Selah was looking for a Manhattan-area restaurant with “quiet spaces” and an “awesome selection of food” for under $20 per person to take her boyfriend—but not for a date: “I need a good restaurant to have a good, clean break-up with a soon-to-be ex,” she writes in 2008 on Yelp, in what has become one of my favorite threads on the review site.
I was surprised to see how thoughtfully—even cheerfully—other Yelpers considered her query: “I had a break up at Rachel’s in Hell’s Kitchen once. We couldn’t yell at each other and afterwards we had a really nice meal,” writes a user named Danielle.
“I broke up with someone a few months ago at Ruby Foo’s in the Upper West Side… it was great,” chimes in Michelle.
Others are skeptical, calling the thread “the tackiest thing I’ve seen on the internet (including websites written in blinking Comic Sans font).” Having only personally experienced drawn-out, tearful breakups in darkened parks or dorm rooms, the idea of getting dumped at a restaurant sounded painful at worst and awkward at best. I was as baffled as the user Julee, who writes, “I don’t understand why people breakup in restaurants? Is it because the other person has [a] violent streak? Thank God this never happened to me. It is such a private moment. So cruel to do it in a restaurant.”
Cruelty aside, Selah is far from the only person looking for the right restaurant to end a relationship: there are similar Yelp threads about dumping grounds in Sacramento and Austin, and for a few years, Zagat published the now-defunct “Dating & Dumping” guide, ranking restaurants and bars in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago for their fitness as breakup spots based on factors like the number of exits for quick getaways and the attractiveness of the patrons and staff (presumably so that you can take home more than your ex’s doggy bag).
It seemed to me like a distinction that few restaurateurs would covet (which might be why Zagat stopped publishing the guide). But one restaurant, Pomodoro Rosso in New York’s Upper West Side, has embraced its reputation as a breakup spot. The Italian joint is immortalized in the 1997 Seinfeld episode “The Susie”, when George avoids meeting his on-the-rocks girlfriend for lunch there because “everybody breaks up at Pomodoro’s”.
“It’s the day before Valentine’s Day and that episode airs, and my phones lit up,” says owner Peter Courdouris. “Half the people wanting to cancel, and the other half wanting to book.” All told, he says, “it worked out like the best piece of advertising I could’ve ever gotten.” He can recall a few memorable breakups at Pomodoro, like the guy who called someone when his girlfriend went to the bathroom and said, “I’m in Pomodoro and I’m gonna do it now,” or the girl who threw a glass of water in her boyfriend’s face. “But it’s really more of a goof when people come here, like, ‘We’re not gonna break up are we?’”
What made Pomodoro, “a low-lit, kind of romantic restaurant” with a “homey feeling”, red-checked tablecloths, and a normal amount of exits stand out as a breakup spot? The notoriety, he tells me, probably started as pure fiction: “The writers used to eat here twice a week, and they came up with the idea while they were eating here.”
Pomodoro didn’t offer many clues as to what makes a good breakup restaurant, so I took an informal survey of peers and was surprised find that many of them had purposefully chosen to part ways with their significant other over dinner.
Some breakups, I learned, happen at restaurants due to sheer momentum. “He didn’t know that we were gonna break up,” says Claire. “The reason we went to a restaurant was purely because he wanted to take me for lunch, and I kept putting it off because I was trying to keep it in a conflict-free zone and not have to do anything to break up with him; I was really disassociating in general.”
Other restaurants are chosen based on the old adage: location, location, location. When Mari wanted to end her NYC “long-distance relationship” (he lived in Columbus Circle and she in Bushwick), she chose a cafe between them in the East Village because “it didn’t seem necessary to make him trek to my neighborhood for what would be a pretty succinct conversation.” The place was “chill and nice but busy enough that it wouldn’t be too awkward and silent,” says Mari. “I haven’t been back since, but every time I walk by, I think of it as the breakup spot. And I thank it for its service.”
Serena told me that she and her boyfriend knew that they were going to have a breakup conversation, and she thinks that, subconsciously, the biggest factor in their choice of restaurant was the lack of a history there. “We were going to go to one of our favorite seafood places, but then we made a decision to go somewhere that was more neutral. I didn’t want to ruin that place, and I didn’t want somewhere that we already had a nice story in, because I wanted to keep that part of the memory as a lovely thing.” The decision to meet at a restaurant rather than one of their houses was to prevent themselves from doing “something stupid like having sex,” says Serena. “I also think that I wanted to be strong and not super emotional about it, and I knew that if we were in public I would have to hold back some of my feelings instead of just totally being a mess.”
Couples break up in restaurants, it seems, because they’re a kind of emotional no-man’s land, where the chances of one party screaming and smashing a beer bottle (an example pulled from thin air, of course) are dampened. Choosing a restaurant at random, one that isn’t already colored by happy times and where you’ll never have to go back and relive the breakup, amplifies that effect.
Naima, though, says it doesn’t always work out that way. She and her girlfriend had already broken up, but they decided to keep previous plans for dinner and a movie and officially part ways at the restaurant. “The dinner was so painfully bad,” she says. She tried to keep it together while they gave each other their stuff back, but “I’m a very watery person, so to avoid sitting at the dinner table bawling my eyes out, I kept getting up and going to the bathroom to cry. I don’t think we ate any of our food. I would never do it again.”
Hearing their stories, I got it: breakups often happen in restaurants because dating happens in restaurants. A 2018 survey of 400 married couples who met on the dating site PlentyOfFish found that the number one first date that leads to marriage is a sit-down dinner. Courdouris told me that Pomodoro has actually seen many more engagements than breakups, with one couple who fly out for every anniversary. And the writer Chase Compton even chronicled his romance and heartbreak through the medium of highly personal Yelp reviews of all of the restaurants where he and his boyfriend went on dates, eventually turning them into the book, The Yelp.
It makes sense psychologically that so much of dating is combined with dining: when we share a meal, there’s not really anything to do but talk and get to know one another; if couples can make time for meals together, they can probably align the rest of their schedules; and footing the bill is a kind of primordial power display. There’s an inextricable link between dating and eating out—and, on that euphemistic note, between food and sex: we only have to think about the connotations of “meat”, “cream”, or “cherry” to see how food is eroticized. Restaurants, then, are public spaces that we can’t help but imbue with our personal lives.
So did Selah end up getting the advice she was looking for? “Thanks all for the feedback,” she writes at the bottom of the thread. “Just as a follow-up: we actually had both decided several months [ago] that we wanted to end it with a quiet meal to go over the good times, and not focus so much on the ending itself, then wish each other well and go about our separate ways. So much for that idea, as the man decided to ask me to marry him. And I accepted. So um, any ideas on how to arrange a massive interfaith intercultural wedding would be greatly appreciated!”
