Justice & Law Quote by Gay Talese

Talese takes the romantic glow we project onto restaurants and swaps it for fluorescent lighting. The line starts with a generous premise - “so many different reasons” - then quickly turns the dining room into a stage for transactions: courtship, business, litigation. It’s funny because it’s almost too true, and because Talese refuses the sentimental alibi that eating out is about cuisine. The meal is incidental; the real menu is human motive.

The craft is in the escalation. “To court a girl” nods to the classic restaurant fantasy, the date as a miniature movie. “To make some deal” punctures that fantasy with the blunt language of commerce. Then Talese delivers the kicker: “Maybe to talk to some lawyer…” The specificity of “alimony settlement” turns the restaurant into a confessional booth with table service, and “better than they got last week” adds a darkly comic serial quality - not just divorce, but the ongoing optimization of divorce. It’s the cadence of a reporter who knows that the sharpest social commentary often lives in casual observation, not grand pronouncements.

Contextually, this is vintage New Journalism sensibility: the public space as a diagnostic tool for private lives. Talese isn’t just describing why people eat out; he’s mapping a mid-century-to-late-century America where intimacy and negotiation blur, where status and strategy ride alongside the bread basket. The restaurant becomes a neutral territory for messy desires - a place to perform control while your life is, quietly, being rearranged.