I considered myself a food lover: a zealous, open-minded, and
studious consumer of food. My tastes ran the gamut from Chex Mix to
Chez Panisse, and I felt this to be charmingly, almost wittily,
indiscriminate of me. I read cookbooks, restaurant reviews, and food
writing. I cooked. I baked. I ate out. I would have, without
hesitation, claimed to be well versed, at the top of my game even, in
the Art of Eating.
I was, needless to say, a recent college graduate and an unfounded know-it-all. I look back on those days with an indulgent fondness for my younger self, and her survey-class approach to eating. There she is, I think in my memory, burning garlic and liking it. I smile, knowing that soon enough she will be introduced to someone so enamored of food that in his presence one begins to question their own passion for almost anything else. To my student’s eye, meeting Ryan was like being introduced to Edward Said after a steady diet of Cliffs Notes: there is, after all, much more to be found in the details.
Since I've recently become single, I find myself going places and doing things that I normally wouldn't do all in the name of meeting women. This usually means after a long tiring day of work I'll force myself to visit a bar or a party that I normally wouldn't go to. The most recent of these events was when my work hosted a networking event called "Girls in Tech." As you might have guessed, it's for women in the tech industry.
That night, we met over Kate Mantilini’s meatloaf, a generous slab of mixed roast beasts—beef, pork, and veal, seasoned with onions and garlic and the perfect soupcon of pepper and salt, and the conversation was delicious, too. It was mid winter 1987, and in terms of warming, filling, non-carb comfort food that goes down easily, meatloaf is probably the best darn thing one can ingest. Intellectual rapport is always an ideal accompaniment.
You gotta love a guy like my friend Howard. On Memorial Day Monday at 10:30 a.m., I called him in Santa Monica from my bed in Sherman Oaks and said, “Whatcha doing today?”
We’d finally made it all the way to Park Slope, it was less than warm, and I’m pretty sure I had mascara on my forehead from frantically trying to fix my make-up on the subway. You can imagine my dismay when the only boy I really wanted to see on my trip to New York wasn’t even home. But we couldn’t just call him! It would be much better if we ‘just happened to be in the neighborhood’. “They can’t be far. Their car is here!” But how were we gonna kill an hour in the middle of residential nowhere in 20 degree weather? That’s when we found it. BAR TANO. A little haven of happiness with pressed tin walls and a zinc bar.