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Why the Nordstrom Cafe Was the Ultimate Mother-Daughter Experience
A visit to the department store restaurant for grilled cheese and tomato soup has become a seminal shared memory
Eating lunch and shopping are two of my mother’s favorite things — she reminded me as much by voice note when mentioned I was planning to write a piece about a specific, nostalgic mother-daughter experience we share: eating at the Nordstrom Cafe.
I’m a child of the 1990s, when mall culture was still thriving. Nordstrom was the jewel in my own outdoor SoCal mall’s crown, a multifloor department store that felt timeless, yet tapped into the imminent Y2K culture. From the outside, its Spanish revival building towered over trendy chains like Abercrombie & Fitch and the Discovery Channel Store; inside, classical 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 on the store’s top floor, and drenched in what folks at the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute now call Frasurbane: a portmanteau of the soft, sophisticated urbane aesthetic seen in the ’90s sitcom, Frasier, that was popularized by Gen X, which was still nursing a 1980s aesthetic hangover.
The restaurant had low, sepia-toned lighting, cloth napkins, and romantic parlor palms — a far cry from the blender-whirring social register of Jamba Juice, or the rushed environment of Panda Express. I loved both of those places. But the Nordstrom Cafe was my first fancy-ish restaurant; it was not a food court, but it was where I realized that a restaurant could be a place to hold court. And I would never have braved the host stand alone (another noticeably absent feature of Jamba Juice) without my mom.
At times, the Nordstrom Cafe felt like an unofficial women’s club. Sure, there were businessmen taking their lunch breaks and buying socks, but the crowd was most often filled with a multigenerational assemblage of moms, daughters, and grandmas. To even access the restaurant in our particular Nordstrom, you had to go through the women’s lingerie department — a blush-inducing signal to my preteen mind: Here’s where real women eat. The odyssey of walking past bras whose cups could fit my entire skull made the upcoming meal feel all the more earned, especially if I was fresh off of shopping for a training bra or underwear with my own mom.
“Do we have the grilled cheese and tomato soup here?” the waiter would ask with decorum, placing my mom’s and my respective orders on the table (hers, 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 place, and which made me think, That house looks serious, because it looks like it hurts. The Nordstrom Cafe didn’t coddle kids with a typical kids’ menu. It proposed an architectural sandwich and a creamy, crostini-topped cup of Roma tomato basil soup — a lot of words to chew on as a 12-year-old. I ate them up, thinking that, surely, my waiter must have known that only a person capable of picking out their own underwear could place such an elegant order.
It turns out I wasn’t the only kid sharing this experience with my mom, and I’m not the only adult reminiscing about it, either. During the 2020 lockdowns, Nordstrom shared the recipe for its beloved tomato soup on Instagram, eliciting a wave of emotional responses. Social media spilled over with hundreds of Instagram videos about it, bloggers duped 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 now, years later, users continue to make declarations like “POV: there’s nothing better than the Nordstrom Cafe with your mom” or “Mom just took me to the Nordstrom Cafe. Everything will be OK.” In the comments of the latter post, one user wrote, “THE TOMATO SOUPPPPOPOPP😩😩❤️❤️❤️😩,” another eulogized, “mine closed and it was the worst thing to happen in my family 💔.”
Today, there is a crostini-size hole in my heart where the Nordstrom Cafe of my childhood, which shuttered in 2020, used to be. One Reddit user wrote about the location’s closure, “I used to eat clam chowder in the cafe with my grandma in the ’80s. I miss it too.” For millennials, the decline of mall culture has posed a small existential crisis. As Jamie Loftus wrote for Eater in 2023, “As a kid, I entered the mall food court with more than just my mom and 10 clammy dollars. I went in with a framework for what it Meant.”
I know that somewhere in this mystical, expanding constellation of mother-daughter tomato soup experiences, there is a dry through-line about privilege, and socioeconomic status, and the Santa Barbara, California, location of my hometown’s bygone Nordstrom. But there is such aesthetic specificity to this widespread, mother-daughter Nordstrom Cafe experience, that it’s become almost folkloric. The cafe is a third space of yore, a reminder of the bonding alchemy that mothers and daughters share in the unique but steadily disappearing lunch-in-the-department-store ritual. Sometimes when I sit in a trendy Manhattan restaurant booth, I still think of the stately Nordstrom ones that made me feel important. “The Cafe was never an afterthought but its own destination,” said Becky Mulligan, the VP of Nordstrom’s restaurant operations. “Customers aren’t coming back out of convenience; they’re coming back because it means something to them.” I wouldn’t say my tomato soup initiated me into adulthood, but its basil garnish hinted at the idea that maybe, one day, I could be a person with taste. Just like Mom.