Why Do We Love to Eat Late at Night?

In his book 24/7, Columbia professor Jonathan Crary argues that sleep—or that time reserved for it, usually between midnight and the morning—constitutes a refuge from capitalism's seemingly perpetual, omnipresent reach. Be that as it may, isn't there a kind of inviolable magic in late nights, too?

Perhaps that's why we're all prone to hanging out at a late-night pizza parlor after a concert, or at least lingering by the fridge for extended midnight snacks. "Street food at night has been a thing since at least the time of the Romans," Professor Richard Wilk, an anthropologist at Indiana University, told me. "The late-night meal is usually taken in what people call a 'third space' between home and office, somewhere that feels comfortable and familiar."

South Street Diner in Boston definitely had an air of familiarity to it as I settled into the counter the day after St. Patrick's Day. Off to my left, an old phone booth in the diner had been converted to hold wine, a touch screen, and a receipt printer. Off to my right, two men fiddled with the ATM machine. There was a sandwich on the counter left unattended nearby. When the men left, the sandwich remained.

Defining the "third space" when it comes to food partly depends on where you are. While I was happy with my coffee and apple pie served in a boxy dish in the afternoon, I knew it wasn't the same thing as grabbing a falafel at 2 AM on a warm summer night in Cambridge. And it wasn't like walking through a rainy Charing Cross in Glasgow, picking away at a flower bouquet's worth of chips with increasingly sticky fingers.

Jessica Harris—journalist, historian, and author of High on the Hog, Beyond Gumbo, The Africa Bookbook, and more—singled out her third space as having "chicken and waffles late-night with the jazz musicians at Wells uptown in NYC, and the dawn patrol French onion soup and grilled pigs' feet at Au Pied de Cochon with the strong men porters from Les Halles in Paris." (Wells Supper Club, considered the pioneer of chicken and waffles in this country, opened in 1938 and was the post-performance meal stop for people like Billie Holliday and Duke Ellington. Nat King Cole held his wedding reception there.)

"There may be a few different late-night dining 'worlds' out there," David Berris, co-editor of FoodAnthropology and a professor of anthropology at the University of New Orleans, told me.

One of those worlds could be the place you end up at after grabbing a few drinks.

Jonathan Prince at Manhattan's Empire Biscuit now works during the day, but he still misses "that late-night thing, where someone walks in at four in the morning—you immediately share something with that person." The stream of daytime customers is easy to figure out, but that after-dark clientele is much more difficult to predict. "The nurse who wants to have a real fucking lunch break or the EMT who has this deeply non-standard work-life has to sit down next to the NYU kid on molly," Prince said. "Sometimes we'd have cops and known drug dealers in the biscuit shop at the same time—and when no one else is there. It feels like a demilitarized zone."

This is hardly a new development in the history of late-night dining. Jan Whitaker over at "Restaurant-ing Through History" wrote of a pre-Civil War New York City in which "a class of rogue males (sometimes accompanied by their g'hals) prominently made up of firemen and the more prosperous newsboys … enjoyed oyster cellars [and] Butter-cake Dick's, where for a mere 6 cents they could get a generous plate of biscuits with butter and a cup of coffee."

Our modern conception of late-night dining, however, can be traced to the turn of the 20th century. It was then—as Andrea Broomfield argued in Gastronomica—that people like Nathaniel Newnham Davis helped popularize the idea of eating out in London, where class anxiety, despite the city's self-evident cosmopolitanism, was a more pronounced than in the States.

The rewards of late-night dining and our contemporary "third space" might not be immediately tenable, but they are felt by anyone working in the restaurant industry. "You can't really tell people how gruesome [the work] is," Prince said. "However, I love it … I know how to enjoy it … I used to do high-end stuff and serve heads of state, and this is a sandwich shop, so … You know what it's like? It's like that Hopper painting."

"Everyone there looked like they were having a miserable time, but you wanted to be there. There was something about it."