The Art of Eating In

by Cathy Erway

  I had numerous options for dinner that evening. Matt had gone on tour with his band that week but left me with a list of highly recommended restaurants. My friend Nick was going on a trip in a few days and suggested we check out one of his favorite Indian places. Chrysanthe had been raving about the food at a restaurant that just opened in Williamsburg. Scott, too, had offered several high-end restaurant suggestions. But that night, Tuesday, I decided to dine alone. On whatever was closest to my vicinity. I got home and looked at the empty sink and kitchen counter. I usually relaxed and unwound when I got home from work by doing the previous night’s dishes. Instead I pulled open a drawer underneath my TV and sifted through the many takeout menus that had been slipped under my apartment door over the months. Most of them were Chinese takeout places, a few Japanese. I put my jacket on, deciding to see what was in the neighborhood. There were a number of hole-in-the-wall Caribbean restaurants in my immediate neighborhood, since it was populated largely with people from the West Indies. There was one right around the corner from my building. I decided to check it out.

  I walked into the brightly lit, small restaurant. There were about six square tables. All were empty except for one, where a sole customer sat. I took a look at the trays of food behind a glass window. The lady behind it greeted me and offered me a menu.

  “Can I try the jerk chicken, please?” I asked a few moments later.

  “Sorry, tonight is curry chicken and barbecue,” she said. She pointed to the word Tuesday on the menu. “Each night we have these,” she explained, drawing my attention to the list of days of the week and the corresponding entrees that were served on each one.

  “Oh, I see,” I said. So tonight’s offerings were barbecue chicken or curry chicken.

  “But we have all the same sides, too,” she went on. Trays full of stewed greens, macaroni and cheese, and other sides were steaming behind the counter. I took a look at them and another look at the menu.

  “I’ll have the curry chicken,” I said decisively. The lady smiled and began to fill a round aluminum takeout tray. “Do you want it with plain rice, or rice with pigeon peas?” she asked. “It’s a Jamaican specialty,” she said, referring to the rice with pigeon peas.

  “I’ll have the pigeon peas, please.” She ladled the curry chicken stew on top of the rice and filled up the last third of the tray with a scoop of soft-cooked cabbage. I paid for the meal, which cost just $7. She gave me a curious smile when I asked for no bag, and placed a few napkins on top of the takeout tray. I smiled and thanked her. The tray was heavy and warm, and I realized that the napkins were handy for holding it without burning my hands. I turned the corner and walked back to my building.

  I turned on the television to a news show but found myself watching only the food as I ate. The tray was filled to the brim. The chicken was so tender that it fell off the bone at the slightest touch. Its warm, spicy mix of ginger, cumin, and other Jamaican spices was soothing and had steeped into the meat well; my nose began to run, and my glasses fogged up, but I couldn’t stop scooping up forkfuls of the stuff. The pigeon peas bled color into the soft, short-grain rice, and the mild, lightly seasoned cabbage was a welcome retreat from the other strong flavors. It was comforting and delicious. It also seemed more like a homemade meal than anything I had eaten so far that week. It reminded me of my mother’s soy sauce chicken stew; the chicken was braised with spices until falling off the bone and also served over rice. I finished the entire dish.

  I wasn’t sure what my dinner plans the next night would be. There was a music show I wanted to check out in Brooklyn. It wouldn’t start until eleven, and this seemed like a good reason to go out for dinner beforehand. I had been exchanging a few e-mails with a new acquaintance I’d met a few weeks before at a party. Keith was a restaurant critic for a local news website, and we’d joked about him being on the opposite team. In his last note, he had offered to be my guide to the local Brooklyn restaurant scene during my opposite week, if I should want one. The show I wanted to see was at a venue close to a new Williamsburg restaurant that Chrysanthe tipped me off to. Called Walter Foods, it had all the makings of a hot restaurant: a chef who’d left his recent post at a renowned Manhattan restaurant, a hip location, and positive hype. I sent off an e-mail to Keith suggesting we check it out that night. A couple of hours later, I received a positive response: It was on. Here I was, going on a dinner date with a restaurant critic, to a highly anticipated restaurant’s first week. The epitome of opposite week.

  I couldn’t decide what to eat for lunch that day. I walked around in a circle through a giant deli below my office building. The number of choices was overwhelming—there were soups, sandwiches, wraps, paninis, and grilled hamburgers. There was an udon and soba noodle station (which I had no appetite for due to yesterday’s cafeterialike affair), sushi, pizza, and pastas and salads with any number of choose-your-own ingredients. There was a hot bar and a cold bar, each with a dizzying assortment of entrees and salads. There were specials of the day. After I made a full round, I found myself back at the front door and walked out. I walked into Pax Wholesome Foods next. This was a nationwide chain, so it had a uniform color scheme and printed labels for every offering behind its glass counters. I eyed the sandwiches over and over and finally settled on a balsamic grilled chicken “Zesto.” It was just a sandwich, actually, on focaccia. But like any good chain’s sandwiches, it had been given a distinctive name. I wasn’t too pleased with this lunch. At almost $9 with tax, the sandwich was dry, the chicken especially, and though the balsamic flavor was fine, the way the sandwich had been sliced in half to reveal its padding of greens and roasted red pepper was a little misleading—all the fresh stuff seemed to be clumped in the center. Still, I finished the last bite and was full for the rest of the day.

  We decided to meet at the restaurant at nine. It was mid-September, and the air was beginning to get chilly. I put on a heavy knit sweater and boots and rode over to the restaurant, arriving a few minutes late. The restaurant was handsome. It had a well-worn air despite being freshly renovated. A mahogany divider with a brass railing ran along an elevated section, separating it from the bar area. The waiters were dressed in bow ties and black and white. Keith was at the bar when I arrived. We were seated immediately, and I ordered a glass of red.

  “Well, this must be an interesting week for you,” Keith said.

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “It’s been fun.” I told him a little about my recent eating-out adventures, in Queens and then at Char No. 4. I asked Keith whether he would be writing up Walter Foods for the website, and he nodded.

  “How does that work, anyhow? Don’t you need to put on a disguise sometimes? Go incognito, so they don’t treat you overly well?” I asked.

  “Not really. I’m not much of a food critic. We actually don’t write very long reviews nowadays; everything’s short snippets, facts ...,” he explained.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Sometimes I don’t even have to go to the places to write about them.”

  “Is that how it works?” I asked.

  “Not all the time.” Keith shrugged.

  “That’s sneaky.” We laughed. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to eat the things I cook for my blog when they turn out bad or are really fattening.”

  We glanced at our menus as we chatted.

  “What should we start with?” I asked.

  “I heard the warm beet salad is good, and the blackened shrimp,” said Keith.

  We decided to go for the blackened shrimp. Our waiter came to our table to tell us the specials. After he described the last one, seared sea scallops with haricots verts, I was sold. It had sounded simple but wasn’t something I would normally cook at home; sea scallops were a luxury I rarely felt like indulging in just for myself. Keith ordered the apple-glazed pork chop. Our appetizer arrived a few minutes later. Four fat shrimp were speared with a wooden skewer, looking juicy and crisp on the outside. A lemon half on the side of the plate had a funny-looking cheesecloth
fitted around it with an elasticized edge.

  “It looks like it’s wearing a little hairnet,” I said as I squeezed the juice through the cloth onto the shrimp. “I guess that’s for keeping the seeds away.”

  The shrimp was hot and perfectly seasoned with blackened Cajun spices. It was not innovative or very fussy, but the shrimp itself was deliciously fresh.

  “Wow, that’s really good,” I said. “Totally classic. I can appreciate that.”

  Keith agreed. As we slowly finished the appetizer, we kept a conversation going, first about movies, then about authors that we found we both liked. We had both recently gone to see films at the same noir retrospective at the Film Forum.

  It soon became clear to me that I was on a classic first date—the restaurant type. Everything about the affair was very reserved and polite. I couldn’t remember the last time I ate with friends when I didn’t throw a piece of food at Matt or didn’t eat with my hands. “Are you going on a date?” Chrysanthe had written over instant messaging earlier that day, when I described my dinner plans. I scrunched my nose. “No, it’s more like a weird opposite-week challenge,” I had insisted. Whatever.

  As I sat across from Keith, though, talking in between slicing through buttery lumps of scallops, I did have to admit that I was having a nice time. And that I did think he was pretty cute. Halfway through my entree and well into my second glass of wine, I wasn’t eating out of hunger, just enjoying the unique sensations of the food on my plate. I took my time with it, savoring the delicate spindles of haricots verts, which were pleasantly lemony and resilient to the bite. The restaurant was busy for its first week of service, but it seemed that the noise level never rose above a soft murmur. We finished dinner off with another drink—Bourbon on the rocks. It was another thing we found we both liked. When our glasses came to the table, they were filled to the brim.

  “Gosh, they really don’t skimp on portions here,” Keith said.

  Our waiter never made us feel as if we should rush, but I ended up drinking that Bourbon pretty quickly. Keith was game for checking out the music show afterward, and I didn’t want to miss the act. When our check came to the table, Keith snatched it up.

  “Wait, let me get half,” I said, pulling out a credit card.

  “No, it’s fine,” Keith said, hovering over the check protectively.

  “No, really! It was my idea!” I pried, trying to angle my card into the billfold. But he was having none of it. The waiter came by and took the check from Keith’s hands with a nod. I had no idea what the total bill was, but I guessed it was well over $100, with six drinks, two entrees, and an appetizer between us.

  “I can expense some of it” Keith shrugged. I was defeated.

  We walked outside to get our bikes, since we had both ridden to the restaurant. I strapped my chain lock around my waist and strolled up to his bike.

  “Shall I lead the way?” I asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  We arrived at the small, dark venue before the show. It had taken us a while to find the place even though we’d both been there before on separate occasions; it had an unassuming exterior and was located on a stretch of blank street facing the East River, overlooking Manhattan. It didn’t occur to me that I was fairly drunk until we ordered our second beers there, and I stumbled into the seedy, unmarked bathroom. It was also later than I’d predicted, well past midnight. The act I’d wanted to see—a singer whom I’d met recently at a party—had just gotten on stage after the opening bands. We stayed around for half of his set until I decided I was too droopy to stay any longer. As Keith and I unlocked our bikes outside, he looked at me strangely.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be okay riding all the way back to Crown Heights?” he asked. I laughed, as if it were the last question in the world that needed answering.

  “You don’t understand. I own this road,” I said. We said good-bye, and I took off on my twenty-minute journey back to my sanctuary.

  The next morning, I was in need of breakfast. The dinner the night before had been plentiful, but even more so had been the drinks. For the second time that week, I wished menudo had been a more popular New York menu item. I walked straight into a deli after getting out of the subway and ordered a toasted bagel with egg and cheese. I sat at my desk, blankly staring at the computer screen in front of me as I gobbled it up. Instantly, I felt much better.

  For dinner that night, I’d planned long beforehand to meet up with Michael “Serpico” Cirino at Momofuku Noodle Bar. Michael was one of the people who, on hearing about my opposite week, was full of restaurant suggestions. He was a passionate fan of the country’s most innovative chefs. David Chang, chef of the wildly celebrated Momofuku restaurant empire, was one of his heroes. Chang’s rise to fame had happened suddenly and had taken the entire food world by surprise. It had also all happened over the last two years, meaning while I’d been eating in. I’d read much about Momofuku Noodle Bar and its sister restaurants, Momofuku Ssäm Bar and Momofuku Ko, and was well aware of Chang’s reputation as a culture-crossing culinary genius.

  “We’re going to the one that started it all,” Michael had responded when I asked him which Momofuku he intended to take me to. The noodle bar: Chang’s once humble and now classic take on the Japanese ramen noodle shop.

  Chang was also both celebrated and criticized for his insatiable love of fatty cuts of meat, like pork belly. Knowing that this lay ahead of me, I thought I’d go easy on lunch that day. As it neared lunchtime, I started talking with a coworker about places to get soup. She suggested a place not too far away, on the southern block of Bryant Park. The place was packed when I got there. The line for the cash register ran the length of the restaurant, and alongside it were two separate counters of food options. I spotted the soup section and eyed the day’s specials. Out of the four choices, two were cream based, which I wasn’t feeling up for. Then there was a minestrone and a yellow split pea. I went with the yellow split pea. With no bag.

  “How is it?” my coworker asked as I ate the soup with a tiny slice of French bread that had come with it.

  “Pretty good,” I said. And it was. Although comprised of only vegetables and no meat stock, the soup was thick and hearty, if a bit on the salty side.

  “It smells pretty good,” she said.

  It was also a good deal cheaper than my previous day’s lunch, at just $5.45 with tax for a large cup. Later in the day, I was feeling like a snack again and hit up the vending machines down the hall for a bag of chips.

  I got an e-mail from my friend Saha that day. Knowing that I was on my restaurant-only week, he excitedly offered up a suggestion.

  “Have you ever been to the Doughnut Plant? If not, I think you need to go. Let’s check it out sometime this week. I’m free today and tomorrow.”

  He provided a link to Doughnut Plant’s website, and I clicked on it. Instantly, my screen was filled with a computer-animated logo with highlighted doughnuts as tabs. I clicked on the “History” tab and read a little animated timeline about the famous doughnut shop. It sounded like a real New York legend of a place. I agreed that I had to check it out.

  “How about tomorrow morning, for breakfast?” I suggested. I was off work the next day, a Friday, and I knew that Saha had a pretty flexible schedule, too.

  “Okay,” he wrote back. “How about bright and early? I’m actually going to the office tomorrow, so I can pick up a bunch to bring to folks there.”

  We agreed to meet at nine o’clock. I continued to click away at Doughnut Plant’s website infrequently throughout the day, building up an appetite for the sweet dessert I had normally thought so little of. It seemed like Doughnut Plant was the very height of doughnut sophistication in the city—with different specialties for every day, all-natural, homemade jellies and curious combinations, and their signature square shape. I read an article about the store’s founder, Mark Isreal. “Well, we had to be different,” he was quoted as saying, explaining why they had gone with a square shape for t
heir jelly-filled doughnuts. What a niche food to get sophisticated about: the once scrappy, proletarian, police force breakfast.

  After work, I hopped on the subway and got out in the East Village. I found Momofuku Noodle Bar quickly and, since it was raining, ducked inside even though I was five minutes early. The hostess greeted me with a smile. I told her I was waiting for my friend and asked if I could sit at the bar.

  “We don’t actually seat people until their whole party is here, and the bar’s another seating area. But you could hang out here and order a drink if you’d like,” she explained, gesturing to the space within five feet or so of her and a small wooden bench beside a wait station with a computer. She handed me a menu and moved aside a small pile of them on the bench. I put my coat and bag down and settled on the bench. Five minutes later, after I’d ordered a beer, Michael arrived.

  “Hola,” he said as we exchanged hugs. Our waitress led us to the end of a long table that was taken up with other parties. We sat across from each other.

  “Where’s Kathryn?” I asked, referring to Michael’s girlfriend, whom I adored.

  “She’s in Ethiopia right now.” Kathryn worked for a nonprofit hunger organization and occasionally traveled to Africa. We talked for a moment about Ethiopian food.

  “When I told her about your restaurant week, Kathryn predicted there was going to be a huge line of guys wanting to take you out on dates,” he said, grinning.

  I laughed and denied any such line.

  “How did you go on dates all this time?” he asked, echoing a question I’d heard plenty times over the last two years.

  “Well, for the first year I had a boyfriend,” I began.