeity, 33, prefers to call Laziz a queer, not gay, restaurant to signal “that we are inclusive in love.” The Pride flag flying outside is the redesigned version with stripes added for the trans community and people of color. Moudi Sbeity founded the Mediterranean restaurant in 2017 with Derek Kitchen, then his husband, who was elected to the Utah State Senate a year later. If there’s a restaurant that points a way forward for queer dining, it’s Laziz Kitchen, in Salt Lake City. “We need to be in spaces with each other because otherwise we don’t quite exist.” “If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that connecting digitally is not enough,” particularly for working-class gay people, he said, like those at Naps. Katinas said, “people are coming back with tears in their eyes” because they “missed being in a space where they’re not the only gay people.” In 2019, when Annie’s received an America’s Classics award from the James Beard Foundation, the restaurant critic David Hagedorn wrote of how, in its early days, Annie “went up to two men holding hands under the table and told them they were welcome to hold hands above it.” Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.Īnnie was beyond supportive of the gay community and became, for many of the restaurant’s racially diverse diners, a mother figure before her death in 2013.She shared some thoughts on what she saw. Transgender Youth: A photographer documented the lives of transgender youth.Elite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.But with a steep rate of complications, it remains a controversial procedure. Phalloplasty: The surgery, used to construct a penis, has grown more popular among transgender men.MeMe’s Diner, a popular queer restaurant in Brooklyn, permanently closed in November, citing shutdown measures and a lack of government support.
The pandemic hit the country’s urban gay restaurants especially hard, said Justin Nelson, the president of the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce. Restaurants fold all the time, perhaps nowhere more so than in New York, and perhaps never as much as during the Covid era. Frankel, the Tony-nominated composer of the musical “Grey Gardens,” “made you feel like you belonged.”īut all those places he so fondly remembers are long closed, as are Harvest, Orbit’s and several others listed in an article, headlined “ Restaurants That Roll Out the Welcome Mat for Gay Diners,” that ran in this newspaper 27 years ago. Manatus was so gay, it had a sobriquet: Mana-tush. Florent was around the corner from a notorious sex club in the meatpacking district. There was that incredibly hot Italian waiter at Food Bar. Universal Grill cranked “Dancing Queen” on birthdays. Scott Frankel’s favorite memories of New York gay restaurants aren’t about food.