Why the Nordstrom Cafe Was the Ultimate Mother-Daughter Experience

The Nordstrom Cafe

A visit to the department store restaurant for grilled cheese and tomato soup has become a seminal shared memory

by Francky Knapp

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.

The Nordstrom Cafe. Image: Nordstrom

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.

The New Luddites

The inevitable backlash against the all-encompassing role of technology in our lives has begun.

AUTHOR

• John O'Sullivan
• 
  
  Technology and social media have become ever-present in our lives. According to the Los Angeles Times, Gen Z now spends half their waking hours staring at screens, an average of 7.2 hours watching videos, scrolling social media or chatting with their friends every day. While technology and the era of the smart phone has undoubtedly revolutionized our lives, adding efficiencies and connection to information, community and immersive content that was unthinkable just a few decades ago, its pervasive nature also raises questions about mental health, surveillance and the overbearing influence of algorithms. According to a survey from messaging company SimpleTexting, 68.6% of people say that screen time has had a negative effect on their mental health, while one in three admitted it had a detrimental effect on their work or personal lives. In response to this, we’re seeing the emergence of a new movement of people, groups and brands who are questioning technology’s unchecked impact on our lives, with many championing a return to tactile, physical, off-line experiences. 
  
  One group that has attracted the attention of The New York Times recently is The Luddite Club in New York. Taking its name from the Luddite movement in 19^th century England, who were a group of textile workers rebelling against the negative impact machinery was having on their livelihoods, The Luddite Club is a teenage lifestyle group that promotes “self-liberation from social media and technology”. The group started as a reaction to death scrolling and social media burnout, but was also influenced by the freedom associated with opting out and not being controlled and tracked by technology. The Luddite Club meets weekly in a New York park where members, who favor 90s flip phones over modern smartphones, talk, draw in sketching pads, and read physical books to each other. 
  
  This yearning for physical experiences is backed up by data from VML Intelligence’s Generation Z: Building a Better Normal report. We found that 83% of American Gen Zers have a newfound appreciation for in-person interactions as a result of the pandemic and while 92% love seeing their friends online, they feel that seeing them in person is best. This sentiment is also fueling the revival of analogue practices and simpler technology from the past. Two of the biggest map producers in the US and the UK have both revealed a significant increase in the sales of physical paper maps during the last two years. Ordnance Survey revealed a 144% year-on-year increase in sales in 2020, a figure that climbed a further 28% in 2021, while The AAA (American Automobile Association) also produced 123% more maps in 2022 than in 2021. This is being linked to digital fatigue, with people looking for ways to disengage from their screens. But physical maps also bring with them a sense of adventure and spontaneity, delivering a very different experience to the efficiency and speed prioritized by digital alternatives. 
  
  There has also been a recent rise in popularity of the digital camera, with #digitalcamera amassing more than 220 million views on TikTok. The lack of filters and editing capabilities, coupled with the barrier between images and social media, is making them more appealing to some Gen Zers looking to claim back control of their lives.
  Cap_able
  
  
  Finally, Italian fashion brand Cap_able is using its debut collection to highlight the potential negative impact of technology. Its Manifesto Collection is made up of knitwear covered in brightly colored patterns, which aim to confuse facial recognition technology and stop it being able to recognize the wearer as a person. The patterns are intricately designed to make surveillance technology think the wearer is a dog, a zebra, a giraffe or a crowd of tiny people.

  
  Cap_able’s co-founders Rachele Didero and Federica Busani tell VML Intelligence: “Fashion has increasingly become a way to convey messages, to gather the attention of a generation for which appearance is not enough. The Manifesto collection is an example of Cap_able's modus operandi: it wants to raise awareness on the importance of privacy and human rights by addressing the problem of misuse of facial recognition technology.”

  
  As technology becomes more immersive and pervasive with each passing year, anti-technology counter-trends that champion the benefits of disconnecting, and the rich and rewarding potential of physical experiences are inevitable. Brands must not forget the power of the physical world, while embracing technology that empowers people, rather than hinders them.

What is Frutiger Aero, the aesthetic taking over from Y2K?

Shiny globules, green fields, tropical fish – memories of an era dominated by glossy, naturalistic design are taking over the internet

by Laura Holliday

It’s 2008 and the sweet smell of plastic fills the air, as you unwrap your first-ever touchscreen phone. You boot it up, and are greeted with a melodic chime, before being lulled into stock images of sunflower-filled fields and oversaturated blue skies. In the next room, your parents are taking their first intrepid steps towards becoming technologically literate by trading the gym for virtual tennis on Wii Sports. You probably didn’t realise it then, but you were swept up in the middle of a substantial digital shift – a subtle transition from the futuristic pessimism of the early 00s to a glossier, more optimistic utopia that felt just within reach. 

For the past few years, nostalgia for Y2K has dominated our feeds, spilling into everything from fashion and make-up trends, to revivals of turn-of-the-century web aesthetics. But as we enter 2023, it’s looking like the millennium bug might finally be over – ousted by a growing nostalgia for a slightly later era, one that provided today’s young people with their formative digital experiences. One of the most prominent aesthetics at the time, nicknamed Frutiger Aero, roughly spans the period from around 2004 to 2013. Slideshows of images of the aesthetic set to soothing electronic music are currently making waves on TikTok, where the hashtag #frutigeraero has over 28M views. On Reddit, a subreddit of the same name has grown by over 400 per cent in the past month, and on YouTube, analysis videos breaking down Frutiger Aero are springing up left right and centre. 

WHAT IS FRUTIGER AERO?

But what exactly is Frutiger Aero? Sofi Lee is a member of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (CARI), an online community dedicated to logging visual aesthetics in consumer culture from the 1970s to now. She was the first person to identify Frutiger Aero, naming it after two major hallmarks of the aesthetic: the Frutiger family of fonts and Windows Aero, the design language of Windows Vista. Although Sofi didn’t acknowledge their connection at the time, she remembers being drawn to the individual elements of Frutiger Aero growing up. “I was in my teens when Vista came out, and I was so excited because I thought it was the coolest-looking thing in existence,” she tells Dazed. “It was glossy and glowing and just seemed like it represented a huge step forward in terms of what interfaces could look like.” 

Lee explains that other prominent motifs of Frutiger Aero include bokeh, auroras, globes, and glassy, transparent materials – that is, virtual things resembling their real-life counterparts. This adds up to a naturalistic aesthetic that provides a feeling of the indoors and outdoors merging together – an apt representation of an era where the arrival of smartphones was transforming the internet from something locked away in a computer room, to a living and breathing entity all around us.

“I think part of the reason why companies adopted this style was to convey a sense of approachability and friendliness, since this was an era when technologies were becoming much more widely accessible to people that had previously not felt comfortable [with them]” says Evan Collins, also from CARI and known for pioneering research into other popular aesthetics, such as Y2K and McBling. One of these new technologies was touchscreen: iPads and iPhones first launched during this era, and Evan thinks their rise might coincide with Frutiger Aero’s growth in popularity. “There may be something to how the use of glossy, translucent, jelly-like, glowing interfaces mimicking real-world physical properties helped to acclimate people to touch-based interfaces,” he suggests.

While UI design is where Frutiger Aero originated, droplets of it can be seen all over the late 00s and early 10s, with its bubbly branding travelling as far afield as air conditioner vents, laundry detergents, and even frozen yoghurt shop chairs. Frutiger Aero can be seen in the shimmery facial features of the Sims 3 characters, the lobes of an Xbox 360 controller, the slash of a Fruit Ninja watermelon on a faux-wooden chopping board. Once you learn how to separate it from its Y2K predecessor, you can see it everywhere. Think: PlayStation Home, Super Mario Galaxy, Purble Place, tropical fish, open-plan offices with a shitload of plants, these four colours. All of them are Frutiger Aero staples.

WHY IS IT TRENDING? 

So is it simply the next trend on the endless conveyor belt of recycled aesthetics? Is it popular because Gen Z are turning 25 and longing for the comforts of childhood? Or does its colourful viberepresent something prescient about our current moment? 

“I think there’s a lot of hopefulness in this aesthetic that Y2K doesn’t have,” says internet culture expert and meme librarian Amanda Brennan. She believes that our nostalgia for Frutiger Aero’s heydey could correlate with us wanting to escape the constantly looming permacrisis of the early 20s. “I think people are searching for aesthetics and feelings that can help them shake off the last couple of years. Something that is still nostalgic and still hitting that comfort bubble, but also a little more out there, a little more exploratory.” Trend expert Hannah Craggs from TrendBible agrees. “In times of unrest and uncertainty, such as the cost of living crisis, there is a natural pull towards the comfort of simpler times and familiar moods often found in nostalgic memories,” she explains. This hopefulness and return to a more playful and quirky style can be seen not just in us tiring of Y2K nostalgia, but also voicing a general sense of boredom with the flat, minimalist style that dominates much of tech and online interfaces today.

As an aesthetic defined by lush, high-definition photos of plants and animals, our nostalgia for Frutiger Aero might also mirror the way we view our planet today. “I think there is a lot of eco-awareness happening now, and that might be why people are drawn to this, because it is very nature-focused,” Amanda explains. “I think we've seen a shift in how people perceive climate change and the actions we can take for it. Thinking back to those years, [Frutiger Aero] had this hope of ‘Okay, we’re going to make this world beautiful, both physically and online’, and I think that is a really big movement in culture right now too.” Frutiger Aero’s associations with the planet were not always positive, though, as both Sofi and Evan tell Dazed that it was often tied to greenwashing. Perhaps there is another parallel here too – silicon valley bros claiming to care about the environment, all the while encouraging us to swap the outdoors for shoddily designed, blocky, virtual worlds? Seems oddly familiar.

Digital nostalgia for the mid-aughts is everywhere, whether that’s in photodumps, blogging, or taking digital cameras into clubs. Blend this with the analysis of microaesthetics becoming its own genre, and it makes sense why Frutiger Aero is soaring in popularity. But is it anything beyond a microtrend and nostalgic reimagining? Could we ever see elements of Frutiger Aero making their way into makeup and fashion like Y2K did? Hannah thinks in some ways, they already are. “The worlds of beauty, media and graphic design are already seeing direct impact through the use of literal Frutiger font in graphic design, through to high gloss makeup looks, a key shift away from Y2K’s diamante bling and sparkle.” Internet and tech-wise, though, we don’t expect to see websites returning to a more skeuomorphic design, as Sofi points out that Frutiger Aero isn’t particularly friendly or cohesive across multiple devices in the same way flat design is. 

‘I think there’s a lot of hopefulness in this aesthetic that Y2K doesn’t have… people are searching for aesthetics and feelings that can help them shake off the last couple of years’ – Amanda Brennan

“Lately, I’ve had the keen sense that the internet is regressing,” writes Terry Nguyen in a recent piece for Dirt. “Nostalgia for the digital past is potent, namely because our futures, both physical and digital, seem unbearably bleak.” In a way, maybe it is Frutiger Aero’s retrofuturism that makes it so appealing. Scrolling through slideshows of old Samsungs and iPod Nanos feels eerily akin to viewing mid-20th-century reimaginings of people living in domes on the moon. Perhaps we are longing for a future that felt tangible at the time, but one that never came. In some ways, Frutiger Aero feels like the last beacon of a lost age – the final days before omniscient tech truly dominated our lives. It makes sense that we yearn for this time, but it’s also for this reason that, although Frutiger Aero feels comforting and soothing for some, it also stirs up feelings of anxiety in others –now its true intentions to get everyone online is more transparent, and we have seen through the curved, perspex looking glass. 

“I think any aesthetic that becomes prevalent in this capitalist society we live in is going to be shaped by that society,” Sofi says. “I think whether people feel Frutiger Aero is actually sincere or tongue in cheek maybe is a reflection on their feelings towards that time.”

Whether it was a soulless trap to entice us into big tech, or an authentic shift towards accessibility, and whether it has any lasting influence or not – the resurgence of this glowing aesthetic and its motifs inevitably runs parallel to our emergence from the early 20s into something fresh and glossy and new. It looks like we’re finally all ready to breathe, take in the world around us and touch grass – albeit virtually.