A version of this post originally appeared on May 6 in our newsletter Eater Today. Sign up here to receive stories like this in your inbox. Eating lunch and shopping are two of my mother’s favorite things — she reminded me as much by voice note when mentioned I was planning to write a piece about a specific, nostalgic mother-daughter experience we share: eating at the Nordstrom Cafe. I’m a child of the 1990s, when mall culture was still thriving. Nordstrom was the jewel in my own outdoor SoCal mall’s crown, a multifloor department store that felt timeless, yet tapped into the imminent Y2K culture. From the outside, its Spanish revival building towered over trendy chains like Abercrombie & Fitch and the Discovery Channel Store; inside, classical oil paintings dotted the walls, and a pianist played a jazzy, live rendition of “Tiny Dancer” while shoppers pondered their Lancôme Juicy Tubes. The restaurant was on the store’s top floor, and drenched in what folks at the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute now call Frasurbane: a portmanteau of the soft, sophisticated urbane aesthetic seen in the ’90s sitcom, Frasier, that was popularized by Gen X, which was still nursing a 1980s aesthetic hangover. The restaurant had low, sepia-toned lighting, cloth napkins, and romantic parlor palms — a far cry from the blender-whirring social register of Jamba Juice, or the rushed environment of Panda Express. I loved both of those places. But the Nordstrom Cafe was my first fancy-ish restaurant; it was not a food court,…
