The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [155]
“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