I love food court food. Not ironically, and not only in the nostalgic way one loves things that arrived alongside an adolescence spent under fluorescent lighting. I love the architecture of it: the trays, the paper cups, the strange little ecosystems that form around soft pretzels and fountain sodas and something served under a heat lamp that is, against all odds, exactly what you wanted.
I have a fiction novel that’s been simmering on the back burner for years about a woman who, after a major life setback, bides her time as a bourbon-chicken sample girl in her hometown’s dying mall, caught between plotting her next move and regressing with the manager of Hot Topic. In my head, the food court is practically a character of its own: the smell of wishing-fountain chlorine twisting around the aroma of an Auntie Anne’s pretzel; fake plants gathering dust beneath neon signs; floppy Sbarro slices; overstuffed Dinky Doozies; the particular melancholy of a place built to feel bustling even when half the storefronts have gone dark.
