Here We Are: A Restaurant Guide

Café Everything, Bistro à la Mode, & Osteria Zeno

May 04, 2025

Three restaurants, six wealthy diners, and absolutely nothing to eat. In Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, the simple quest for a meal becomes an absurdist descent into societal collapse.

The first act of Here We Are unfolds as a darkly comic descent through the circles of fine dining hell. Our protagonists—rich, entitled, and desperately hungry—begin their Saturday morning seeking brunch at the ironically named Café Everything, where they discover that nothing is actually available. Their journey continues to Bistro à la Mode, where post-deconstructivist cuisine and a corpse await them. Finally, they arrive at Osteria Zeno, only to have their meal curtailed by military intervention. With each failed attempt at dining, the veneer of civilization grows thinner, and the chaos of the outside world intrudes ever more forcefully.

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Adapted from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, these restaurants do more than simply deny their wealthy patrons a meal. Each establishment becomes a mirror, reflecting back different aspects of a society in crisis. At Café Everything, we witness the hollow promises of consumer culture. At Bistro à la Mode, death itself crashes the party. And at Osteria Zeno, the very institutions meant to maintain order become agents of disruption. Let’s examine each establishment in turn, and see what’s really on the menu.

Café Everything

Our story begins with that most sacred of weekend rituals: brunch. Café Everything announces itself as “a celebration of plenitude, a hymn to abundance, a paean to endless plenty!” But as our wealthy diners are about to discover, the restaurant’s name is its first and cruelest joke.

What follows is a masterclass in denial, orchestrated by a waiter whose politeness becomes increasingly manic as he methodically dismantles every possible dining option. He begins with the relatively minor disappointment of having no “decaf latte mocchaniños with soy milk,” but the situation rapidly deteriorates. Not just no soy milk—no milk at all. Not just no specialty coffee—no coffee whatsoever. Not just no Earl Grey—no tea of any color or description. The waiter’s arsenal of regret seems infinite: “We have no Coke, we have no Sprite, we have no Mountain Dew, no Fresca Lite.” Even when the desperate diners attempt to order actual food, from abalone omelettes to blood pudding, each request is met with the same elaborate apologies and increasingly absurd explanations.

The genius of this scene lies in how it inverts the usual dynamics of luxury dining. These are people accustomed to having their desires not just met but anticipated. Yet here they encounter a service professional whose entire function has become the denial of possibility. Even his job title has been rebranded; he is introduced not as a waiter but as an “enabler.” “I’ll be enabling your table,” the waiter tells these diners— but he enables precisely nothing. His attempts at maintaining the formal pleasantries of high-end service (“I apologize profusely, Madam”) only heighten the scene’s underlying tension between appearance and reality.

When the waiter finally reveals that the restaurant is “completely out of food of any kind,” the absurdity reaches its peak. Yet even this total negation of the restaurant’s basic function doesn’t break his professional composure. His response to Claudia’s request for sparkling water, moments before the gunshot that drives our diners to their next destination, perfectly encapsulates the scene’s dark comedy. He’ll “check on that,” he says, despite having spent the entire scene systematically eliminating every possible thing one might consume in a restaurant.

Café Everything thus establishes the pattern that will play out across all three restaurants: the collision between expectations (both privileged and reasonable) and a reality that increasingly refuses to conform to them. It’s a theme Sondheim had explored previously—but here, in his final work, the denial of satisfaction becomes almost mathematical in its completeness. Everything minus everything, it turns out, equals nothing at all.

Bistro à la Mode

If Café Everything offered nothing under the guise of everything, Bistro à la Mode presents an even more perverse proposition: a restaurant where, according to its weeping waitress, “everything now is what it is.” This supposedly post-deconstructivist establishment promises an end to culinary pretense—“that is actual boeuf on the actual hoeuf”—but conceals a far more literal truth behind its curtain, in the form of a corpse.

The restaurant initially presents itself as a rejection of culinary artifice. When Leo asks if “nothing here is what it seems,” the French waitress corrects him: “Non, non, non, that is passé. Our new menu is post-déconstructif.” Yet this philosophical stance—that “things are what they are”—takes on an increasingly dark resonance as the scene unfolds. The waitress’s mournful catalog of dishes (“Black bean soup, blackened catfish, blackbird pudding”) becomes a culinary funeral march, each item darker than the last, building to what she herself describes as “Dark, dark, dark...”

Behind the apparently simple declaration that “it is what it is” lurks something far more devastating. When the curtain is pulled back to reveal Philippe’s body, we discover what the waitress’s tears have been telling us all along: death, that most fundamental reality, has intruded into this space of theatrical dining. The revelation prompts an almost existential exchange:

LEO: Yeah, but he’s just kidding, right?
FRENCH WAITRESS: Monsieur, he was French. He have no sense of humor.

This mordant joke cuts to the heart of the scene’s deeper meaning. In a world of culinary pretense and social performance, death remains the one thing that cannot be deconstructed or reinterpreted. It is, in the most absolute sense, what it is.

The presence of Philippe’s body transforms what might have been merely another failed dining attempt into something more profound. While Café Everything’s denial of sustenance was absurd, Bistro à la Mode’s confrontation with mortality hints at deeper hungers and deeper denials. These wealthy diners, who moments ago were debating the merits of post-deconstructivist cuisine, must now face the most fundamental reality of all—though notably, even this doesn’t stop them from attempting to order their food.

Osteria Zeno

After a restaurant with nothing to serve and another with a corpse in the back room, our increasingly desperate diners arrive at Osteria Zeno with renewed hope. Finally, it seems, they might actually eat. Paul spots antipasto on the menu, Leo prepares another truncated toast “to cheese and wine,” and for a moment, the simple pleasures of Italian dining appear within reach.

But this is no ordinary trattoria. Their meal is immediately interrupted by Colonel Martin and his military unit, who have surrounded the restaurant in pursuit of an international drug cartel. The intrusion of armed forces into this dining room represents more than just another denied meal—it marks the complete collapse of the boundary between civil society and raw power. The very institutions meant to protect the social order have become the agents of its disruption.

This military intervention transforms Osteria Zeno into something more surreal still. The arrival of the Colonel and his poetic Lieutenant brings with it “The Soldier’s Dream,” one of the Here We Are’s most enigmatic sequences. When the restaurant’s food is revealed to be artificial—“the sheep was stuffed, and the sky was cloth, and the clouds were just paint, and the food was just rubber”—we move beyond mere dining disappointment into a deeper questioning of reality itself. Even Leo’s wine turns out to be “goddamn cherry soda.”

If Café Everything represented the hollow promises of consumer culture, and Bistro à la Mode confronted diners with mortality itself, Osteria Zeno completes the progression by dissolving the very notion of reliable reality. The revelation that the food is fake suggests that perhaps everything else is too—the military posturing, the drug cartel allegations, even the structure of society itself. All that remains real is our protagonists’ hunger, which by now has evolved from a mere desire for brunch into something far more existential.

When Fritz warns the Colonel that Leo, Raffael, and Paul are the drug dealers he’s seeking, the scene’s various elements—fake food, military intervention, and personal betrayal—coalesce into a perfect storm of societal breakdown. Our wealthy diners’ quest for sustenance has led them not just to empty plates but to the edge of order itself. Their next stop will be the embassy salon where Act II unfolds—a space that proves to be both refuge and prison, suggesting that perhaps these restaurants were preparing them for a confinement they never saw coming.

Through these three restaurants, Sondheim crafts his final meditation on the rituals that both bind and blind us. Each restaurant becomes a new variation on the impossible pursuit of satisfaction. Perhaps, we might reflect, many of our most elaborate social ceremonies are little more than increasingly sophisticated ways of staying hungry.

These scenes strip away the illusion that privilege can protect us from reality’s intrusions. At Café Everything, infinite choice proves meaningless in the face of actual scarcity. At Bistro à la Mode, not even the most sophisticated culinary philosophy can keep death from pulling up a chair. And at Osteria Zeno, military might reveals itself as just another form of theatre, complete with fake food and artificial skies. “It’s too bad,” remarks Raffael, “I was rather enjoying the Brie.”

As our six diners flee from one failed meal to the next, they remain trapped not just by their circumstances but by their inability to abandon the performance of privilege. Their persistence in the face of increasingly dramatic refusals becomes Here We Are’s darkest joke—and perhaps its deepest truth. In the end, these three restaurants serve as Sondheim’s last word on the elaborate facades we construct around our basic needs, and the price we pay for maintaining them even as they crumble around us. The real hunger, it seems, is the one we can never admit to ourselves.