Teleportation

There are a couple of restaurants in town that make me feel like I'm in some other city when I eat in them. One is on Pitt Street just this side of the mall, sort of near where Tattersall's is I think. You go down a steep set of stairs that's half-taken up with an exhaust hose, to below street level, to a narrow room that's always full of smoke and grease but has a full bar above the counter. There's a backpacker sort of guy cooking, and two very friendly and capable but also kind of dippy Chinese girls waiting and serving. I ducked in for coffee one morning when I didn't even live here but had a meeting in the city. I went there one night when I was supposed to meet someone for a difficult conversation but completely chickened out, sent a text, and went there for dinner (first course - Scotch on the rocks) by myself instead. It reminds me of a cafe in Boston where I went once for coffee - the Boston place amazed me because it was so diner-ish, completely unreconstructed, and also because the people there spoke with authentic thick Bostonian accents when I'd only ever heard thick fake ones on Cheers. So it was a top touristic experience, and that's probably why the underground Sydney place makes me feel like I'm in another country.

I found another one tonight - the transformation of a place I used to go in the afternoons because it was so casual and unpretentious, on Bourke Street amidst all the trees and gentrification. I headed there tonight because I didn't want to cook, I wanted to eat pasta, and I wanted somewhere you could dine by yourself and wouldn't feel a bit self-conscious or out of place. They used to have folding wood tables out front, but tonight as I approached I saw the tables had white tablecloths and were set with wine glasses. Turns out they have gussied up the place. The name was the same, and maybe some of the people, but the menu was completely different and the service quite a bit more elevated. The building is an old terrace and there's lots of wood around, wrought iron tables, atmosphere, antique-i-ness, and as it happened the white tablecloths and wine glasses set it all off rather elegantly. I of course had the old place in my mind the whole time and was in a sort of tesseract of memory with the new superimposed on the old (and a sense of how long it's been since I lived on Bourke Street - can nearly start rounding up to two years), but then I tried to imagine what it would be like to come there for the first time and not realise it had been something else before, and it reminded me of lovely little family cafes in Italy. I could image getting up from a nap, taking a shower and getting dressed up, walking out from a hotel to explore the neighborhood, coming upon this quaint yet classy little cafe and thinking, "This looks nice, looks like it could be good." And settling in and indulging in one more glass of wine than you planned to have, or maybe splurging on dessert, and having a sense that this elegant, cosy, antique-y family restaurant had been there for generations and truly captured the spirit of the neighborhood.

Do these mental transports mean I should go somewhere to visit soon? Am I bored with my surroundings? Does it mean I'm so bored that I should uproot and find some other city to explore and make unfounded assumptions about? Anyway, I'll enjoy the little mental journeys when they happen.