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Lunch and shopping are two of my mom’s favorite things – she reminded me via voice note when she mentioned that I was planning to write a post about a specific nostalgic mother-daughter experience we share: eating at Nordstrom Café.

I’m a child of the 1990s, when mall culture was still thriving. Nordstrom was the crown jewel of my own SoCal outdoor mall, a multistory department store that seemed timeless but tapped into the impending Y2K culture. From the outside, its Spanish Revival-style building towered over hip chains like Abercrombie & Fitch and the Discovery Channel Store; inside, classic oil paintings dotted the walls and a pianist played a jazzy, live rendition of “Tiny Dancer” while shoppers pondered their Lancôme Juicy Tubes. The restaurant was located on the top floor of the store and was steeped in what the folks at the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute now call Frasurbane: a portmanteau of the smooth, sophisticated urban aesthetic seen in the ’90s sitcom, Spawnwhich was popularized by Generation X, who were still nursing an aesthetic hangover from the 1980s.

The restaurant had dim lighting, sepia tones, cloth napkins and romantic lounge palm trees – a far cry from the buzzing social register of Jamba Juice’s blender or the rushed environment of Panda Express. I loved both of these places. But Nordstrom Café was my first fancy restaurant; it wasn’t a food court, but it was was where I realized that a restaurant could be a place to hold court. And I never would have braved the host alone (another feature noticeably absent from Jamba Juice) without my mother.

At times, the Nordstrom Café felt like an unofficial women’s club. Sure, there were businessmen taking their lunch break and buying socks, but the crowd was more often a multi-generational gathering of mothers, daughters, and grandmothers. To get to the restaurant at our particular Nordstrom, you had to pass through the women’s lingerie section – a signal that made my pre-teen mind blush: Here’s where real women eat. The odyssey of walking past bras with cups that could fit my entire skull made the upcoming meal even more deserved, especially if I had just purchased a training bra or underwear with my own mother.

“Do we have the grilled cheese and tomato soup here?” the waiter asked with decorum, placing my mother’s and my respective orders on the table (his, a French dip and an iced tea). The grilled cheese sandwich was sliced ​​at an angle, its scalene triangles stacked on top of each other in a way that resembled Fallingwater, which I first saw in a calendar at a friend’s house, and which made me think: This house looks serious, because it seems to hurt. Nordstrom Café didn’t pamper children with a typical children’s menu. It offered an architectural sandwich and a cup of creamy tomato-basil Roma soup topped with crostini – a lot of words to chew on at 12 years old. I ate them, thinking that my waiter must surely know that only someone capable of choosing their own underwear could place such an elegant order.

Turns out I wasn’t the only child to share this experience with my mother, nor am I the only adult to remember it. During the 2020 lockdowns, Nordstrom shared the recipe for its beloved tomato soup on Instagram, sparking a wave of emotional reactions. Social networks have been overflowing with hundreds of Instagram videos on this subject, bloggers have cheated the soup and continue to do so; TikTok was filled with videos under the search term “Nordstrom Cafe Grilled Cheese Tomato Soup and Mom”; even today, years later, users continue to make statements like “POV: There’s nothing better than Nordstrom Café with your mom” or “Mom just took me to Nordstrom Café. Everything will be fine.” In the comments of this latest post, one user wrote: “THE TOMATO SOUPPPOPOPPP😩😩❤️❤️❤️😩”, another praised: “Mine closed and it was the worst thing that could happen to my family 💔.” »

Today, there’s a crostini-sized hole in my heart where my childhood Nordstrom Cafe was, which closed in 2020. One Reddit user wrote of the location’s closure: “I used to eat clam chowder at the cafe with my grandmother in the 80s. I miss it too.” » For millennials, the decline of mall culture has posed a bit of an existential crisis. As Jamie Loftus wrote for Eater in 2023: “When I was a kid, I walked into the mall food court with more than my mom and a sweaty $10. I walked in with a framework for what that meant.”

I know that somewhere in this mystical, growing constellation of mother-daughter tomato soup experiences, there is a direct line to privilege and socioeconomic status, and to Santa Barbara, California, where my hometown’s old Nordstrom is located. But there is such an aesthetic specificity to this mother-daughter experience prevalent at the Nordstrom Café that it has become almost folkloric. The café is a third space of old, a reminder of the bonding alchemy that mothers and daughters share in the unique but ever-vanishing ritual of lunch in the department store. Sometimes when I’m sitting in a trendy Manhattan restaurant, I still think about the majestic Nordstrom restaurants that made me feel important. “Coffee has never been an afterthought, but its own destination,” said Becky Mulligan, Nordstrom’s vice president of restaurant operations. “Customers don’t come back for convenience; they come back because it means something to them. » I wouldn’t say my tomato soup introduced me to adulthood, but its basil garnish hinted at the idea that maybe, one day, I could be a person with taste. Just like mom.