Tag: Mara L.

Last week, a business trip took me outside of New York, a real adventure for the Europe-based Manhattanite – and therefore a welcome occasion for musings about food, as it relates to the meaning of life. Bear with me if, as an Italian lover of poetry, I tell you that for Dante, the bad is the mere absence of the good. The deeper down in hell you are, the further away you are from God. Beware, the bad is not a counter-force to the good! It’s merely the lack of the good. Now, looking at one’s plate at a number of restaurants all over the world, the phrase ‘absence of good’ rings very true. But is Dante right? Isn’t there more to bad food?

So, one of these evenings, I’m sitting in the most ridiculously over-ambitious restaurant in my hotel, with nothing less than a harp player entertaining me and the only other, single female diner in the whole room. Given the fact that I was going to sit there on my own, I thought I was going to order two small dishes, so as to give me something to do with my lonely evening. The first was shrimp in a herb sauce. Sounds like a safe bet. But wait until some chef (why is no one simply a cook?) puts the shrimp on rosemary branches, and grills them all for the same amount of time, irrespective of the fact that they differ in size. So one shrimp was uneatably raw, and the rest were uneatably well done. The second course, which I expected to be a selection of cheese with fruit (you see the reasoning here, I was going for the simplest possible), turned out to be a whole brie baked in some terrible crust, with something perhaps best described as strawberry jam around it.

Now here I’m sitting, pitying the harp player, a harmless student, put into this depressing position of playing for an empty room by the restaurant’s hopeless pretensions. My thoughts drift back to the good and the bad: Is the bad a force that aims to assert itself, even if it has to come in the guise of ambition for the good?

Jens is right, I am supposed to be writing about food—about culinary survival in New York!—not complain about life in Manhattan, or even worse, life in general. But what can I do, I am still in my Dante mood.

Here’s a dilemma for people like me, people who spend half of the year in Europe and the other in New York, and consider themselves ‘creatives’. Scientists have found (presumably) that moving twice is the cardiac equivalent of a divorce. Suppose that your yearly back-and-forth is not quite like moving, it’s a little less stressful, but really only a little less. So let’s guess that four such moves (equals two years) are the cardiac equivalent of a divorce, and let’s suppose that one can only take so many divorces without being utterly exhausted. All in all, this means that the oh so trendy life style between two continents speeds up things quite badly. And that, while it is part of the game to consider yourself ‘young’, you might already have gone more than half of your life’s way (that’s where Dante comes in).

But if you do not want to take this mid-point of your life as an occasion for serious soul-searching (such as: exploring hell), perhaps it indeed is time to turn back to the pleasures of eating. Let’s not forget that blueberries have an enormous amount of vitamins and other things that are terribly good for you. Didn’t I do much blueberry picking this summer? And didn’t I eat lots of it? Admittedly, some of it was enjoyed in the not-quite-so-healthy form of blueberry crepes, a kind of crepes which needs much sugar, for the blueberries have all this (healthy) acid. But then there’s consolation in the thought that things can be good for you two ways: for your body or your soul. And isn’t the latter much more important?

This year, the end of my European summer hit hard. Not just because tomatoes and fish in Manhattan don’t taste quite like they do on my favorite island near Napoli, Procida. That’s to be expected, and perhaps it’s even mildly reassuring that things haven’t changed too much in my absence. These days, I think with nostalgia of the times when my worst worry was whether the figs and peaches were perfect. Returning to Manhattan, this year, was like falling into Dante’s hell. To some level of hell were people have self-inflicted ailments, ailments which are reflections of their sins. So what’s my sin? Pointless attraction to Manhattan, which is bound to kill me.

I came back during some of the hottest days, which I shouldn’t have done, but there is this unfortunate element of my life called work. It took me two or three days, then I had multiple minor illnesses, which make me lie awake at night and picture sinners with gaping black and yellow wounds. I have never had a serious existentialist phase in my life, but now there is a big WHY hanging over my head.

And then I ran into one of my European friends who had the luxury to return a couple weeks later, and who says that he couldn’t be better just coming from, as he put it, *his European beach summer*. I want my European beach summer! Now!

[Edit: Mara’s series runs under the title “Culinary Survival In New York” for a reason. But enough whining now. She’s tough, she’ll get back on track and rejoin the Manhattan rat race in no time, I promise. JH]