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.
It’s Sunday morning, and the last thing I want to hear is a discrete ringing sound, calling out from my computer, to alert me that I have mail. I ignore my computer, throw on my jeans, and catch the train into the city. The first and only thing on my mind, on this day, is an Upper West Side brunch that comes with a wonderful, delectable, cappuccino – I hope.
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.
Going to New York is always a treat. Like everyone else, I love
walking around the city. A leisurely stroll through Central Park when
the flowering trees are in bloom is one of life's great pleasures.
My dad was a two job guy. We lived in a representative, working class
neighborhood in Brooklyn, which was to me, the paradise of the world.
Representative I learned years later meant not just Jewish people, like
us, but an equal mix of almost everything else. The working class is
obvious.