Thanksgiving at a restaurant can be a divine break.
A Thanksgiving feast at a restaurant can be a divine break and a chance to try out a chef’s latest creations
For many Americans, Thanksgiving dinner is all about staying home— or traveling to someone else’s home— and gathering around a table groaning with a golden-brown bird, dressing, yams, cranberry sauce and all the fixings chronicled in Norman Rockwell’s famous “Freedom From Want” painting.
And that’s fine, although after more than 30 years in the Southwest, I like to have a plateful of enchiladas or tamales on the table, too.
But here’s something else that’s fine: Going out to a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner.
I grew up in a North Carolina family where visiting a restaurant on national turkey day was considered heretical— not that it was actually considered at all, given how unthinkable it was to not have a relative toiling over a bird so that everyone could fall into a tryptophan coma after laying waste to the table.
This was how the holiday went for me until 1995, a year that found me in Phoenix on my own. So with a bit of trepidation, I made reservations at a hotel restaurant that was serving a full Thanksgiving feast. I came, I sat, I ate. Really well, in fact.
Looking around that restaurant, I discovered that, hey, other people were doing the same thing. And enjoying it. And they were not incurring lightning bolts from the wrathful homeand-hearth gods.
It was sort of liberating. Almost
revelatory.
The upside: No provisioning, prepping, cooking and pressure on the host.
The downside: Little to no leftovers. So forget about the turkey-dressing-cranberry sandwich or yam enchiladas.
In the two decades since, I have dined out on Thanksgiving Day more than a half-dozen times. Five of those trips have been to northern New Mexico. Sometimes it’s just my wife and me. One year a dozen friends joined us at Coyote Cafe in Sante Fe, everyone ordering a different entrée so we could pass plates.
Another year it was a charming little restaurant in Kansas City, where we were passing through on our way back to Grits-and-Biscuits Land. This year: Out to dinner with an old friend in Portland, Ore.
Just sowe don’t lose our Thanksgiving cooking chops, my wife and I host Thanksgiving at our house in the non-restaurant years. She’s amaster of any and all roasted poultry: turkey, hens, duck, goose, pheasant. She does them all, brilliantly. Me, I make the side dishes. Guests bring wine.
But I do like dining at a restaurant on the big day, if only to sample a professional chef’s take on the Thanksgiving staples.
It’s also fun to try the regional variations on the day’s fare. Think oyster dressing in New England, shrimp-stuffed mirlitons in New Orleans, or barbecued turkey in New Braunfels, Texas.
David Charles of Denver has spent the past 14 Thanksgivings overseas. That’s due in part to the travel he does for his job in the mining industry, but mostly because he loves good food and new experiences.
“I have spent the holiday in the Alsace region of France where charcuterie and foie gras took the place of turkey and giblets and in Austria where pork knuckle and Riesling stood in for the bird and sides,” he says.
And there were holidays spent in Switzerland, Ghana, Wales, Greece and Australia, plus a memorable one in St. Petersburg, Russia. There, after touring the former royal palaces, his group went to a fancy hotel bar.
“The bar was smoky and full of prostitutes and the scary-looking dudes that manage them,” Charles recalls. “But the piano player was from New York. We made friends with him, and before he went back on stage, he told us that on his next break we would all be eating a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with the band.
“Turns out he had arranged for the hotel kitchen to make 10 orders and he had allocated some for us.”
Among Charles’ discoveries that Thanksgiving: “Vodka goes surprisingly well with pumpkin pie.”
Marsha Howell of Denver has made a tradition of visiting San Francisco for Thanksgiving. She doesn’t have family there; she just brings friends in tow and they make a pilgrimage to a restaurant— preferably one that’s enjoyed some recent buzz. But she has one caveat. “I try to make sure that they serve cioppino,” Howell says, referencing the city’s famous Italian stew of shellfish, fish and tomatoes. “I don’t necessarily need turkey and dressing on Thanksgiving. I just want a creative dish. But if I’m in San Francisco, I do need a cioppino fix.”
Bobby Alvarado of Denver hails from a big family in Texas. But he’s not always able to make the trip down there for Thanksgiving. So he goes out.
“Whether it is a restaurant or a hotel where they have a huge buffet doesn’t matter,” he says. “I can enjoy the best of everything in a Thanksgiving buffet, where I can have turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, cornbread dressing, gravy, vegetables and whatever is being served.”
Even when he dines alone, Alvarado says he’s always conscious of the spirit of the day.
“I am happy and content in knowing that I had an awesome meal,” he says. “And for that I will always be grateful and give thanks that I was a part of this year’s Thanksgiving blessings for what came my may.”
Austin Green is the restaurant chef at Elway’s in downtown Denver’s Ritz-Carlton. He’s noticed that some people just enjoy eating out on the national feast day.
“I don’t know if it’s the trend of people really getting into food or it’s a matter of people working and not having the time and energy to put into the meal,” Green says. “I think people just like being taken care of.”
Sometimes dining out on Thanksgiving Day is unplanned— even unwanted.
Rene Ramirez of Aurora always had a big family dinner in his native Arizona— except for one year during law school.
“We had a break from Thanksgiving through New Year, and I was driving to Tucson on Thanksgiving Day,” Ramirez says. “I recall stopping at a truck stop and buying a turkey sandwich for the road. Some dinner.”
For some folks, Thanksgiving dinner out, while a choice freely made, is a one-time affair.
“We’ve only gone out once for Thanksgiving that I can remember,” says Rusty Staff, owner of Decor Asian Style in Denver. “It was with friends— another couple— to the Gold Lake Mountain Resort in the foothills west of Boulder.
“The food was incredible and abundant, the service elegant, the setting sublime, but there was something about paying for a meal at the end of Thanksgiving that left me cold,” he says. “I guess to me the idea of sharing is what Thanksgiving is all about.
“While I love not having to clean up, it’s part of the ritual that makes the day special.”