The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [153]
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