You walk out of the cold into a tiny, steaming, jewelbox of a restaurant in the city, where there's no room for a coat check and limited space for hooks, and once you get a seat, you naturally begin to de-layer.
Off comes the hat, the scarf, the gloves, the coat, the sweater; now where do you put them? Do you fold your coat then drape it on the back of your own chair, stuff your gloves and scarf and hat inside your coat pockets, and then proceed to peruse the menu like the self-contained, dignified, veteran city diner that you are?
Or maybe you peel the layers from your body and push them as far away from your person as you can, because you're feeling claustrophobic and sweaty and clammy and you're hungry, and you're thirsty, and you just want to relax and you can't be bothered to keep track of your possessions.
Did you maybe hang your coat the chair of an adjacent table? No one's sitting in it at this exact moment so it must be what it's there for then. Did you pile up your layers onto a twisted heap of textures and fabrics on the banquette, kinda like a spoiled brat's nest? Did you even notice the frayed end of your scarf dragging on the floor, daring someone to trip on it? Is that your hat just sitting on top of the other table?
This, friends, is winterspreading. It's like manspreading, but gender-neutral. Anybody can do it, all it takes is a sufficiently puffy jacket and absolutely no conception of your surroundings.
Mark, 35, a server and bartender who has worked in NYC restaurants for the past seven years, knows the behavior well. He describes a typical winterspreading scene: "It's like watching the weird kid at school who eats their hair unpack their lunch in the cafeteria. They need the whole table to distribute everything just so. If there's empty chairs nearby, forget about it. Chairs aren't for sitting! They're meant to be festively decorated with infinity scarves and holiday shopping bags!"
Winterspreading might occur in other cities that experience...winter, but it strikes me as a distinctly New York affliction because of the high ratio of people to available space. Be it the train at rush hour or Sunday brunch in Williamsburg, we are constantly committing transgressions of personal space.
(Scott Lynch / Gothamist)
I asked Gothamist's Ask a Native New Yorker columnist Jake Dobkin to weigh in on the etiquette of the issue.
"Given the usurious rent that most NYC restaurants pay for their spaces, there's rarely room for a coat check. That doesn't mean your coat gets an extra seat—unless it's buying an entrée," he told me. "The correct etiquette is to drape your coat over the back of the chair, or if that doesn't work, sit on it like a cushion, with your hat and scarf stuffed inside. This may be uncomfortable. Meditate on that discomfort- perhaps use it to feel sympathy for the many other people suffering around you, like the busboys making $2 an hour, or the line chef who has to work 16 hour days just so some restaurant entrepreneur can charge you $40 for steak frites."
Besides being an indicator of a sense of entitlement and lack of empathy, winterspreading actually hinders the way restaurants are run. The Bitchy Waiter, the blogger and soon to be published author who has amassed an online following from sharing his service industry gripes, says the culprits are people who've never worked in a restaurant before and "don't understand the concept of table rotation and shared space."
"It's not okay to use the adjacent table and say 'I'll move it if you need it' because we will need the table and we shouldn't have to ask you to have manners," he explained. "I guarantee that if we request they move it, they will look around the restaurant and find one other open table indicating that the next customer should go sit there instead. Nope, that fucks with our seating rotation and the server whose turn it is does not deserve fewer tables just because some mannerless asshole is too self-important to let his coat, scarf, hat and gloves remain in his own personal space."
A server at the ever-bustling Walter's in Fort Greene, who wished to remain anonymous, described "a general lack of awareness" among diners who occasionally knock the glasses off the tables with their "giant puffy coats."
The burden is not exclusive to servers; bartenders, too, have to contend with the 'spread. Katharine Heller, host of the podcast Tell the Bartender, says she'll actually lose business when customers load up empty barstools with their outerwear.
"When we get busy, a new customer will assume a person is sitting there and has just gone to the bathroom. If they really would like to sit, they will go to a different bar. I have nothing against a nice infinity scarf, believe me. It's just that coats and hats don't drink, and if they were to, they'd probably be terrible tippers."
And some patrons get that. Molly Lamb, an esthetician in Williamsburg, says that if she's seated at the bar, "I sit on top of my coat, gloves go in pocket, and I specifically carry a bigger purse in the winter to put my hat, scarf, etc. But I really do love a damn coat check!"
It seems coat checks have been reduced to little more than nostalgia. Self-proclaimed "maitre diva" John Winterman, who has worked in the Daniel Boulud restaurant group for more than a decade and is now a managing partner at Batard, wrote in a 2014 article in Town and Country that "one of the more disturbing trends (outside of Ugg boots and the rise of Hollister) would be the decline and downright disappearance of the Cloak Room, or Coat Check."
In the article, he bemoans the trend of diners declining to check their coats, even when given the option, which he attributes to "the casualization of America."
When we spoke on the phone, he clarified his stance: "At Daniel, we had the luxury of a large coat check. It has three Michelin stars, the check averages were very high, we were required to check coats—they didn't want to see coats draped over chairs. If someone was cold, we had pashmina wraps we would distribute."
Winterman continued, "I think all restaurants with at least a Michelin star should have an option for putting coats somewhere, within reason. I think it's unreasonable to suggest restaurants should have to find a place for your motorcycle helmet. At Batard, we have one Michelin star, it's more of a casual fine dining spot, with no dress code and a very limited coat check. But recently we found some dead space and we put in shelves for people to put their bags."
(Though this has created an unintended consequence: bagspreading. "They're checking sometimes two or three bags a person!” Winterman says. "I don't know how people move about the city carrying what they do.")
Patricia Napier-Fitzpatrick, founder of the The Etiquette School of New York, also lamented the disappearance of coat checks. "There's only two options—I don't like either of them," she said.
"If you are sitting in a booth, if there's room, you can put it beside you. Same with at the banquette, but if people are sitting next to you, you don't want to put your coat down because it would crowd them. The only other option is to put it on your chair."
At the Spotted Pig in the West Village, a combination of ingenuity and cooperation goes a long way—hooks are tacked on the walls above almost every table, providing a no-brainer spot to hang your winter wears. Hostess Claire Keichel explained, "My job as a host is to point out the hooks so people don't [winterspread]."
Beyond dispensing etiquette to the clueless, maybe there’s a practical solution: losing the layers. It's 2016; advancements in outerwear technology have shown us that bigger and puffier do not necessarily equal warmer! And those trendy $1,000+ "arctic tech" Canada Goose parkas with coyote fur ruff hoods have been debunked as more status symbols than cold weather game changers, anyway. You're going out to eat, not mushing huskies in the Iditarod.
So I implore you, fellow diners: the next time you go out to eat, rein in your winterspread. Take this is a public service announcement. Be kind to the tables, chairs, barstools, and most of all, the people with whom you navigate the shared space around you. Winter sucks enough; now don't make it worse.
Kate Mooney is a writer living in Brooklyn. For more cold takes, follow her here.
