Joshua Malbin

For one of my early Valentine’s Days in Los Angeles, my now-ex and I went to Campanile, one of Los Angeles’s best and fanciest restaurants, located in a vaulted home where Charlie Chaplin’s production company once resided. The waiter was efficient but exhausted, and towards the end of his shift, as we struggled down the rest of our second-cheapest-bottle, he saw sympathy in us and unloaded a little.

“Valentine’s Day,” he said, passing us a secret of the trade. “A lot of amateurs come out to eat.”

We weren’t any different, of course — kicking it up one notch in honor of Mandatory Romance — but we appreciated that we were young and somehow assured enough to attract his confidence.

The following year found us exhausted and filthy on the night of February 14th. I’d been sanding the floors in our apartment, and she had been late at work, preparing a gallery show. Unshowered and dusty in our workshirts, we headed out to Palermo, a neighborhood red-check Italian default, and plopped ourselves down at the first available table.

And then we looked around, and saw that Palermo was like every other restaurant on Valentine’s Day, a place where people go one step further than usual. It was mostly teenagers, dressed up better than the restaurant’s usual casual-dining customers in blowy suits and shiny, short dresses, sporting single red roses or buying them from a girl on the floor. A good number of working-class adults were there, not as spiffy as the teens but wearing the ease of having found a babysitter and made it out to the first restaurant in a long time.

We felt a bit out of place in our stains and flannels, but no one was there to notice us. It was a fine dinner, with amateurs everywhere.

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