Cartoon Processs: Curbside dining in New York

The term ‘hot Chinatown garbage’ rings a pungent bell with any New Yorker who’s had the privilege of stepping through puddles of putrid trash water in July.

The above cartoon for Air Mail appeared out of thick air while I was stalking the then-vacant streets of the Flatiron District. Here’s my process for the cartoon from conception ( ooer ) to completion. ( oo-er! )

August 7, 2020
New York, NY

Phase 3: Eat outside.

When outdoor dining was allowed as part of the Phase 3 pandemic reopening of New York, some neighbourhoods were filled with empty chairs being glared at by waiters slumped in their doorway, tapping an anxious pencil against their order pad. Many were still fearful that dining out was just too big a risk.

Others, like the recent Gen-Z accumulation in my neighbourhood, lept gleefully from their walk-ups and filled the sidewalks. Occasionally, they were a little too comfortable returning to the sidewalks and were given a stern talking-to by Governor Cuomo. (I’m looking at you, St Marks Place).

The neighbourhoods like Flatiron, Kipps Bay, Gramercy, Murray Hill and similar were a little more timid. But eventually, people were lured to the curbside tables and chairs with the notion that they were helping financially-stricken small businesses stay afloat, if just for the summer.

I had become friends with several of our local small business owners who own restaurants in the area like Plado, Book Club Bar, Post, Cornerstone Café¹ and Root & Bone.² One of the drawbacks of this new normal was dining alongside a phenomenon that New Yorkers just tolerate as a part of life on a daily basis:

Mountains of hot trash, thrice weekly.

Where I was raised in suburban Western Australia, we had ‘Bin Day’ once a week. It was my job to wheel the bins out to the end of the driveway and have the garbage trucks come by with their hilarious metal arm and do their thing. You could often find me sprinting down the driveway barefoot with two wheelie bins in tow, screaming “WaaAAAAAaait!” because I’d forgotten to put them out the night before.

In New York, “Bin Day” is every second day. The sheer volume of waste that is accumulated on a daily basis in Manhattan alone is astonishing, but you don’t even notice the bags on the sidewalk after a while…unless it’s Summer.

Then the term ‘hot Chinatown garbage’ rings a pungent bell with anyone who’s had the privilege of stepping through puddles of stinky bin water in July. This unmistakable fish waft can interrupt the best of dining experiences; hence the spark of an idea that struck me as I passed these restaurants.

My older sister is a wine expert, and despite her best efforts, has yet to teach me good etiquette.

She visited New York right before the pandemic, dining in various restaurants around the five boroughs and was probably one of the only people I’d trust with that little ritual the waiter plays when opening a $14 bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand. The other 99.9% of people—myself included— are really just playing a small pantomime of “I definitely know what I’m doing.” to impress whomever they’re sharing a table with.

It always strikes me as such a funny, bullshit ritual. I think I’ve seen a grand total of one bottle sent back to the kitchen in my whole life, and that was because the wine was ‘corked’. (Which is ironically only discoverable once it is uncorked.)

I wanted to draw this little ritual in that restaurant setting above.

The setting is a lone couple on a date, the waiter playing out the little wine ritual, and the guy really getting into the ‘impress my dining partner’ performance, with a gigantic pile of wet, hot, fly-ridden summer trash behind him.

Recognize anyone familiar?

I’ve been drawing up little New York scenes for myself lately and figured I’d give this one the same treatment with a bit less detail. I jumped on the Wacom tablet with a number of photo references and sketched out the scene in three or four thumbnails.

One of the iterations was with the woman in the foreground with her back to us, on the left of frame, the man smelling the wine in focus in the centre, with the waiter to his left, and the stack of garbage to his right in the background.