An afternoon off N Street.
Three rooms for a long lunch and the bookshop that knows its regulars — a walking note from Dupont.
The office is on N Street, and the office has had its lunch preferences worked out for forty-three years. The walk, most often, goes east three blocks, south one, and back up through the square. It passes Kramers if the afternoon calls for a book. It passes the Phillips if the afternoon calls for a painting. It passes, most reliably, the three rooms at the back of a small restaurant on P Street where the coffee is not served after three.
What we notice, doing this walk on a late-September Thursday, is that the street has not changed in any consequential way in a decade. The sycamores along the north side of N Street are the sycamores from 2015. The bookshop clerk who recommended a Joan Didion essay in 2018 is recommending the same essay today, with the same slight hesitation. This is a neighborhood that holds its pace.
A lunch that runs long is the neighborhood’s small luxury.