The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [150]
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