The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [137]
“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,