It's been a rough couple of weeks for inner-Durham's eat-meet-greet-and-sip set. Hardly had the news settled in that JoAnne Worthington of Joe and Jo's was trading Five Points for the Caribbean coast when William Simpson made it official that his Fowler's Food & Wine shop is out of business.

A decent respect for the opinions of Durhamkind requires a moment of nostalgia.

Latecomers will remember Fowler's for its wines, its sushi and the Duke Street Dawgs playing blues on the porch on a Sunday afternoon. Older-timers will remember how it helped make Brightleaf Square a hit. Those with real Bull City roots remember it out on Roxboro Street (its place now occupied by a pawn shop), the place to go for a t-bone steak when you were grilling to impress.

Sigh.

And Joe & Jo's ... It was having its best year ever when Worthington got the call to family duty down south, having given downtown a shot in the arm of art, politics, vivacity in, as she put it last week, "a comfortable place where everybody felt at home" -- in spite of the panhandlers, junkies and car break-ins that came with its particular territory.

Sigh, sigh, sigh.

But eating and drinking and gathering places come and go with reliable rapidity. Eighty percent of them are gone within five years -- or so said Gerry Bleau, who ran West Main Street's Ivy Room from 1977 until departing for the boat business in 1985.

Yes, the Ivy Room. Before Durham ever heard of prosciutto, there was Johnston County ham. Before there was Culture Crawl, there was the Poet's Corner. There were the waitresses Dottie ("Wha'choo go'n' have?") and Freda ("You want some cheesecake, apple pie ... ") and Percy Poole ("We appreciate your business.") behind the register.

Downstairs, the dining room was the place Durham came to be seen and eat Chicken in the Rough after church on Sunday; and, beside it, the shop with caviar tins and Russian cigarettes and Chianti in wicker baskets. Upstairs was the variously titled tap room ("Cosmo," "Joe's," "Top of the Vine") where, circa 1970, a table might be shared by an EPA executive, an MD, an ex-Marine poet, a trucker, a housepainter, a college kid or two and a survivor of the Bataan Death March.

And then there were Mayola's Chili House, the UG, even the Haufbrau. Sigh? Yeah, but: Establishments come and go, but the Durham-grit mix of tastes and characters -- experience says that'll be hanging out on West Main Street for a good long time to come.