You never know what will give you a little feeling of déjà vu.

Last weekend, we were out at the mall helping my wife’s friend look for some furniture. “The mall,” in Northern Virginia, will typically be Tysons Corner Center, probably one of the nicest and most upscale malls in the country, except for the ultra-luxurious Tysons Galleria a couple minutes away:

The Tysons Corner area has the distinction of being probably the first locality in Northern Virginia I ever mentioned, back in my early writing days:

We passed the new Adaire luxury tower, which cast a shadow over the dual Bentley/Aston Martin dealership, with a Tesla store in the background and a Porsche dealer across the street. It is all, directly or indirectly, financed by the American taxpayer. We ate at a restaurant in the ground floor of a modest office building, but had to trek up and down a six-story parking garage to the “customer parking,” even though the entire garage was empty—reserved, perhaps, for the bigwigs who never show up to work. We needed a few things at Wal-Mart (surprisingly, there is one here), and I had to explain that the parking lot in front of Wal-Mart is not actually for Wal-Mart, and that, if you are coming from your car, the store has to be entered from the top level of yet another parking garage. 

“If Kim Jong-Un is going to drop a nuclear bomb,” my dad remarked, “it should be on Tysons Corner.”

This is what the area looks like on satellite: a strange quasi-density-corridor surrounded by sleepy single-family neighborhoods. Some urbanists think the area is ripe for maturing into something walkable and livable. Maybe.

But the mall is pretty nice.

Anyway, none of that has anything to do with today’s piece, except to introduce that the area were driving around was very affluent and full of new, seemingly poorly planned roads and buildings.

We were getting lunch at a little Japanese restaurant in a strip plaza, and I thought, this just looks like a normal old strip mall. Why is it still here? There’s very little along the main corridors through Tysons Corner that’s obviously been there awhile. There was something comforting about this utterly cookie-cutter shopping center that could easily have been untouched since the ’80s.

It reminded me of the main shopping center in my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey, with its old-school collection of stores: an Italian bakery, a coffee shop, many years ago a five-and-dime, a gym, an office supply store, and a few restaurants. There also used to be a piano shop.

As I often write, sites like this are fossils in a roadside fossil record: artifacts telling any passerby what this landscape used to be.

The Japanese restaurant was small, but had a very cool interior: two floors, which is uncommon in a strip plaza spot. We sat upstairs with a view of the ground floor. There was even a skylight above us with a view of some trees off to the side of the building—the restaurant was at the far end of the strip. What a nice little touch.

I’ve written a lot recently about restaurants and cooking and being unsatisfied with spending money outside the house. Somehow, this restaurant kind of pulled me out of that. I was looking at the menu, and decided to go for a sushi roll and an appetizer instead of a similarly priced main dish (a donburi or a sushi-regular type plate). The rest of us did the same thing, or at least it looked like the same thing, because the tempura udon came with the tempura on the side. Another nice touch.

The rolls were big, the wings were big, the tempura portion was big. Six distinct dishes. And each of us spent $20-$25. That still doesn’t feel cheap to me, but it’s quite competitive around here, especially when the portions are a good size.

Nothing was outstanding, but everything was good. The little touches—the fun arrangement of the special roll, the salad on the side of the wings, the crispy tempura served separately—were really nice.

I realized how long it had been since I’d been to a casual, everyday restaurant and just liked it, been able to say something like “Good food, good value,” and not find something wrong with it. I said déjà vu up at the top, and this is what I meant: this lunch reminded me of the lunches we’d have going out when I was a kid in Flemington or Whitehouse Station. Regular places where you could just go on a whim and get a good meal for a reasonable price. No frills, no concepts, no schtick. (I’m thinking in particular of Mangia Pizza, a nice sit-down pizza shop/Italian restaurant in a small strip mall next to a Laneco, a regional Mid-Atlantic Kmart-style store. We went there all the time, knew the owner and the waitstaff, etc.)

Obviously there are lots of places generally like that around here, especially in the suburbs, but a lot of them are just expensive and/or mediocre. And there’s only so many times you can do that before you just eat at home.

But I’d spend more money out of the house—and maybe more importantly, more time out of the house—if going out to eat meant this kind of thing. Nice, unremarkable in a good way, the kind of simplicity you sometimes think adult life leaves behind.

Much as I love this region, I think I’ve probably mistaken the ritzy-glitzy bubble element of Northern Virginia for a shift in the way things are done, and not a change of setting. I’ve probably asked myself “Why don’t restaurants feel affordable and homey anymore?” when what I really mean is, I miss some of the elements of the quieter, smaller-scale places I used to explore in Central Jersey.

None of that is second-guessing making my home here. But it’s just nice to find something, especially in a place like Tysons Corner, the belly of the transient, defense-contractor, too-much-damn-money beast—that still thinks it’s the old days.

Related Reading:

The Screen Where You Started

Growing Up

Buffet Chronicles: Different Than All The Rest

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