★ I am probably not in the proper life place right now to offer food advice. At the moment there are a pair of small children wailing away in my chaotic home. For the past two years I have eaten somewhere around 80 percent of my meals standing up. I subsist mostly on scraps left behind by a toddler. I eat chicken fingers, mac ’n’ cheese, and broccoli treats shaped like dinosaurs, and drink from boxes of apple juice, and I can finish an entire sleeve of animal crackers during an episode of Bob the Builder.
When I walk down the street, I look inside the windows of restaurants with a kind of envious Dickensian glare. I was once one of those people, lingering over dessert and cappuccinos, talking about bands and Broad City. I was once one of those people, reckless, impulsive, living on the edge, eating after 5:45 P.M.
★ Like many families, we are trying to stay devoted to the family meal. You may have seen that the family meal has made a Great American Comeback. When I was growing up, the frantic mealtime hustle was a sign of progress—commercials depicted high-speed breakfasts in which Dad drank his coffee in the shower and kids on their way out the door to school caught minipancakes in their mouths. At dinner Mom popped a pizza into the microwave and handed it over to the clan in front of the TV couch. Family dinners? We were busy getting life done! Now there is a backlash to the hurried dinner. Now there is a return to the long, sit-down family meal, with a well-considered recipe, handpicked ingredients, and, good Lord, conversation. Partly this is a revolt against the modern rush. Partly it’s a desire to make a family connection. It’s also a new appreciation of home-cooked food. It’s what I want. It’s what my wife wants. Also, microwaved pizza is horrendous.
★ But let’s be real: sometimes the family meal is too difficult. Sometimes I think my favorite family meal is the one in which we talk about making an elaborate home-cooked family meal and then give up and order Chinese food.
★ I’m also not completely convinced that the home-cooked meal creates an essential bond between parents and children. When you were a kid, nothing was better than when your parents gave up and ordered—not microwaved—pizza. You never thought, This pizza is nice, but it would have been better for our family dynamic to have a slow-cooked meal. No, you thought, Pizza!
★ Early in the life of your family, you need to decide whether you are the family that stops at McDonald’s or the family that has McDonald’s at home.
★ Nobody has McDonald’s at home.
★ At this point in my dad life I should have a handle on how to grill, but I don’t. It’s always a panic. I’m never like that dad in the commercial with eighteen hamburgers and two T-bone steaks and a dozen sweet sausages and hot dogs, sipping a beer by the pool. I feel I am okay with hot dogs and sausage and semireliable with burgers and steak. Chicken, I might as well be doing open-heart surgery. I am so afraid of poisoning you that I will leave that chicken on the grill until 2042. I do like standing around the grill, however. And in all the years I have been standing around grills, with many people of different ages and experiences—some truly distinguished in the art of grilling—do you know what the most common topic of conversation has been? How to grill the corn.
★ I want that to be on my tombstone: I Never Totally Figured Out How to Grill Corn.
★ Having people over to dinner? Here is the ideal number of dinner guests, including the host or hosts: seven. You say six or eight, I say seven. Why? Because an odd number helps. Even-numbered dinners invariably become gatherings of couples, and here’s what’s interesting about a dinner that’s exclusively couples: zero. Unless you want to spend the entire night talking about real estate and the lice breakout in the sixth grade, invite an unattached spare, who will be picked apart at the table like a med school cadaver, making for hours of easy entertainment at his or her personal expense.
★ Anything bigger than nine guests, it’s a football banquet and you need to invite everyone’s parents and hand out awards and scholarships.
★ There’s always one guest who eats 70 percent of the cheese. That guest is me.
★ No seating chart, psychopath.
★ No soundtrack either, psychopath. Just put some Adele on Pandora and calm down.
★ Serve salad before dinner, not after. What is this, Iceland?
★ Guests like to hear a little about the food, but that’s about it. If you are complimented on the duck, tell your guests where you got the duck. Do not tell them where the duck went to college.
★ The duck went to Wesleyan, FWIW.
★ Keep the TV chitchat to a minimum. If you’ve discussed Homeland for more than forty minutes, lean into the table and set fire to your hair.
★ When the dinner party migrates from the table to the couch, the dinner party is over. Nobody is about to break out cocaine and put on Prince’s 1999. Two people are going to fall asleep right there, and if you don’t call a taxi, they’ll be there when you wake up the next day, eating your Froot Loops.
New York is a renowned restaurant city, but restaurants here can also drive you nuts. Food has been a sport here for many decades, but lately the mania has been ratcheted to the point where chefs are celebrities on a par with athletes and rock stars and restaurant openings are greeted with the fanfare once reserved for King Tut’s sarcophagus. What should be a happy ritual—eating!—has been turned into a Lord of the Flies–style competition that can leave a person (me!) very insecure. It has reached such an extreme that at the moment there are websites that are effectively scalping tables to New York restaurants.
Table of four? Sure, buddy. I can get you in. Partial unobstructed view of the men’s room toilet.
On the occasions when I have been lucky enough to find myself in one of these white-hot establishments, I have gotten crabby about a few things:
★ Waiting at the bar. I know a restaurant’s reservation system is a flawed, evolving, fickle beast, and I know that when I arrive on time for an eight o’clock reservation, it is not always possible to be seated at eight o’clock. I get it. But I do not want to wait at the bar. The bar is crowded and everyone is standing and shoving forward to order $18 drinks and I just took someone’s handbag to the ear. I am going to stand outside and talk to neighborhood dogs about the Stanley Cup.
★ Complicated menus. I promise to be a very polite and generous customer. But I would love ordering dinner to require less instruction than removing the engines from a 747.
★ Loud restaurants that confuse a shrieking racket with popularity and jam tiny tables closely next to each other like it’s a high school chess tournament.
★ Please God, no more restaurant DJs. (No offense, restaurant DJs.)
I read in the New York Times that food mania has trickled down to people in their early twenties; people fresh out of college are now spending half their rent checks at the best new restaurants, which have become a social priority among young New Yorkers, like seeing a great band or throwing up on your roommate’s futon. There is something about this that leaves me depressed. I don’t have any objection to anyone liking good food, but it doesn’t seem like it should be a focus when you’re twenty-three. Locking yourself out of your apartment and having to kick your way in through the fire escape at 4:15 A.M. should be a priority when you’re twenty-three. You will have the whole of the rest of your life to sit in good restaurants pretending to enjoy squab.
Restaurant jobs I have had:
1. Dishwasher.
2. Prep cook.
3. Dessert guy. (Scooped ice cream, cut pies, ate pies.)
4. Grilled cheese guy.
5. Morning cleanup guy (Pizzeria Uno, Madison, Wisconsin).
Best of these jobs? Dishwasher. There’s no question. If you’ve been a dishwasher, you know what I mean. You’re in the engine room. You’re essential. The chef can flip his lid and walk out the door and the kitchen will figure out a way to cover, but the dishwasher is the glue. Everyone’s nice to you; the waiters check in with you; the chef makes sure you get fed. There are loads of prima donnas in restaurants, but there’s never been a prima donna dishwasher. You have to put your elbows down and get it done. At the end of the night, the dishes eventually stop, and there’s a great feeling of pride and accomplishment, diminished only slightly by the fact that it’s 1:00 A.M. and you smell like pickles and barbecue.
Worst job: You would think it would be cleaning up a Pizzeria Uno on weekend mornings, which was indeed horrible, and involved mopping up things that aren’t supposed to be found on the floors of restaurants, but it was really my very brief career as a grilled cheese station guy. It was a grilled cheese station at a college dorm kitchen where I’d been washing dishes. I thought the grilled cheese station would be a step up, I really did, but it wasn’t. I should clarify that this was the nighttime grilled cheese station. During the dinner shift I’d stand behind this counter and wait for kids to order grilled cheese sandwiches. Here’s who orders a grilled cheese sandwich in a dorm: everybody. A grilled cheese is a backup plan against any culinary failure, because it is pretty impossible to mess up a grilled cheese. College students order grilled cheeses just because they’re bored. And so I would make 21 billion grilled cheese sandwiches, lathering the bread in butter, waiting by the grill for the sandwiches to finish, flipping them onto plates, and developing grilled-cheese carpal tunnel. It took many years for me to come back to grilled cheese. But I am back. I love you, grilled cheese.
Have you ever done a juice cleanse? If you haven’t, here’s what a juice cleanse is: you go to the juice store, buy somewhere between six and eight cold-pressed juices, the clerk charges you $85, and the staff laughs uproariously and high-fives each other as you walk out. Juicing used to be the domain of actors and vain billionaires scared by a brush with mortality. Now it’s available to morons like you and me.
You never feel healthier than you do leaving the juice store. You are really doing it! You’re grabbing your body and shaking it and saying, “It’s time for a spring cleaning, buddy!” You have read all the vapid testimonials. Within days your skin is going to glow like Princess Grace’s on a cruise to San Lorenzo. Your gut will look like a corner suite at the Four Seasons. Your tongue will turn a color it hasn’t been since you were in pre-kindergarten. You will be gripped with enough energy to kick-box your way through an ultra-marathon.
Or something like that. Juicing has never seemed like a terribly practical or scientific endeavor, except for the part where you’re consuming fewer calories than you would have if you’d gone to, say, Taco Bell six times a day. I’ve found it helpful in that it does seem to press a reset button if you’ve been punishing your body with empty junk. But I’ve never had a juicing epiphany. I’ve never experienced the Glow. My tongue is the same color it’s always been: tongue. The biggest benefit seems to be just motoring through to the other side. I’ve managed three days and five days. I hear if you can do ten, it’s pretty great. If you can do a whole month, you get X-ray vision and abdominals like Willem Dafoe’s and can climb a coconut tree like a lemur.
People ask me all the time what the best thing to eat at a sporting event is, and I tell them it hasn’t changed since your grandpa went to watch DiMaggio on the Yankees: a hot dog and a beer. I know stadiums are getting better with food now—there are sushi bars and minitacos and sliders, and if you hunt carefully you might be able to find a salad—but let me explain something to you: you’re at a stadium. If you witness sports history, it should not be while picking at a salad. Fisk’s home run hit the left-field foul pole and Dad nearly spilled all his spring lettuce mix!
Years ago my wife and I were on vacation in Florence, Italy, and like anyone vacationing in Italy, we were fanatical about making sure we were eating at the best places. No tourist traps, no chains, no places that made us look like suckers. The first night we asked the hotel concierge for a recommendation, and as we assumed was his job obligation, he recommended the hotel’s restaurant, which he said was excellent and romantic and utterly worth our time. No thanks. We weren’t falling for that. We hadn’t come all the way to Italy to eat in the hotel restaurant. So he recommended another place, a short walk away. We waited in line for a half hour, and as we were about to go in, a departing American couple looked at us and made the puke sign as they were walking to the street. When I see strangers exiting a restaurant and making the puke sign to me, it scares me off. I am no longer interested. I am conservative like that. And so we walked around on our own and tried to find something, which is always a bad idea, to the point where we were hungry and snapping at each other, when we came across this low-lit restaurant that appeared to have a secret entrance in a stone wall. The place was on the Arno River, and it looked like a vision of what a Tuscan restaurant should be: romantic, cozy, almost clandestine. Amazingly, a table was available out on a balcony overlooking the river. We couldn’t believe our luck.
Bessie and I proceeded to have what we considered—and still consider—the most romantic dinner of our lives. A lot of the joy was in the surprise of it—we’d been so close to pathetically packing it in for the night, and here we were, in one of the most beautiful places we’d ever seen, having a fantastic meal. And when dessert was finished and we paid the check, we walked away from our table and couldn’t help but notice something we hadn’t noticed walking in: the interior of the restaurant was somewhat familiar. We kept on walking until we reached another familiar space, and then the…concierge’s desk. We had walked around Florence in circles for long enough that we’d wound up walking in through an alternate entrance and eaten at the restaurant in our hotel.
Good food isn’t supposed to be hard work. If you’re lucky, it may even find you.