Fait La Force is not going to win Valentine’s Day. For one thing, it’s a brewery, which, at the risk of overgeneralization, does not signal romance. Its Nashville taproom is open and industrial, has no candles or prix-fixe menu, and the food — sandwiches from a local shop — is notoriously difficult to eat in an alluring manner.
“We’re not the upscale fancy date night, like go-out-for-a-nice-dinner spot,” said Parker Loudermilk, the brewery’s co-owner and founder. “But we’re also not low-frills enough to be ironically fancy.” The brewery is not so casual that it can tap into the market for winking Valentine’s Day jokes (read: tableside service at White Castle).
All of the above presented a problem — or an opportunity: “Tired of Cupid’s mushy antics?,” the flyer for the bar’s Feb. 14 festivities reads. “Join us for Anti-Valentine’s Day, a.k.a. Emo Night.” The event mostly hinges on a playlist featuring My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday and Good Charlotte, to name a few. The bar will also serve margaritas with chamoy dripping down the side, and call them Bleeding Hearts.
“We were thinking, an anti-Valentine’s Day party kind of makes light of what could be a heavy day for people,” said Shanley Deignan, the brewery’s marketing director.
Nobody gets to opt out of Valentine’s Day completely. To celebrate is to acknowledge it; to emphatically not celebrate is also to acknowledge it. To take a casual approach to the day requires willfully ignoring that the whole world has been temporarily blanketed in red and pink stuffed bears.
Perhaps more than any other business, restaurants tend to lean into the holiday. But even though it’s among the busiest nights of the year, it ignores a significant portion of the population.
“Everything is pink, and your menu needs to be pink and red and cheesy, and for two,” said Sydney Buck, a private chef in Queens, N.Y., and Valentine’s skeptic who, this year, will host her fifth annual anti-Valentine’s “dump your ex” dumpling-making class.
“People have this kind of icky feeling about it,” she said. “Especially if they’re single.”
Accordingly, the internet is rife with people, coupled and uncoupled, desperate for other options. And not every establishment is built for high Valentine’s romance, either practically or constitutionally.
“As a restaurateur, I’ve never been a fan of people making out at a table while others next to them are trying to enjoy a meal,” Jamie Boudreau, the owner of the Seattle restaurant and cocktail bar Canon, wrote in an email.
For 14 years, Canon has marked the occasion with a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre event. Flyers warn that “any couples outwardly showing displays of affection (such as holding hands, kissing or whispering sweet nothings)” risk the wrath and judgment of fellow diners, as expressed via “one (or all) of the 24 water guns placed throughout the room.”
The gathering, Mr. Boudreau explained, is meant to “provide a safe haven for others who don’t want to be surrounded in a room resembling a soft-core-porn set.” But it is also savvy business: With six tables, two counters and bar seating, Canon would “literally lose thousands” of dollars, he said, if it encouraged the kind of tantric lingering associated with the holiday.
There are even special dinners catering to single diners. The Valentine’s installment of the chef Charlene Luo’s Sichuanese supper club, the Baodega (or, this weekend, “bao-bae-ga”), accepts only solo reservations. No couples. No pre-existing friends. It is not a matchmaking event but, as Ms. Luo explained, “everyone is ideally looking for someone,” which creates, if not romance, then at least camaraderie.
“I just wanted to create a safe space for people, no pressure,” she said. “It’s not that serious.” Still, she has secret ambitions. “It is my dream to someday be invited to a Baodega wedding.”
Not all Valentine’s Day counterprogramming is targeted exclusively, or even primarily, at the uncoupled. Everybody, of any relationship status, can rebel against the tyranny of tradition at the Laundromat, a San Francisco pizza and wine bar. On Valentine’s Day it will offer live airbrushing and a balloon artist, in addition to a D.J.; it could be the setting for a date, but it’s intended as a broader celebration of love in all its permutations.
This is roughly the same idea behind “Love Stinks,” an annual event at Hart’s, in Brooklyn, that Nialls Fallon, a co-owner, describes as an alternative to steak-and-Champagne programming. There’s a set menu of pungent dishes (polenta with stinky cheese, puntarelle with anchovies), and the theme is adaptable, depending on your needs. Sharing a cascade of funky courses with your beloved can be the height of intimacy. Alternatively, it is an acknowledgment that “love can literally stink sometimes,” Mr. Fallon said.
To Mr. Loudermilk of Fait La Force, the apparent appetite for counterprogramming like Emo Night suggests that people are fed up with the hegemony of Hallmark. They’re “really trying to push back against the corporatization of everything,” he said. To celebrate without the classic trappings is, if not revolutionary, then “maybe a little countercultural.”
“We’re not trying to be exclusionary,” Ms. Deignan added. And how could they be? In a paradox not lost on them, Mr. Loudermilk and Ms. Deignan got married last year.
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