The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [88]
As I walked, my cell phone rang. It was Mark Douglas.
“So, you know you won?” he said.
“No way!” I yelled. I felt like dancing in the street.
I’d need to book the plane tickets first, he instructed, as flights were beginning to fill up. I would be receiving all the details about the hotel and rental car that came with the prize trip from COPIA soon. Mark would also be attending the chocolate festival that weekend and hoped to round up a small group for dinner on the last night.
“I’m real curious to see who you’ll bring along as a date,” he chided, right before we got off the phone.
I’d laughed along, pretending that my plus-one was up for contention. But really, I knew all along whom to bring.
“Mom, we’re going to Napa,” I said a little later over the phone.
“What?” she shrieked.
“Pack your bags. It’s next weekend.”
A week and a half later, we were driving from Napa Valley to San Francisco in a rental car. Our day had begun early, with a delayed flight due to snow in New York. We landed in California with just enough time to make it to a guided tour of Bay Area chocolatier Charles Chocolates, first up on our chocolate-filled agenda. Chuck Siegel, founder of Charles Chocolates, walked us through the facilities, handing out choice bits and even letting us dip gloved fingers into slowly churning tanks of fudge. It was all very Willy Wonka-esque, but by the chocolate factory tour’s end, what my mom and I could really have used was some lunch. So we decided to take a detour and spend the rest of the day and night in San Francisco.
Shortly after my parents married, they had lived in San Francisco for several years. There my father completed law school, and my mother worked odd jobs while acclimating herself to her new country of citizenship. My parents had met in Taiwan; my dad had gone to work for an import-export company in Taipei, as a bilingual associate (he spoke Mandarin and held an Asian studies degree) who would act as a sort of Western culture go-to person for the company. One of the first colleagues he met at the office was my mother. My mom had never dreamed of living in America, or anywhere else, really, before she’d met my dad. But a couple of years later, she was married, an American citizen, and living in San Francisco.
I’d been to San Francisco only once before, so my mom was eager to show me around the city she remembered so fondly. We went to Chinatown first and walked into the first Cantonese noodle shop we saw. It was only a couple of weeks since my Morocco trip, and stepping inside a restaurant again felt funny and frivolous. I wasn’t used to sitting before a steaming bowl of wonton soup anymore, at least in the States, but once it was brought to our table, the vapors flooding my nostrils with the scent of stock, a rush of familiarity swept over me.
The month had been a wacky one in more ways than just a deviation from my usual eating habits. Just the night before our flight, I’d picked up the keys for my new one-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights and moved out of my old one for good. I’d hired movers, who dropped all my furniture into the new living room, and I left the boxes in the middle of the living room floor. I was a single girl now, with my own apartment.
The soup and congee that we’d ordered was comforting and fueled us for a lengthy walk around the city. I didn’t realize how much I missed the run-of-the-mill Cantonese noodle shop. It wasn’t just the food that mattered—it was everything: the roasted ducks and chickens hanging in the window, the butcher skillfully hacking into them on a block just behind the panes. The sound of other customers slurping loudly at the