Lola is closing for good, and I’m just terribly sad about it.
I’m not sure when I first went there. Sometime around 2000 or 2001 maybe? I went with a friend, on one of many non-dates he and I had over the span of several years. He’d moved out of town by then but when he came home for a visit, we’d go out on these fake dates. That is a story for another day, but suffice to say we both wasted a lot of time trying to act as if we didn’t want to date each other, and some of that time was spent at Lola.
I ended up at Lola a lot in those days, which is especially surprising given the money I was making at the time. I had no business spending $12 on fries, let alone whatever three cocktails and valet parking cost. I worked for a local magazine, so restaurants and chefs and cocktails were part of my job; but that was mostly an excuse. Tremont was just where you wanted to be – at Lola, or Mojo, or Parallax, or Fahrenheit. The neighborhood was tattier then and there was nowhere to buy a locally produced artisan candle or a Cleveland t-shirt while you waited for your table. I’m not a jackass so I won’t say it was “better” then but it was a lot different.
Now, I’m definitely the kind of jackass to tell you I liked Lola better at the old location, just so you know how cool and also how old I am. But I liked it on East Fourth Street, too. My husband and I went on semi-secret dates there when we were still coworkers (in retrospect I am not sure how smart it is to go on any kind of secret date at a place where you both know a lot of people) and almost ten years later we celebrated our first wedding anniversary there with no worries about the price of cocktails. So like many other people I have a lot of memories tied up with that place, and it makes me very sad to think of it sitting dim and empty.
I think, though, that what I am mostly mourning is the very idea of calling a Lyft and going downtown and walking through crowds to the front door of a place you know and love, and sitting down at a banquette table and accidentally or on-purpose overhearing the stilted conversation of the first date happening a foot and a half away from you. Thinking about it now, I really could cry.