So, where was I?

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Oh, right, I was writing about the now-closed restaurant M. Wells in Long Island City, Queens, N.Y., and the completely different approaches taken by two reviewers of the briefly wildly popular place – it closed after a year because of a rent dispute – Sam Sifton of The New York Times and Alan Richman of GQ. Why bother, since my readers and I live in the Mid-South? Because, to my mind, the controversy brings up issues that relate to how we dine out in a rapidly changing world.

You will recall that Sifton doted on M. Wells and praised its “hippie idealism and punk-rock cool,” its meals that were “chaotic, undisciplined affairs – wildly delicious if sometimes roughly served,” and he seemed to revel in the restaurant’s “hapless, occasionally reckless energy.” But Richman, a generation older than Sifton, deplored M. Wells for precisely the elements that Sifton praised, the lack of attention to detail, “the chipped plates, distracted staff, and badly washed glasses [perhaps] … intended to enhance an unceremonious ambience.” Richman described the service on a third visit as “dreadful.”

“Critics like me,” Richman wrote – and I’ll quote this again – “deserve some blame for the current proliferation of impossibly low service standards in so many casual New York restaurants. We tend not to censure lackadaisical conduct, thinking this is what customers want and that we would appear out of touch if we disapproved. … I wish I had never been so forgiving in my reviews. ... I should long ago have paid attention to this disastrous decline in service. Casualness in restaurants does not automatically make customers feel more relaxed. It often has the opposite effect.”

What has all this to do with us?

If you have not noticed increased casualness in local restaurants in the past decade, then you have not dined out much or have habituated the bottom of the pond. From the chef at the now closed Pasta Italia in Collierville who came out at the end of the evening and drank wine with well-heeled customers while we waited 30 minutes for our check; to the waiter at the upscale and not inexpensive Grove Grill who relentlessly addressed a table of five middle-aged women and one man as “guys” for an entire evening; to the female waiter at Cortona who patted me on the arm and shoulder so often that under different circumstances I would have thought she was hitting on me, the attitude we seem expected to assume is that if the food is good enough, then we will put up with any depredations of cramped quarters or rushed (or agonizingly prolonged) meals, arrogant or supercilious or just giddily hip and hapless service because, well, that’s just the way it is. Ha, ha, didn’t know I was keeping notes, did you, but let’s not hold grudges, s’il vous plit, though unfortunately, the food is not always good enough to sustain such attitudes anyway. No, the real question is whether the nature of dining out has changed. Certainly there are still fine dining restaurants, in New York, in Memphis, all across this great land, that uphold traditions of decorum and dress and gold-plated cuisine. Yet a look at restaurant reviews such as those written by the acutely culturally aware Sifton and the comments of legions of young bloggers tells us that the physical and psychological experience of a restaurant has become as essential and perhaps more so than the food.

Phoebe Damrosch, author of “Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter,” titled a piece she recently wrote for New York magazine’s Grub Street blog “Scruffy Chic.” In creating a list of guidelines for the “new dining out,” Damrosch notes, for example, that “bars are for diners, not just drinkers.” Go to just about any restaurant in Memphis that has a bar and you’ll see the truth in this assertion. In fact, as testimony, my wife and I tend to eat more in restaurant bars than in dining rooms, a curious innovation of the past decade that speaks reams about the growing casual and communal nature of restaurant eating: Talk to strangers! Watch CNN! Chat with the bartender!

And she’s right about “scruffy chic.” It’s not only fine-dining, white-tablecloth restaurants that are chic or “in” now. That aura of purpose, of essentialness, of scene-making, of being in on a secret – though there are no secrets when people post instantly to Twitter, Facebook and their own blogs – has been transferred from temples of cuisine to hole-in-the-wall diners where heavily tattooed chefs source their ingredients from local farmsteads and make all their own condiments, breads and pastas and none of the china or utensils match. This is real, friends, this is authenticity.

And why not? The events of Sept. 11, 2001, whose occurrence a decade ago we observed a few days ago, made us anxious and apprehensive and a little paranoid; largely unnecessary and very expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan solidified our malaise; the economic bust of 2008 and 2009 and its long-dragged-out non-recovery cemented our now deeply honed discontent. And what about the so-called Millennials, whose weird combination of abject restlessness, electronic savvy and fiduciary prowess makes them a formidable marketing target? The country has changed in 10 years.

So, yeah, let restaurants get casual, but not arrogant; relaxed, but not neglectful; witty, but not incoherent. And make thy waiters know their menus and wine lists inside-out.