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It’s 10.30pm on a weekday evening in New York City. The air still stinks after a day of 100-degree heat and the smoke from the Canadian wildfires that, until nightfall, have bathed Manhattan in a blurry, seamy haze.
But nothing will deter those waiting in line (or “on line” as New Yorkers will correct you) for Greek frozen yoghurt from Myka.
Here, on 7th Avenue in Greenwich Village, a queue of mostly young people lines up within a cordon. The crowd is a hubbub of chatter, no one bemoaning the wait. Framed in the window of the store, a woman raises a spoon of fro-yo to her mouth – her blissed-out expression implies those waiting won’t be disappointed.
Myka isn’t alone. As journalist Brock Colyar wittily sketched in a recent New York magazine cover story, queues for the coolest takeout foods – as deemed by online influencers – are peppering the city. Near Myka, the lines for those wanting pizza from L’Industrie on Christopher Street persist just as relentlessly; the same for ice cream at Caffè Panna, or pastries from Radio Bakery.
As a Brit who has lived here for 16 years, the lines are both familiar and baffling. I come from a nation of doughty queuers – it’s “line”, not “queue” here – and yet my years of queuing patiently for the ice cream van or at a railway station ticket office seem far away.
If Brits-of-yore traditionally lined up, grumblingly acquiescent, for things they needed or mildly liked, the new New York line is more frenzied. These are lines formed by food-related crazes powered by the internet – and not exotic foods, but ice cream, bagels and pizza. In an excellent song-and-dance skit, Saturday Night Live skewered the “big dumb line” trend perfectly.
Bizarrely, these are lines in one of the world’s most notoriously impatient cities, where waiting a second too long for anything can provoke loud vocal displeasure. The lines are a New York contradiction: islands of waiting in a city that traditionally doesn’t wait for anything. They can also be annoying for those living nearby. There are chains across the base of brownstones near Myka. Residents complain about noise and litter.
The savvy New Yorker knows to wait for a quiet moment on a quiet day when the line has abated: sneak in, acquire foodstuff, leave. The even savvier New Yorker eats and drinks their favourite things somewhere as-yet unidentified and un-invaded, in gloriously un-online secrecy.
Yet, as someone who hasn’t queued for ice cream or pizza – or, in the past, a cronut (the mixture of croissant and doughnut popularised by Dominique Ansel’s bakery) and the cupcakes and banana cream pudding of Magnolia Bakery – my immediate thought of “What on earth are you all doing?” comes with the less-easy-to-admit: “It must be something if everyone’s lining up for it. Should I?” Truth: the toasted bagels at another line-heavy place, Apollo Bagels, are delicious (especially the ones with raspberry jam, or scallion cream cheese and tomato).
Fomo may be a long-overworn acronym, but, as Sex and the City made clear, it is an omnipresent New York vibe, even for those revolted by the idea of following the crowd – or, even worse, the shame of being so late to a trend you have to queue for it.
Yet the lines outside Myka and L’Industrie signal not only the power of the internet to create formidable bubbles of popularity, but an enduring retail truth: that the products must be pretty good if people keep lining up for them. At this point, as SNL’s skit showed, mocking resistance to the new food lines is futile.
Still, think back to the chaos outside Studio 54’s velvet rope. Then the cool kids lined up in the hope of seeing Bianca Jagger on a white horse. Now they clamour for frozen yoghurt.
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