• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1158 0

loft shortly before noon and spent the next twelve hours cooking, eating, teaching, and serving. The menu, like the performers, was filled with interesting quirks. We used hydrocolloids to turn out distinct textures, like soft blocks of green curry custard to serve underneath the black-squid-ink-battered shrimp dish. Michael was also determined to create perfect cubes of “square sausage” to serve with a Creole-style étouffée. I tasted and nibbled through all the food, by the end scooping up hunks of the braised short ribs with my bare hands. I also ate more than my share of tobacco-laced ladyfingers. We’d revised the dessert from the previous dinner slightly, perfecting the cigarlike shape of the ladyfingers and sandwiching a layer of coffee-flavored buttercream frosting between two of them (a riff on “coffee and cigarettes”). Jonny had walked around the tables filling shot glasses with whiskey for guests to sip with their dessert or to use as a dipping sauce.

As we were cleaning up, I got a text from Scott, wondering if I wanted to grab a drink. Since we happened to be in the same neighborhood, we decided to meet up for a nightcap at a nearby bar. Scott had recently begun working as a bartender at a newly opened restaurant in Brooklyn and was enjoying a night off. We talked about the restaurant and his new gig, and I made plans to have dinner there during “restaurant week” when Scott was working behind the bar, on Monday.

“Are you sure you’re okay to ride home?” Scott asked, standing outside the bar after we’d finished our nightcap.

“Yep! I’m an old pro,” I said as I strapped on my helmet to begin my long ride home to Crown Heights.

PART II

“OPPOSITE WEEK”

On Sunday, I woke with a terrible hangover. But I had a full day’s worth of eating out in New York to begin. There was no time for sleeping in.

A couple of weeks before, Mark had e-mailed me with a question: “Do you know Grace Piper? She’s a producer/blogger for a food website with cooking videos and interviews called ‘Fearless Cooking.”’

In fact, I did. I’d met Grace about a year ago to discuss some possible video projects, but we didn’t immediately come up with anything and gradually fell out of touch. The reason Mark asked me this was because he was trying to hunt down a coauthor of a 1985 book called The Brooklyn Cookbook by the name of Lynn Stallworth. The cookbook was all about historically Brooklyn-based food, like the famous blackout cake created by Ebinger’s Bakery, or the pierogis and kielbasas of Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s Polish community. Mark wanted to create a Brooklyn-themed menu at an upcoming Whisk and Ladle dinner and desperately wanted to meet her and invite her to come. He’d seen a photo of Lynn on Grace’s website with a caption and figured they must know each other. Mark connected with Grace, who connected him with Lynn, and he proposed a casual brunch with everyone. He invited me to come along, and that brunch fell on the first day of opposite week.

Lynn had chosen to meet at a restaurant close to her home in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It was an elegant, New American restaurant called Stone Park Cafe, a popular destination for brunchers, situated along a classy strip of restaurants and shops in the neighborhood. I had never been to the restaurant before my not-eating-out days but had eagerly scoped out its website days before the brunch. Such was my fascination with every place I was to eat at this week.

I arrived at the restaurant on time, hangover and all, and spotted Mark and Grace standing by the bar. Grace introduced me to her boyfriend, James, and the four of us chatted for a while as we waited for a table. Lynn arrived not too long after I did. With her petite frame and frail, shaky step, I never would have expected the vivacity in her voice as we greeted one another. Lynn was as chipper as any woman could be, her pale eyes glowing as she was introduced to Mark and me.

“Why don’t they have a table for us yet? Let’s just go ahead!” she suggested.

Fortunately, we were escorted to a table almost immediately after Lynn arrived. We were