Travel Diary: 2 Meals in NYC

Notes from the kiosk.

One

It’s 45 minutes before our matinee and we need a snack, so dip into a place that looks decent, a contactless dim sum quick serve. Order at the screen, on what is euphemistically called the kiosk, named for the open walled pavilions in Persian gardens, only here—now—it’s a smudged flatscreen.

The future promises us no human friction, except the exhausted looking cook in whites and a paper cap is taking a break in his apron in one of the booths like a cook in a Chinese restaurant anywhere—he kind of wrecks the frictionless illusion, because he looks absolutely pumiced. Him and the other guy (maybe the manager since he gets to wear a polo)—he’s taking a break at a table by the window, and his eyes look puffy as he gets up and carries his tray with a plate of half-eaten fried rice back to the screened-off kitchen. Did he get full before he finished? Is he too tired to eat? Was it nasty? The future feels as worn out as the present.

Perry orders. Turnip cake? I always love that starchiness but we don’t have to get it. Soup dumplings, four per order, I heard David Chang (or Chris Ying?) say on some vlogcast you have to go to Shanghai to get decent ones but come on Chang, this is Eighth Ave. This moment does not have the time or the patience for food-bro fantasy perfection. The soup dumplings, an order of scallion pancake. Perch at the high table, beige and gray veneers not aging nice, cracks and scuffs, a film of forearm grease and soup. This table—this perch—is raw plywood, the infamous raw plywood of Momofuku (no escaping Mr. Chili Crunch in this town). The glass front door has a cloudy flange around the edge. It goes gweeeeefffffkkkkk if anybody goes out or comes in, as if you could keep Eighth Ave. from seeping through, because all of this city is open walled in one way or other. 

Our little drone of a bell lights up and shudders: food’s ready. Stacked-up bamboo steamer turned lizard green from use, four soup dumplings, each in its own little foil tartlet pan. Dough sticking to the foil, gray clutch of porkmeat, clear broth seeping. They’re good; good enough. I mean, not Shanghai good. The uneven pancake quarters a little crisp, chewy overall; a slick of oil that burns. We jab them imperfectly into a tiny portion cup of soy sauce showing an iridescent film of grease. Gweeeeefffffkkkkk.

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Two

It’s the middle of the afternoon but we’re on Arizona time filtered through the numbness of a red-eye, we don’t mind having a meal. Via Carota’s a mob show—couples in smug sunglasses at the sidewalk tables—but Buvette looks half-sleepy in the filtered canopy cool of spring. It’s radiating the quiet composure of off-street West Village.

For whatever reason we want bistro French whenever we’re in New York. I think it’s a question of patina. The food has to have a patina because every surface in the city has one: worn brass, tiles that never totally wash; knob plates and door edges with the grease of hands; dried, stepped-on shit; scratched glass. The ubiquitous lit weed smell on the street in Hell’s Kitchen, where we dropped our bags, is an olfactory patina, a reek like rusty molten iron glowing under wet leaves.

My point is that the food some of us fetishize as French—your coq au vin and croques; your tartare and pâtés—have a patina too: of memory; of some ideal of urbanness; of Julia and Craig (Claiborne). Whether the patina on the bistro food on your plate feels genuine or faked, painted on trompe-l'œil style—well, that’s for you to figure out. Depends on your taste and your tolerance for fantasy.

At Buvette, Perry says let’s sit in the street shed. I think it’s the first time we voluntarily have. There’s something about the mildness of the day and the rosy brick of the iron-laddered fire-escape townhouse fronts through the open back wall that makes us want to go for it. Rats may be sleeping under the floorboards but, hey: patina. 

Buvette’s a tourist spot, at least today; at least out here. The luxury shopping-bag girls speaking Mexican Spanish at the next table; the well-off family from the Philippines, daughters in carefully shopped pieces with handbags; the mom in elaborate sunglasses, as the dad descends without haste from a black Mercedes van, hands in pockets, looking around and blinking and smiling like he’s tickled by how much it’s all going to cost him. Their driver sips Starbucks, stands and smokes by the illegally parked van, snapping pictures of the family through the shed’s opening, to record them eating Parisian food on this gray, lovely street in Manhattan—one act of urban privilege overlaid on another.

The drinks are good. A resiny little Bourgogne aligoté; cocktail with an absinthe glow. The food’s good too: chicken salad, croque madame. They sound boring, but have this quality of polish mastered long ago and kept up more or less faithfully in the years since. Chicken that must have been poached in oil or something, infused with tarragon and dressed properly, lots of whole mustard seeds sticking in the folds and cracks. Same with the ham for the croque, an intensity of sage that tastes infused. There’s a delicately oxidized quality about the flavors, totally simple; deep. We stopped asking much of food like this a long time ago, but here it’s giving—it’s givinggg. It’s part of the street, of the open-sided pavilion, open to all the ambient things that leave their prints, their scuffs and smells, in a city of 16 million sticky hands.