Erik Piepenburg tears up talking about his debut book, Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants. Wearing a sharp slate sweater, the fit 50-something-year-old New York Times contributor with neat graying hair nibbles on a pastry and sips a latte at Duck-Rabbit Coffee in Ohio City. It’s his annual trip home to attend the Cleveland International Film Festival and to visit his mom.
What is a gay restaurant? Is this coffee shop one? No. At least not right now. But maybe sometimes. Or some day.
“I don’t mean to sound like a dick when I say this, but a gay restaurant is a restaurant where there are mostly gay people eating,” Piepenburg says. “When I moved from Cleveland to New York in 1989, you would walk into certain restaurants in Chelsea and it was a sea of gay men.”
From New York City’s Stonewall Inn to Los Angeles’s The Black Cat Tavern to Cleveland’s The Cadillac Lounge, gay bars’ important role in the LGBTQ+ movement is well-documented. Yet, they are not for everyone. Bars cater to drugs, alcohol and loud music — not the best places for older people looking for companionship, teenagers struggling with identity or anyone seeking sobriety. Gay restaurants, by contrast, offer a safe place to mingle and talk.
“They are very different experiences,” he says. “I wanted to explore, since the early 1900s to our queer today, where have gay people been eating and why?”
Today, one can walk through Ohio City, Tremont, Downtown and even the suburbs and see pride flags hanging from the windows. Heck, the streets of Hingetown are painted rainbow. Yet, many of those spaces are dominated by heterosexual, cisgender men and women. The same is even happening at many gay bars, where (mostly) straight women go to dance on Saturday nights or during bachelorette parties.
Are those flag-hanging spaces gay restaurants and bars? Not necessarily, even if the gesture is important and appreciated.
“It immediately says, Hey, even if you’re the only gay couple in this restaurant, don’t worry about it. We support you,” Piepenburg says. “That doesn’t make it a gay restaurant. But that’s progress in some ways.”
As a college student at DePaul University and then a young producer at MSNBC.com, Piepenburg ate at Melrose Diner “three to four times a week,” he says, often after studying late or working second shift. The 56-year-old Lakeview restaurant in Boystown served pancakes, omelets and, most notably, sweet-and-sour cabbage soup 24 hours a day behind a red-and-yellow ’60s, bulb-lit sign.
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When it closed in 2017, Piepenburg mourned the loss of his once second home, the place where he once went on dates and got to know servers’ names and watched guys walk to the bars after long evenings at work. The place, but more importantly the people who worked and ate there, deserved to be remembered. That loss became an impetus for Dining Out.
“I wouldn’t quite say a death in the family, but this place that meant so much to me is now gone. The camaraderie that you get at that kind of a gay restaurant is gone,” he says. “So, I wanted to remember Melrose by talking about what it means to be a gay restaurant.”
A Gen Xer growing up in North Olmsted, Piepenburg found kinship with those who shared his passion for culture. Late nights at The Phantasy introduced him to industrial bands. CIFF programs helped develop his love for film, which now appears in his coverage of horror movies for the Times. Finding a gay community in Northeast Ohio wasn’t as easy as a “deeply closeted” teenager.
Working on Dining Out, however, recontextualized one important place from his teen years. Few would peg My Friends restaurant on the Lakewood-Cleveland border as a gay restaurant. And at most times of the day, it was not. In the early morning, factory workers and police officers ate dinner after the third shift. Later in the a.m., families and older people would enjoy a leisurely breakfast before office workers grabbed a bite at lunch or on the way home. However, the atmosphere and clientele were different after those shows at The Phantasy.
“I didn’t quite know it at the time, but now looking back, after certain concerts, My Friends was totally a gay restaurant,” says Piepenburg, who also points to Beauregard’s on Detroit Avenue and Lake Effect on Detroit Avenue, which was co-owned by LGBTQ+ talk show host Buck Harris. “You had out gay and lesbian people, and you had closeted gay boys like me, who were like, Oh, I see you.”
The phenomenon of “queering a space,” as he calls it, is one he found at restaurants across the country.
“One of the many ways that gay restaurants are different from gay bars as gay spaces is that they can shift throughout the day,” says Piepenburg. “It’s a space that is not necessarily gay, but it becomes gay when you have enough gay people there.”
Gay restaurants, and bars for that matter, can be oases in conservative states like Ohio. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, Nepalese Lounge and Grill serves that same purpose. Despite its name, the restaurant does not serve food from Nepal, but since 1982, “Naps,” as locals call it, has been a safe space for LGBTQ+ individuals from across a state of Catholics and football fanatics. In addition to trivia, fish fries and bingo, guests drive hours, even traveling across state lines, to attend its monthly trans mixer.
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Beneath the fun lies a bravery that makes Piepenburg’s emotions rise. When the bar first opened, vandals would kick open the front door and throw bottle rockets and trash at the patrons. So frequent, the front door was sealed and customers entered through the back. Even as hostility toward the trans community grows once again, multiple owners have stood strong and proud.
“I met a lot of heterosexual cisgender men there, some were with their wives, and they had on their female-presenting clothes and wigs and everything,” says Piepenburg, choking up. “So many of them were like, ‘If I went out to a restaurant like this back in Kenosha or whatever, that’s not gonna go well for me. Here, I can be myself.’”
Nepalese Lounge and Grill is now the oldest gay bar or restaurant in the state — an honor it does not relish. Between 2002 and 2021, more than 50% of gay bars closed in the United States, says author and Oberlin professor Greggor Mattson. Those that remain are not the same. But do they remain vital in this time of progress? Piepenburg says a place like Naps, which attracts people from across the region, proves their necessity.
“What we’re seeing is a sign of progress,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean that I can’t be nostalgic for the gay restaurant and gay bars experiences that I grew up with. They don’t exist in the way that they did. I think that’s kind of a loss.”
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