The Art of Eating In

by Cathy Erway

  “Oh. Okay,” she said glumly.

  “What movie are you seeing?” I changed the subject.

  “Well, just think about it. I’m meeting him at twelve thirty. Just come along,” she said.

  “But I already brought my lunch—,” I began to say, right before my mom got another call and quickly got off the line.

  Shaking my head, I turned back to my product copy.

  It was August. The next month, I would hit the two-year anniversary of my blog and of not eating out. I had no idea how to celebrate this milestone. Many of my friends had been asking me lately if I would keep on not eating out, like I had proudly said a year before. I never liked the thought of scrapping my strict diet on an exact date, though. I thought it might end more gradually somehow, or else spontaneously, with an earth-shattering circumstance, or an epiphany. I guess I just didn’t want to know in advance or think about how I would end it.

  But two years was a long time. Long enough that I had adapted to the daily demands of not eating out without thinking of them as extra work, or unusual in any way. Hey, people didn’t eat out many centuries ago, and even though my days were busy, for a New Yorker at least, when push came to shove, I’d become pretty agile at feeding myself without the help of restaurant workers. Today, for instance, I’d brought an oatmeal bar that I’d made two days earlier, with some dried cherries that I’d bought for a salad a few weeks back. Along with the zucchini pasta for lunch, I’d provided myself with a roasted beet, wrapped in foil, for afternoon snack cravings I knew I would have. Then, as an extra guard, I’d brought a couple of unpeeled carrots, fresh from the Greenmarket. The way I was living now, making dinners for myself at home on most nights, eating the leftovers for lunch, and cobbling together snacks from this and that in my fridge, was so routine that I knew I could keep at it indefinitely. It truly could go on forever.

  My mom of course knew better than to suggest lunch in a restaurant in the city, something that I would so routinely object to. Maybe you can take a break, she had said. As I continued to work throughout the morning, my mind was spinning with a dizzying storm of rationales for either going to meet my mom and uncle for lunch or not. I could ... meet up with them at the restaurant, sit and talk, but not eat? I had done this before with friends, and it was not fun. I could bring my lunch out to a park and suggest they get takeout and sit at an outdoor table with me instead? Too much trouble for my relatives, I concluded. Plus, they would hate being outside on a hot day like this. Or I could, as usual, just not meet them at all.

  I sighed loudly. I remembered the first day I began to work at my current job, my two bosses had taken me out to lunch. It was something they did for all new employees, an icebreaker, a kind gesture, and I appreciated the offer. I couldn’t say no. The lunch was hardly comfortable, though. We’d gone to an Italian restaurant around the block, a popular business lunch spot, it seemed. I had a salad with a huge mound of greasy, undercooked, and underseasoned salmon on it, and I’d pecked hopelessly at the leaves of baby spinach underneath it while trying to make simple conversation. That had been my last midtown Manhattan restaurant experience, and it didn’t make me hungry for more. Why, then, was I so naggingly tempted to meet up with Mom and Jo-Jo for lunch today? It struck me then as somewhat unfair; I had eaten out with my bosses but wouldn’t make an exception for my mother and uncle?

  A couple of hours later, I stood by the rotating door of Macy’s. It was the middle of the week, late summer, not exactly any particular season for shopping, but the entrance to the store was flooded with traffic as usual. The dollar had been in decline all year long, and in recent months I’d heard that hordes of Western European tourists were coming to New York, traveling in flocks through Times Square, or shopping in midtown to take advantage of the weak dollar. As I stood by Macy’s, it sounded like everyone around me was speaking with a British accent.

  “Hi, Cath!” my mother called from a few paces away on the street corner. Beside her, Jo-Jo was waving his arms like slow windshield wipers. I squeezed past a small crowd to meet them.

  “Okay, let’s eat,” my mother said, turning to Jo-Jo. “Which place should we go to?”

  “Any. It doesn’t matter,” he said. We walked two blocks down to Thirty-second Street, turning at the start of K-town. We chitchatted along the way, my mom asking her usual questions about pieces of my wardrobe that she had never seen before (“When did you get that?”), as if I was supposed to tell her every time I bought some clothing. The topic of why I had spontaneously decided to join them for lunch was oddly, or perhaps purposely, not raised.

  We stopped at the door of one of the first restaurants we passed. My mom took a look at the menu on the window.

  “This is the good one, I think,” she said.

  “Okay,” Jo-Jo agreed.

  We filed into the narrow lobby. It was the middle of lunch service, and the tables were filled with customers. Luckily, we were quickly seated at a table just as a party was leaving. A waiter brought a metal teapot to our table as soon as we sat down, and another waiter came by moments later with a half dozen trays of cold appetizers.

  “Okay ... great,” my mother said, taking in the sights.

  The kimchee was closest to me. Now, this was something I hadn’t eaten in quite some time. Nor had I thought to try my hand at making it myself. I’d learned how to make several types of pickles, tinkering around with cauliflower and Brussels sprouts at different times, and unusual spice combinations for the brines. But the fermented and chili-soaked cabbage that was so essential to Korean cuisine had evaded my DIY home-cooking attempts and my taste buds for the past two years. I was ready to dig in. Only, I had no chopsticks. In all their speediness to serve us the appetizers, our waiters had forgotten to place utensils at our table.

  My mother signaled to a waitress, who nodded and came to our table. She said something indecipherable in Korean.

  “Uh ... don’t speak Korean,” my mother said.

  “Oh, sorry,” the waitress responded in English. We asked her for chopsticks and she nodded and left.

  “I guess we look Korean,” Jo-Jo s aid, grinning. My mom shrugged. In the past, I’d seen my mom confused for Japanese at restaurants with Japanese-speaking staff. More commonly, at Chinese restaurants she would have to revert to English when a waiter began speaking Cantonese, and not her native Mandarin. This never happened to me, since my Mandarin is elementary at best and my appearance more Caucasian than anything else. But just from years of being around my mother and uncle, I knew about the advantages of the native-language exchange with restaurant workers. For instance, at Chinese restaurants my parents frequently had dishes that were not on the menu, or they might receive more authentic menus printed only in Chinese. Usually, there was some dialogue with the waiter about what was best to order, or to clarify what was available. Sometimes dishes were specially made at my parents’ request. This was the way my parents always ordered at Chinese restaurants—with a back-and-forth exchange and at least one off-the-menu course. But alas, it was not to be for this Korean lunch.

  The waitress returned shortly afterward with the chopsticks. I appreciated the fact that they were reusable plastic chopsticks, unlike the wrapped, wooden disposable types that were served at so many restaurants. Really, what was the point in using these at a sit-down restaurant, where everything else on the table was washed and reused? The only reason I could think of was laziness.

  “What is this?” my mom asked nonchalantly, poking her chopsticks at some pickled turnips. They crunched loudly as she bit into one, and nodded to indicate that whatever it was, it was good. Jo-Jo went for some seaweed first. I got my satisfying taste of kimchee—a little crunchy, a little wilted, and completely saturated in a spicy, acrid brine. We nibbled through the rest of the offerings. Our favorite was the salty preserved whitefish, with tiny bones that one needed to be wary of. Jo-Jo left my mom and me to decide what to order for lunch. First, a seafood pancake was in order. Korean pancakes are an appetizer
that no one can resist ordering again and again. Crispy, savory, and often the size of a dinner plate, the pancakes are grilled in a pan with big strips of vegetables and meat in the batter. My mom chose a spicy tofu and seafood casserole next, and clear mung bean noodles stir-fried with beef and vegetables.

  “We have too much food. As usual,” Jo-Jo said.

  “It’s okay,” my mom said. I remained silent, salivating at the thought of eating everything we had just ordered. I’d skipped breakfast that day, so my stomach was gurgling. I refilled my cup of tea for the third time since sitting down a few minutes before, even though it was sweltering hot outside. The restaurant’s air-conditioning didn’t seem to be keeping up, and the place was filled to the brim with customers.

  “So warm,” Jo-Jo said, fanning himself with a folded napkin.

  Our pancakes came to the table first. They were as hot as the smoking griddle they must have just been flipped from. Chopped tentacles of tender octopus and scallions studded each one in about equal parts to the batter. We dipped our slices into a thin soy-and-vinegar-based sauce.

  “So this movie, Jo-Jo says is supposed to be very good,” my mom said in between bites.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “This English movie, from a novel by this English woman writer,” she said.

  “Oh, Jane Austen?”

  “No, not that one. Evelyn something,” she said.

  “Wor,” my uncle filled in.

  “Oh, Evelyn Waugh. That’s a man, actually,” I said.

  “No. Ev-el-yn,” my mother said, sounding out the syllables.

  “Yeah, it used to be a man’s name, too,” I said.

  “Evelyn is a man?” my mother asked, incredulous.

  “Can be.” I shrugged.

  “That’s weird,” she proclaimed. My uncle heaved with laughter behind his napkin.

  The rest of our food came shortly after the pancakes. We were each given a bowl of short-grain rice, cooked with small dark-purple pebbles of black beans throughout. I helped myself to the soupy tofu casserole first. There was always something different to be found in a ladle of its red, chili-based broth. A clam or whole shrimp came up with every other scoop. I spooned a knife-scored piece of squid into my mother’s rice bowl since I knew it was her favorite. I picked up a piece of shrimp and a hearty wedge of tofu. The tofu was the best part of the meal—it was silky smooth but held its shape. It also held up its mild, nutty flavor against the soaked-in chili broth.

  “We did pick the right one,” my mom said, pointing to the casserole. “This is so good.” Jo-Jo nodded, scooping up some more tofu. So far, everything I’d eaten was completely unlike anything I’d had in the last two years. Tofu stew—now, that was an idea I could find time to play around with, I thought. But it would never taste as good as this plentiful seafood-studded version. That is, unless I went through the laborious task of collecting all these various small amounts of seafood to add to it myself. No, this dish, and especially its broth, was made with an abundance of ingredients, like fish heads and other scraps found in the restaurant kitchen. I didn’t have any seafood hanging around that I’d need to do that with very often, like a restaurant’s kitchen might.

  The glass noodle stir-fry was less impressive than the other dishes, but I still ate more than my share of it. It came to our table on a cast-iron plate, its gingery brown sauce bubbling at the edges. I was still pecking away, far past being full. With all the food still available in front of me, it was impossible to resist.

  “Aren’t you afraid somebody’s going to see you eating here?” my uncle joked. He stifled a snort of laughter.

  Actually, I had been a little afraid of this possibility. Had we been eating at another, more popular restaurant, I might have been even more fearful. What if a fellow food blogger, wielding a camera, happened to come to this restaurant and see me? I had reached the stage where strangers began to recognize me and come up to me to ask if I was that not-eating-out girl. What if I ended up on Gawker the next day, with the headline NOT EATING OUT: A TOTAL HOAX!

  But I pushed the ridiculous thoughts aside. I definitely wasn’t that newsworthy. And I was pretty convinced we’d be concealed from the mainstream media juggernaut tucked inside the nothing-special, nothing-new Koreatown restaurant. What was bothering me, though, was a constant feeling of guilt. It seemed to multiply with every bite I took, adding another layer of confusion to the dilemma about my experiment that was brewing inside.

  Why was it okay to host elaborate supper-club dinners in someone’s home where patrons paid a price comparable to the cost of a restaurant meal? Why was it okay that we nonprofessional chefs made the food for that Hope Lounge barbecue, if it was going to be served at a commercial bar where customers paid $5 a plate? Or what about the hot-dog cook-off benefit where attendees had to pay a donation for admission? What if a professional chef were cooking for an event that also had an amateur-cooking element, like the Highbrow Barbecue where I served as a judge? Would his or her food count as not eating out then?

  I knew when I began the blog that not eating out was never going to be a cut-and-dried equation. From the start, there had been a number of moments for pause: If a fresh-baked loaf of bread from a bakery is considered not eating out, then are baked goods from coffee-and-bagel carts, too? What about a handful of bar snacks from your friend’s plate that he or she didn’t want to finish? There was also the dilemma of the particular bar in Brooklyn that served a free individual-sized pizza with every pint of beer one purchased.

  Then, how could I be so staunchly supportive of specialty food-related businesses, like small artisanal food makers, or the family-owned stores that sponsored my risotto cook-off, but not a friendly, independent restaurant that shared many of the same community-driven values? What if a friend who happened to be a professional chef cooked a meal for me? What if a friend happened to open a restaurant in New York? By now, I had a small handful of good friends who worked in the restaurant industry in some capacity. Some were people who shared a lot of the same ideals I did about food, particularly seasonal, local food, and wanted to push the movement further into restaurant kitchens. Would I not support them? To put my strict not-eating-out diet into perspective, it was beginning to seem a petty tirade compared to these more relevant, pressing, food-related issues.

  All these thoughts clouded my mind as I ate my Korean restaurant lunch, reluctantly enjoying every bite. I slurped up the last drop of seafood soup from the bowl.

  “Are you dating anyone now?” my mom asked.

  “No,” I said. It was half true. Over the summer, I’d had a spotty and mostly short-lived string of relationships. But by the end of August, things had pretty much fizzled out by all accounts. I was in the habit of biking down to Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach by myself on free afternoons and was loving the peace and solitude. Jo-Jo commented on how dark my skin had gotten from the sun.

  Earlier that month, I had also switched to freelancing for the same company where I worked, instead of being a full-time employee. This meant that I had a flexible schedule—I worked usually three days a week instead of five. Taking long bike rides and walks in the park, reading and sunning in the afternoons, and swimming or just lying in the sand had become my favorite things to do, besides spending a whole day on a particular cooking project, or participating in cooking events. Between these solo activities and running errands around Brooklyn, like going to the library, grocery store, or Laundromat when the crowds were mostly in their offices, the end of the summer had become a very tranquil time for me. It’s said that sometimes you need to get out of a crowded situation to hear yourself. I heard myself thinking a lot around this time.

  “Boys don’t know what to do with you,” my mom said. “I told you so.”

  I shrugged. But I detected a hint of pride in her voice, instead of sympathy.

  We lingered for a while after the plates had been cleared from our table. The cluster of the business lunch-hour crowd had wound down a bit, and tables
were beginning to empty. I had to get back to my office, though, so I said good-bye to my mom and uncle and headed off. My mom, as usual, took care of the check.

  I slipped quietly back to my cubicle after the long lunch break. I nudged my mouse across the pad to light up the screen. A large, retouched photo of another flatware collection appeared, reminding me of the words I had been dredging up to describe it an hour before.

  Being with Jo-Jo that afternoon reminded me of something he’d said a few months before. It was on Easter, and we’d both gone to my parents’ house in New Jersey for a home-cooked feast of rack of lamb. Jo-Jo and I rode the train back to the city together afterward. It was Sunday, and we both had to get up for work the next day. We’d talked about my blog and eating experiment for a while, sitting across from each other on the vinyl seats. It was always nice to have some one-on-one time with my uncle.

  My uncle and I actually have a long history of being on trains together, and having alone time. When I was little, my uncle loved to take me to museums and galleries in New York. We’d roam around the Metropolitan Museum of Art or Soho, and along the way he’d tell me stories about my parents from before I was born, or from his and my mother’s childhoods in Taiwan. Once I got a little bit older, he’d take me shopping in the East Village. There we’d rummage through secondhand boutiques, my uncle picking choice finds for me to try on, and taking hats off the racks and mannequins to place on my head. Jo-Jo was a men’s clothing designer. So when I developed a fondness for vintage clothing and ramshackle costume jewelry as a teenager, he was the only one in my family who actually shared some interest in it with me.

  Every now and then, my uncle would offer some sort of prophesying wisdom that would really stick with me and make me think. One Thanksgiving or Christmas, when I was in college studying creative writing, we were sitting on the couch talking when he told me that some people are only truly creative for a certain period of their lives. Some people just lose their creativity after this spell. Inspiration is fleeting, or even fickle, is what I took from that conversation. Since then, I’ve always tried to seize the moment whenever creativity struck. It’s what happened when I became so obsessive about cooking, living in that apartment with Erin. So I started a food blog. I also took away the sense that only really meaningful work springs from honest, unstoppable creativity. In other words, only write something, only do something, only create something, if you’re really passionate about it. Don’t force something out or beat a dead horse.