The Art of Eating In

by Cathy Erway

  But the real highlight of the meal was the conversation. Grace was an effusive talker, and we discovered we’d both recently written about similar topics on our blogs. We talked with Lynn about The Brooklyn Cookbook for a while, as Mark tried to gather ideas for his dinner menu. Lynn was a whip, sharing stories about her short-lived theater career long ago, and offering strong opinions on everything from Brussels sprouts to bagels. She reminded me of Ruth Gordon’s character in Harold and Maude, the feisty old woman who falls in love with a teenager and looks death in the eye with a twinkle. Somehow, the topic of James Beard came up.

  “I knew Jim from way back,” Lynn explained, wrinkling her nose as if the late food connoisseur were a childhood pest. “He was a real fruit, you know” She gossiped about the penthouse he’d owned on Park Avenue, adding that Beard used to shower before a clear window facing the public. She finished her wine and began to ask the waiter for another. Grace suggested ordering a bottle for the table, since the four of them were up for another glass.

  While the waiter was pouring, I asked Lynn if she was originally from Brooklyn.

  “No, we’re from Pittsburgh,” she said. “My parents were in the iron and steel business. She ironed, and he stole.”

  “Can I steal her?” I whispered to Mark as our table laughed.

  “So you’re part of a different supper club now?” Lynn asked me.

  I nodded and told her about A Razor, A Shiny Knife.

  “So you cook a lot, too, then?” she went on.

  “Yes, and my blog is about just cooking, instead of eating at restaurants. This is actually the first time I’ve had brunch in a restaurant in two years.”

  The other faces around the table froze.

  Mark clanged his fork down. “That’s right! I forgot about your restaurant week.”

  “Your what?”

  I briefly explained my current weeklong experiment and the concept of my blog to the rest of the table. Once the confusion cleared away, Grace remarked, “Wow, I can’t believe you really didn’t eat out for two years! I didn’t realize that.”

  “Well, with some exceptions,” I said.

  Lynn smiled. “That’s incredible.”

  “How’s that going so far, by the way?” Mark asked.

  “You’re looking at it,” I said, tearing into a piece of buttered toast.

  We spent a long time talking after our plates were taken away. Everyone else was finishing up the bottle of wine, and I was on my third or fourth cup of coffee. Our waiter approached our table and asked us if everything was okay.

  “I feel bad; there are so many people waiting for our table,” Grace said once he walked away. “But we come here all the time.”

  We received our check a few minutes later, and our party decided it was time to get going. We passed the check around the table. My brunch with coffee cost $14, and I added another $4 for the tip. We decided we’d better leave a good tip, for lingering so long.

  It was a beautiful day. The morning fog had cleared away, and a vibrant farmers’ market across the street from the restaurant was teeming with shoppers.

  “How’d a cookie get so thin?” Lynn said, eyeing me up and down. “Because you’re a cookie,” she said with an affirmative nod. “That’s what you are.”

  I didn’t really know what this old-fashioned nickname meant, but I smiled and took it as a compliment. We bid Lynn farewell as she headed across the street to her home with a wave. Mark and I chatted with Grace and her boyfriend for a while in front of the restaurant. The brunch meeting had gone well: Mark had succeeded in convincing Lynn to come to his dinner, and he invited Grace as well. We’d been at the restaurant for almost two hours, and it was getting close to the time when I’d have to take off for my next eating-out appointment.

  “What are your plans for the rest of the day?” Mark asked as we walked toward my locked-up bike.

  “I have to meet my brother in the city pretty soon. Then we’re going to Flushing, Queens, to eat in Chinatown,” I said.

  A few months ago, my mom had read an article in The New York Times about the incredible, authentic Chinese food throughout Flushing, Queens. She had been desperate to try it all summer long but never got around to it. It was a perfect destination for my opposite week, though, so she and my dad were driving into the city that day, to meet up with me, Jo-Jo, and my brother, Chris, who happened to be in town with his band that weekend. But before dinner, Jo-Jo was taking Chris and me around Flushing for a mini-tour in the afternoon.

  “That’s brilliant,” Mark said. “Have a good time.”

  I got home to park my bike and grab some things to read on the subway. Once there, I suddenly remembered one part of opposite week that I’d previously forgotten. I had to get a scale.

  Now, it may sound like a far-fetched idea that my weight would change over the course of just one week. I certainly wasn’t intending on gorging myself on excess food, and I experienced very little fluctuation in my weight in general. But I couldn’t help but be a little bit curious about this possibility. What if it did change drastically due to a restaurant-only diet? I didn’t own a scale and hadn’t remembered to buy one in time to weigh myself before the day began. I hurried to a pharmacy a few blocks down and roamed the aisles in search of one. While I was there, my mom called—what time should she and my dad plan to meet us in Flushing? she asked. While I was on the phone with her, I got an idea.

  “Mom, can you bring your bathroom scale with you?”

  “Why?” she retorted.

  “Because I’m trying to weigh myself before and after the week,” I said, “and I can’t find one at Walgreens.”

  My mom pulled her Honda up to a corner in downtown Flushing, where Jo-Jo, Chris, and I were standing. My brother and I were each holding plastic cups of bubble tea, with wide, neon green straws sticking out of them to allow the marble-sized, chewy tapioca pearls at the bottom of the tea to come through. Before my parents arrived, Jo-Jo had taken us to a couple of bakeries in the neighborhood and bought a package of high-end moon cakes. At another one, he got a bag of beautiful, individually wrapped pineapple cakes, or feng li su, a specialty of Taiwan. These had been my absolute favorite treat in Taiwan while I was there, and unlike bubble tea (which could be found throughout New York City), I had never seen the real thing outside the island before. We also strolled through a shopping mall and eyed the Chinese food court’s hand-pulled-noodle shop. Again, I hadn’t seen a chef pull fresh dough into noodles with his hands since the street-food stands of Taipei—although I knew that handmade Chinese noodles existed elsewhere in New York City. For a predinner snack, we’d stopped at a small window to a restaurant on a busy block with a line of customers crowded around it, a good indication that this restaurant had the goods. At the window, I bought a freshly steamed pork and leek bun for $1 and shared it with the others. The moment I took the first bite into its soft, foamy crust, the juices from the filling dribbled down my wrist.

  “Okay, we decided on two options,” Jo-Jo said to my parents once they emerged from the car. “There’s a very good Taiwanese place, up the street. Then there’s that Szechuan place you read about. In the article.”

  “Ooh. Hm,” my mom said. I took the bathroom scale she was holding out of her hands as my parents thought about this for a minute. I placed it on the sidewalk and stepped on it.

  “What are you doing?” my brother asked.

  “Never mind,” I said, taking mental note of my weight. I picked the scale back up and stuffed it into my tote. Chris shrugged.

  “The Szechuan place looks nice. It might be a little more formal than the other,” Jo-Jo offered.

  “Is it crowded?” my mom asked. We walked down to the end of the block and craned our necks through the glass storefront windows. “It does look pretty good,” she said, eyeing the trays of prepared appetizers at a cook’s workstation, which were all dyed a rich red hue, a signature of Szechuan cuisine because of its heavy use of chili oil. It might not have been the only a
uthentic Szechuan restaurant in the city, but according to The New York Times article, it was certainly one of the best. It was called Spicy and Tasty—which was an understatement, considering the bold flavors of Szechuan food.

  “Why don’t we go here?” my dad suggested. We all agreed.

  We filed into the restaurant and settled at a large round table that was really meant for about twelve people. It was the only available table in the restaurant. As platters drifted by us balanced on waiters’ palms, we stopped to gaze at them all. “Wow, what’s that? I want to get that,” my mom would say as each one went by.

  To be sure, this was exotic food to all of us at the table. My mom and Jo-Jo grew up in Taiwan, and their parents hailed from Hunan Province in China. We had never tasted anything like the pungent, spicy dishes of Szechuan until a trip to China a few years back. Soon after that, my parents discovered a gold mine of authentic Szechuan food at a restaurant in New Jersey. Since then they’d been developing an ecstatic, burgeoning love of the spicy, salty, and yes, tasty food.

  When we left the restaurant, I was beyond full, and my spicy taste buds were well satisfied. Later that night, even though I was still fairly full, I found myself alone in my apartment with one of the pineapple cakes that Jo-Jo had bought, and three of his moon cakes. I ate one of each. The moon cake was really exceptional. It was dense and moist, its molded cakelike crust gleaming with egg wash and tasting faintly of dried fruits, or molasses. On the inside, it was filled with a sweet black sesame seed paste. “The best,” Jo-Jo had said to me in the car, pointing to the black sesame one. I fell asleep that night as soon as my head hit the pillow.

  The next day I had the day off from work. I skipped breakfast, not having a glimmer of hunger in my belly until about noon. That morning I strapped on my helmet and pedaled off to the library and a few other spots in Brooklyn, running errands. As I was heading back home, I sped by a sushi restaurant that I recognized. It was a place that my brother had gone to often while he was living in New York, a few years back. I retraced my path, then walked inside and picked up a laminated menu. The small, quaint restaurant was sparsely decorated with a few Japanese motifs, like koi fish. I placed an order for a chirashi sashimi bowl to go, and paid the waitress at the counter. As I was waiting for my order, I watched the sushi chef behind the raw bar take a slip of paper from the waitress and begin to work on my order. He took out a few bundles of plastic wrap and from one of them removed a block-sized portion of sushi rice. He placed this in a flat, even bed on the bottom of a round plastic takeout container, and topped it with a hairlike mass of extra-thin radish ribbons. One by one, he placed uniformly shaped slices of raw fish on top of the rice and radish. His eyes darted about quickly as he checked for ingredients, but his hands moved ever so delicately with the food. I had never seen such focus and concentration. He must have made this same dish a thousand times. Consistency, I remembered, was one of the keys to a successful restaurant.

  I biked home with the takeout lunch hung from a plastic bag around my handlebar. The meal had cost me $9, or $10 with tax. It looked so pretty when I opened the takeout container at home that I felt I had to take a picture of it to do it justice.

  That night, I planned to meet Karol for dinner at Char No. 4, where Scott was working. I also knew Char No. 4’s executive chef, Matt Greco, whose class on charcuterie basics at the Brooklyn Kitchen I’d attended a few months back. I’d had a great time learning from him and had kept in touch. I knew that he was planning to open the new restaurant, and its launch fell just a couple of weeks before my opposite week, so it seemed like a perfect idea to check it out.

  Karol was sitting at the bar when I arrived. Scott and one other bartender were shuffling behind the bar, and another couple was seated a few stools over.

  “This place is really nice,” Karol said, admiring the sleek, cylindrical light fixtures against the neutral-toned room. We ordered cocktails, and Scott made me one of his new signature drinks— Bourbon laced with ginger ale and lime. The menu, as I’d heard about previously from the chef, was a refined take on Southern-style classics. We decided to order two appetizers: bacon- and corn-topped baked oysters, and fried cheese curds with smoked-pepper dip. After discussing some of the options with Scott, we decided to split the pulled pork sandwich and ordered the side of eggplant stew.

  As we waited for our food, Karol and I gossiped. We were in desperate need of a girl-talk session. About a week ago, after Matt’s show, I’d met up with a guy I’d been sort of seeing that summer. Instead of hanging out, we got into an argument and parted ways less than ten minutes later. He’d decided to break things off with me because he couldn’t see a long-term future for us. It was a mutual feeling, but it still stung to hear, and I made my long ride home through the familiar darkened streets afterward crying, for the first time on a bike. We hadn’t spoken since. As for Karol, she had recently been told by her love interest that he was “not ready” to be in a relationship.

  “Well, I’m glad that you’ve had this experience,” Karol concluded after we agreed that our sort-of breakups were for the best.

  “Yeah, me, too. For you, too,” I said.

  Scott, who had been bending over to get something behind the bar, popped up and raised an eyebrow

  “Hey, how’s it going?” I said.

  “Not too bad,” he said. “It’s not too busy here tonight. Can I make you two another drink?” he asked. We nodded.

  Our appetizers came out. Karol and I shared bites of each other’s—my deep-fried cheese curds were luscious and crisp on the outside. Made from the extra-mild, rubbery curds of cheddar before they’re aged and actually become cheese, they reminded me of mozzarella sticks, only much better. Our entree was even more delicious. Served on a soft brioche bun, the shredded pork was tender and had a good kick of vinegar in the sauce. We liked the stewed eggplant, too, which had a mild tomato-based sauce and minimal, savory spices. When we were about halfway through dinner, Matt Greco poked my shoulder from behind.

  “Thanks for coming, guys,” he said. In his arms were two extra plates. He placed them on the table before us. One had a homemade lamb pastrami and pickled onion appetizer, and another, smoked almonds. We chatted for a while about the restaurant and business so far. From all indications, the restaurant was off to a good start. He politely excused himself and got back to the kitchen after a few minutes.

  “Matt works really hard,” Scott said. “He is almost never outside of the kitchen.”

  Karol and I made a good dent in the extra food and had one more round of drinks. Everything about our dinner date—the food, the drinks, and especially the friendly service—was delightful. We split the check between us, which came to a little over $60 total. Matt had thrown in the extra appetizers, and Scott had given us each a drink on the house. We left them a good tip.

  The next day I went to work. I’d felt funny the night before not preparing myself something to bring in for lunch. As I got dressed and ready that morning, I kept having the nagging feeling that I was forgetting something. When lunchtime rolled around, at about twelve thirty (once again I’d skipped breakfast), I was ready to eat.

  Lunching from midtown restaurants and delis was one of the main reasons I had begun my not-eating-out-in-New York quest. But here I was, two years later, strangely ecstatic about all the choices at my disposal. A twisted sense of excitement had been building up to this moment for weeks: my reunion with the typical New York working-class lunch. So, what would it be today?

  I’d noticed a few coworkers coming in with bags from a Japanese sushi and noodle place down the street. I decided that something different like udon noodles sounded like a good way to start. When I got to the noodle place, I found myself in the back of a long line. As I waited, I looked over the options written on a board. There was udon with chicken, beef, vegetables, tofu, or kimchee. I set my mind on kimchee. When it was my turn to order, I paid the cashier for the kimchee udon first. With tax, it cost $6-47. Then I stood in a shorter
line and watched as a cook behind a glass window took a block of squashed udon noodles out of a package and dropped it into a vat of water that had a small draining rack inside it. He lifted another draining rack beside it and dumped the cooked udon noodles that were inside it into a polystyrene foam cylindrical bowl. To the bowl he added a few ladles of broth from a large pot, and next he picked up a small handful of chicken from a small container with his gloved hands. He topped the dish with a handful of chopped scallions, put a lid on the bowl, and wrapped it up in a bag for the customer. A moment later, he lifted the other portion of boiling noodles from the water and dumped it into another polystyrene foam bowl. He added broth and a scoop of kimchee from another container behind the glass. That one was my order.

  Once I got back to my desk, I cleared away my papers and set the bowl down in front of me. A set of disposable wooden chopsticks had been thrown into my bag faster than my eyes could really make out, so I took them out of their wrapper and snapped them apart. I tasted the broth with a plastic spoon first. There was nothing special about it. Next I tried the udon. My first bite actually tasted like fresh plywood. I’d forgotten the way these chopsticks spread their delightful flavor into each bite. I wondered whether I could also taste polystyrene foam in the soup, and it was right then that I remembered that fact about hot foods causing styrene to leach from polystyrene foam the most. I started to freak out, and the feeling grew with every bite. After about twenty more seconds, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I went to the kitchen and opened the cabinet doors, trying to find a stray ceramic bowl. No luck. There was, however a small stack of plastic disposable cereal bowls. I grabbed one and dumped the contents of my polystyrene foam bucket into it. I was able to get about three-quarters of the contents in before the rim overflowed with soup. It wasn’t big enough. I thought about grabbing another white plastic bowl, then remembered my coffee cup sitting on my desk. I dumped out my coffee, rinsed the cup out, then filled it with the rest of the udon and soup. This saved me from wasting three disposable vessels for the udon alone, instead of two. What a feat.