There are many foods I will not miss about New York City: street cart hot dogs dressed in a syrupy mess called “onions,” over-priced dry pasta from ancient red sauce joints in Little Italy, the thousand dairy-free sugar-free fat-free ice cream substitute Tasti-Delite variants, which taste like glue after the first lick. But I long for Café Orlin, the Middle Eastern-inflected diner on Saint Mark’s Place where I think I spent a quarter of my income the past two years.
My standby meal in college was Diana’s Breakfast, hummus drizzled with olive oil, chopped tomato, and onion; tabouli; and two eggs any style (I had mine sunny-side up). I ordered extra pita and a side of homemade harissa and I constructed two little Middle Eastern tacos of the various ingredients and nibble at them slowly. My then-boyfriend and I ate this meal almost every day, with coffee (Americano with milk in undergrad, skim cappuccino during the pursuit of my Master’s degree). Once, when I was home in Chicago, he called me during breakfast. My mother told him I was eating “hummus with eggs and tabouli,” then passed the phone to me.
That’s a loaded statement so let me describe the dish before we go any further. It’s a pot of clam chowder — with a light cream base — with succulent, dinner-sized hunks of pork, rosy-pink and tender as a clam, floating in the broth. You spear the pork onto your plate with a fork and then ladle up the soup from the bottom of the pot where the spiced and diced potatoes, clams and vegetables are lurking. Oh baby, oh baby.
I've never been the type to have a candy drawer or crave chocolate. Growing up, I would rather have a savory snack than give myself a sugar rush. There was one sweet spoonful that sent me swooning, ice cream. But as my love for tea grew, the chilled scoop wasn't always the best companion to a hot cup.
I have always wanted to eat at Balthazar. After many years of
fruitlessly trying to go to Balthazar, I finally succeeded. Maybe it
was the way the restaurant teased me over these past few years that I
had become thoroughly intrigued: The restaurant’s Parisian frontage and
the crowds of diners seen through the windows beckoned me. Maybe it was
the promise of la vie Bohème. From afar Balthazar has that
je-ne-sais-quoi look, but from up close it seems just a bit faux and
overdone. I think the restaurant tries too hard to look authentic with
its crackled mirrors, dark paneling, and dim light fixtures.
Winter on the Upper West Side of New York is a strange time and place to open a lobster shack. Where’s the beach, for example? Where’s the sun? The seagulls? It’s hard to conjure up seafood by the seashore when you’re standing thigh-deep in slush. But open it did – Luke’s, that is – on Amsterdam, between 80th and 81st and I, for one, couldn’t be happier. I’m an actor; I can pretend it’s summer.