The Best Way to Remember a Meal Is to Steal the Pen

It started at Russ & Daughters Cafe on my 30th birthday. After bagels, lox, and a halva sundae, the bill arrived with two hard coffee candies (the kind my grandfather used to like), a postcard, and a pen. In place of the generic stic precision ballpoint pens that came with nearly every bill in the days before the Square app, a sleek two-toned pen appeared. It was dark sky blue on the top half and white on the bottom with the Russ & Daughters name and motto “Appetizing Since 1914” running up its side. It felt like a birthday present. Without thinking, I pocketed it. So began my life of crime.

Months later, I dug into my bag for a pen. Feeling around in the dark abyss, I was surprised to come up with several that were more stylish than the green TD bank pens that seem to proliferate when no one’s looking. There was an electric blue one from Flora Bar at the Met Breuer museum, with its fittingly stylish and clean white font, a souvenir from a mid-afternoon snack of radicchio salad and white wine with my friend Gil. And, there was a forest green one from Olmsted that reminded me of a much needed solo drink in the restaurant’s lush backyard garden. An ad hoc collection had accumulated.

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Over the coming months, I added a midnight blue pen from a lunch at Cafe Habana that was just a hair darker than the blue seats in the crowded canteen with curly white cursive writing. Then came the simplest of the group, a black pen with neat white text from the Italian restaurant Via Carota where my friend Kathy welcomed me to the freelance life with chicken soup, salad, and sage wisdom. There were others, too, each with their own corresponding meal springing to mind.

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Decades ago, those pens might have been matchbooks and only a few years ago, they might have been restaurant postcards. But pens, “They’ve completely replaced the matchbook,” said Samantha Safer the co-owner of Otway, a cozy restaurant in Brooklyn where guests are met with a bronze bar cart of house-baked crackers and lard for spreading instead of a traditional host stand. Their off-white pen matches the minimalist, stylish space with a metallic teal logo spelling Otway in perfectly symmetrical, thin letters. We aren’t the only ones taking notice; Zagat recently wrote about the pen trend.

Pens are “the last thing someone touches before they leave a restaurant,” said Ken Fulk, the prestigious designer of Sadelle’s in New York City and Strangers and Saints in Provincetown. “It feels considered.” And they often are, as pens (and other branded accoutrements like cocktail napkins) are increasingly included in restaurant design packages.

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