The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [8]
“Not eating out in New York?” Sergio said after I told them what I wanted to call the blog. “That sounds ... perfect. I only eat out, but I would read it.” He shrugged and took another chomp of his burger.
A cloud of smoke wafted to our table just then, and I couldn’t make out Erin’s exact expression. It was a muggy, severely hot day, and the ceiling of patio umbrellas in the cramped backyard created a virtual hotbox of stale, smoky city air. Sergio’s normally olive-complected face had turned bright sunburn pink.
I suddenly wondered why the three of us couldn’t be sitting at home, in the comfort of a room with an air conditioner or a fan, or in the shade of someone’s backyard, drinking much better beer, and making ourselves better burgers. Why did we have to come here, forking over our hard-earned dollars in exchange for the basest of barbecue food and being squashed in this pebble-floored patio, waiting for service, and yelling over the din of our too-close neighbors? Pure habit, I guessed. I wondered whether this habit was something we could reverse.
“Yeah, do it!” Erin pressed.
I picked up my third or fourth burned slider from my plate. It had been baking in a slice of sunlight on the table for a while, and the cracked black patty looked and smelled like a charcoal briquette. I took a swig of flat, lukewarm beer to wash down the regrettable last bits of bun.
“Yeah, I think I will,” I said.
Despite that underwhelming meal at the beer garden, it was a good time to be a gourmand in New York. “You are what you eat” might be the universal food motto of all time, but in today’s metropolitan food meccas, the old adage might be better put, “What you don’t eat will come to define your limitations in character.” In the midst of a national foodie renaissance, especially in New York, not eating anything, by principle, was simply not cool. Even friends of mine who are vegetarians are routinely pooh-poohed by the cultured and elite. And vegans? They might as well wither and die. But not eating out in New York? That was like not seeing the sea lions at the Central Park Zoo, or not not drinking the tap water in Mexico.
Even as I described the plan to Erin and Sergio that day, I felt a creeping trepidation about how my blog would be received by those who were not my friends. I braced myself for severe backlash; the concept would seem sacrilege to many. For shame, people would shake their heads and say. In this town, you could eat a bagel or bialy with lox for breakfast, a stuffed dosa from that amazing street cart for lunch, bistro steak frites for dinner, and for late-night eats, a steaming bowl of ramen or a mean slice of real New York pizza, all within the radius of a few blocks. The world is our oyster bar, so let’s start slurping it up.
So awesome and plentiful is restaurant, takeout, and street-stand food here that New Yorkers eat it for almost every meal. I certainly did, at first. For those first two years or so living in the city, my head was very much in the game; my budget, on the other hand, was not up to speed. Any financial expert will tell you that your twenties are the best years of your life ... to save. I wasn’t a fluid spender, at least compared to some people I knew, but I simply wasn’t saving up, either. I was living pretty much from paycheck to paycheck, what with paying rent, utilities, transportation, weekday lunches, a lot of takeout and casual restaurant dinners, afternoon brunches on the weekends, and the occasional splurge at a nice, new restaurant. I was fond of seeing music gigs and movies, and grabbing happy hours, too. Saving was not the first of my priorities when I began working and living in New York City, obviously. It’s no wonder that people of my generation have coined terms such as quarterlife crisis (dealing with insurmountable debt, among other things) or the boomerang effect (when college graduates move