New York

A friend of mine says that all the restaurants in New York City are good. Her belief is that is that with so many options, only quality survives. I’m not one to put her theory to the test as I have been to NYC only three times in my life and on two of the trips “fine dining” was definitely not an option. On this most recent visit, I was with my husband and 17-year-old daughter—showing her “the city” before dropping her off at college in Massachusetts. Our plan was to have one special dinner. If all the restaurants in NYC are so good, then how do you decide where to go?

I knew exactly where I wanted to go. I wanted to go to Blue Hill in Greenwich Village, and no, not because the Obama’s went there on their “NYC date night” (although how cool is that?). I wanted to go to Blue Hill not only because I love (obviously) the whole farm-to-table philosophy, but because I have had the opportunity to test Blue Hill Chef Dan Barber’s recipes in the Bon Appetit test kitchen. Dan Barber’s recipes are awesome—any one of these on Epicurious will please. After experiencing his creative treatment to vegetables—Cauliflower Steak and Kale Chips, I knew that if I ever had the chance to eat at Blue Hill, I would.

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.

I’ve been in rehearsal this week for a reading we’re doing on Friday. It’s a fun piece called “Old Jews Telling Jokes” based on the website of the same name. All this is to say that this week I’m a working man, a nine-to-fiver, so bye-bye to my indolent life. No time now for shopping at Eataly after my caffé macchiato with the crossword puzzle; no time for noodling away at the stove in the afternoon, sautéing pretty vegetables for Jill’s dinner while hooked up to a Sangiovese drip. No. I’m a working man. Punch that clock.

But today I fell into one of those time warps that New York offers up when you have no particular place to go. I’m on my break; it’s drizzling; I have an hour to kill. Our rehearsal hall is on Eighth Avenue in the high Thirties – a bit of garment district, a bit of spillover from Forty-Second Street — tons of places to eat and not one of them calling me. I walk in the rain over to Ninth Avenue, which never lets me down. Ninth Avenue is a Baghdad bazaar — good, bad and everything in the middle. I love Ninth Avenue. I walk past this little place with a menu board out front. It’s called Capizzi, a little joint, sitting in the shadow of the Port Authority bus terminal. It’s essentially empty, some people at a table in the back – maybe it’s the staff having their lunch. It’s 4:00 in the afternoon – the rush was over. But there’s something; I walk by it three times; there’s something about this place.

The East Village is, was and always will be my hood in the big apple. Sure, I now stay on the Upper West Side and much to the dismay of my husband, I gravitate downtown. He will often say “downtown again?” My friend Peggy always lived on the Lower East Side and she was my friend-to-stay-with in New York. It was really seedy and exciting then, the 70’s. It’s been totally gentri-yuppie-fied in recent years. The Hells Angels owned the block – or maybe even blocks – around where Peg lived. And each day as I ventured out, one or another of them would ask me to fetch him something like matches perhaps from the corner store. So I did. Who wouldn’t? It was always more of a command – and I was to obey.

One hot summer night when Peggy and I were feeling playful and fearless, I actually hopped on the back of Mike the Bike’s Harley for a quick spin around Alphabet City. She was on the bike of another Hells Angel whose name I cannot recall; I only remember his toothless grin and his notoriety from the Altamont infamy of some years earlier. I am not the biggest adventurer – in fact, I’m not adventurous at all.