Mise en Place

Brillat-Savarin said tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are, and I have always believed this. Not as metaphor. Literally. I can walk into any restaurant in New York, watch a couple for seven minutes, and tell you whether they will still be together by dessert. It is a talent. It is also, if I am being precise, a professional obligation — I have been reviewing restaurants for the Ledger for nine years, and in that time I have developed what I consider an empirical model of human appetite.

For instance. A man who orders the tasting menu on a first date is trying to buy time. A woman who asks for the wine list before sitting down has already decided whether she likes him. A couple that splits an appetizer has been together long enough to have stopped performing, which is either the beginning of real intimacy or the end of all interest, and you can tell the difference by whether they fight over the last bite.

I am, by any reasonable measure, an expert on other people’s romantic lives. This will become relevant.

Lila needed someone. Not in the desperate sense — Lila is a thirty-six-year-old architect who renovated her own bathroom and once ate dinner alone at a Michelin-starred restaurant without looking at her phone — but in the sense that she had been single for eight months and had begun making her own pasta from scratch on weeknights, which is a warning sign.

I had found her someone. Graham. He worked in documentary film and had the kind of beard that suggested conviction. I chose Bellaro on Bleecker for their first date: rustic Italian, generous portions, a wine list that rewarded curiosity without punishing ignorance. I told Graham to order the burrata and to let Lila choose the wine. I told Lila to wear the green dress, the one that made her look like she’d just come from somewhere more interesting.

“You’re stage-directing again,” Lila said on the phone.

“I’m helping.”

“You’re casting. You’re doing blocking. You probably have notes on lighting.”

“The table by the window has the best light after seven,” I said, because it does.

Daniel’s review of Bellaro had run the week before. He’d called the pasta “competent” and the ambiance “calculated to suggest warmth,” which was the kind of thing Daniel said when he meant a restaurant was good but he didn’t want to admit it. I had read the review once. I am including this detail only because it is true and because I will not be mentioning Daniel much — he is my co-critic at the Ledger, he has been my co-critic for six years, and our professional relationship is precisely that.

He is wrong about anchovies, but that is not the point.

The Graham experiment failed on Tuesday. Lila called me from the bathroom of Bellaro at 8:47 p.m.

“He’s explaining Bitcoin to me.”

“He’s a documentary filmmaker.”

“He’s a documentary filmmaker who is explaining Bitcoin to me. There’s a Venn diagram and I am in the wrong circle.”

I told her to order the affogato and leave. Lila said she would stay through dessert because she had manners. I thought about this after we hung up and realized I should have chosen the table in the back, not the window — the window table made the evening feel like a performance, and Graham was clearly the kind of man who expanded to fill the space given to him.

Daniel texted me at 9:15: Heard your friend’s date is going well. He had a source at Bellaro, one of the line cooks, which I found unprofessional but useful.

It’s going fine, I wrote back. Then: How do you know about it?

You told me about it Thursday.

I had not told him about it Thursday. I might have mentioned, in passing, that Lila had a date, in the context of discussing Bellaro’s dessert menu, which I had strong opinions about. That is not the same as telling him.

I didn’t tell you the details, I typed.

You told me his name, his job, what you told him to order, and which table to sit at. That is the details.

I put my phone down. It buzzed a moment later, or I thought it did — one of those phantom vibrations that happen when you’re expecting a message, except I was not expecting a message, so it must have been something else.

The second setup was worse. A man named Fletcher whom I’d met at a food and wine event. He had excellent taste in natural wines and terrible taste in conversation, which I discovered too late, after I’d already arranged him at a table across from Lila at Otsuki, the new omakase place on 73rd that everyone was talking about and that Daniel had already reviewed, calling it “a restaurant that believes silence is a flavor,” which I thought was pretentious until I sat at the bar and realized he was right, the whole room was built around quiet, and Fletcher was the loudest thing in it.

Fletcher spent the first course explaining his relationship with his therapist, which is never a good sign when the sushi hasn’t arrived yet. By the second course he had moved on to his relationship with his mother. Lila texted me from her lap: I am going to drown him in the soy sauce.

I was at the bar at Otsuki when this happened, reviewing. Not checking on them. Reviewing. I had arrived an hour before Lila’s reservation and taken notes on the ambiance, the lighting, the particular way the chef moved his knife — unhurried, like a man who had long ago stopped needing to prove he was fast. The yellowtail was remarkable — clean, bright, with a finish that tasted like cold ocean — and I was taking notes on my phone when Daniel sat down on the stool next to me.

“You’re spying on your own setup,” he said.

“I’m working.”

“You’re working three seats from your friend’s date.”

“It’s a small restaurant.”

Daniel ordered sake and didn’t say anything for a while, which was unusual for a man who once spent forty-five minutes arguing with me about whether bread service was a moral obligation or a crutch. I kept taking notes. The rice was slightly warmer than I liked. The ginger was excellent. Daniel’s sake arrived and he held it the way he always holds drinks — both hands, like a man warming himself — and I noticed this only because I was looking in his general direction, which was unavoidable given the seating arrangement.

“Your friend doesn’t need setting up,” he said.

“Everyone needs setting up.”

“Your friend specifically does not need setting up. Your friend is a functional adult who chose to eat alone at Le Bernardin last March and tipped thirty percent.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me. We had coffee.”

“You had coffee with Lila?”

“We’ve had coffee four times. We talk about architecture and restaurants. She doesn’t try to set me up with anyone, which I find refreshing.”

I felt something — a flicker, a tightening — that I attributed to the wasabi. Daniel was watching the chef. Or he was watching me watch the chef. The difference has never been clear with him, and I have never thought much about why.

We stayed until closing. This was for professional reasons. We argued about whether the hamachi needed more acid — I said yes, he said the restraint was the point — and whether the music was too loud for a restaurant that believed silence was a flavor. He said I was right about the music. I said he was right about the hamachi, which came out before I could stop it, and which I immediately qualified by noting that I only meant the hamachi and not his broader position on acid in raw fish, which remained deeply flawed.

He smiled. It was the kind of smile that meant he knew exactly what I had conceded and exactly what it had cost me. I ordered another cup of tea and did not think about the smile for the rest of the evening, except that I did, twice, both times while he wasn’t looking.

The third and final setup was my masterpiece and my greatest failure. I found a man named Oren who ran a small bookshop in Park Slope and had once cooked professionally, which gave him an understanding of food that went beyond performance. I chose the restaurant myself — a new Georgian place on Atlantic Avenue that nobody had reviewed yet, which meant it was neutral territory, uncorrupted by opinion. I briefed Oren on Lila’s preference for window seats and her habit of ordering whatever the waiter recommended, which was not indecision but trust, a distinction that mattered.

Lila called me the next morning. Not from the bathroom this time. From her apartment, at nine a.m., which meant she was calm.

“Oren was lovely,” she said.

“Good.”

“He was lovely and I am not going to see him again.”

“Why not?”

“Because he was lovely, Wren, and I didn’t feel anything, and I’m tired of sitting across from perfectly good men feeling nothing and then calling you to discuss what went wrong like you’re my case manager.”

There was a pause. I could hear her coffee maker in the background, the specific gurgle of the Chemex she’d bought after her last breakup — the good breakup, the one that ended with mutual respect and a shared custody arrangement for a sourdough starter.

“You need to stop,” she said.

“I’m trying to help.”

“I know you’re trying to help. You’re always trying to help. You helped me find my apartment and my dentist and the best dry cleaner south of 14th Street and I love you for it, but Wren — you’re allowed to eat at your own restaurant.”

“I don’t have a restaurant.”

“You know what I mean.”

I did not know what she meant. Or I knew what she meant in the abstract — she was saying I spent too much time arranging other people’s lives — but I did not know what she meant specifically, because to know specifically would require considering a possibility I had already considered and dismissed, which is not the same as not having considered it.

Daniel reviewed the Georgian place the following week. I read it because I was planning to review it myself and needed to know what ground he’d already covered. This is standard practice. There is nothing unusual about reading a colleague’s work three times. The first reading is for content. The second is for errors. The third is — I don’t have a good reason for the third.

His review was, I will admit, good. Not adequate. Good. He wrote about the khachapuri as “the kind of food that makes you homesick for a place you’ve never been,” and I sat with that sentence for longer than was professionally necessary. He wrote about the wine — a Saperavi, Georgian, dark as ink — and said the restaurant understood something most New York restaurants didn’t, which was that food was not about novelty but about the particular courage of repetition. Making the same bread every morning. Pulling the same cheese. Getting the small things right a thousand times.

I thought: That’s not about food.

Then I thought: Of course it’s about food. Everything he writes is about food.

Then I checked my phone and it hadn’t buzzed, but I checked it anyway.

We were both reviewing a place called Meridian on a Friday in late October. This happens sometimes — the Ledger sends us both when a restaurant is important enough to warrant two perspectives, or when the editor thinks our disagreements will generate traffic, which they always do, because Daniel and I disagree about everything. We disagree about the correct temperature for red wine. We disagree about whether amuse-bouches are charming or condescending. We disagree about tipping policy, menu font, the ontological status of brunch. We have been having the same argument about anchovies for six — for a long time.

Meridian was small and warm and smelled like brown butter and rosemary. It sat between a laundromat and a wine shop on a block that didn’t know yet whether it was gentrifying or just confused, and the menu was handwritten on butcher paper, which is either charming or an admission that the printer is broken and you can never be sure which.

Daniel was already seated when I arrived, which was unusual. He normally came late. I normally came early. Between us we had spent years arriving at the wrong time for each other, which I am noting as a fact and not as a metaphor.

“I read your review of Otsuki,” he said.

“And?”

“You didn’t mention the sake.”

“The sake was unremarkable.”

“You wrote four hundred words about the yellowtail. You wrote sixty words about the rice temperature. You wrote zero words about the sake you watched me drink.”

I opened my menu. “I didn’t watch you drink anything. You happened to be sitting next to me.”

“You described my hands.”

“I described the presentation of the sake.”

“You described someone holding a cup with both hands ‘like a man warming himself.’ That’s not a description of a cup.”

The bread arrived. I tore off a piece and didn’t look at him. The bread was sourdough, which meant this restaurant was worried about itself, and I noted this on my phone while Daniel sat quietly, not eating, not drinking, just sitting there with the particular patience of a man who has been waiting for a very long time and is deciding whether to keep waiting.

“Wren,” he said.

“What.”

“How long have we known each other?”

“Six years.”

“Seven.”

“Six.”

“We met at the Gallagher opening in October 2019. That’s seven years.”

“The Gallagher opening was in November.”

“It was October fourteenth. You were wearing a blue coat and you told the sommelier his wine list lacked conviction.”

I put my phone down. I did not pick it up again for a long time, though my pocket buzzed twice, or I thought it did.

“You remember what I was wearing,” I said.

“You remember what you said to the sommelier,” he said.

“I say things like that to sommeliers constantly.”

“I know. I’ve been there for most of them.”

The food came. We ate. We talked about the lamb, which was exceptional, and the greens, which were overdressed, and the dessert, which arrived unrequested — a panna cotta with a basil thread that neither of us had ordered but which was obviously meant for two people, and which we ate from the same plate without discussing it.

I will write a good review of Meridian. I will note the lamb and the sourdough and the slightly too-aggressive lighting. I will not mention the panna cotta because it was not part of the formal tasting and is therefore irrelevant. I will not mention what Daniel said or how he said it or that when we left, he walked me to the subway and stood on the platform after I went through the turnstile, just stood there, not waving, not leaving, until the train came.

I texted Lila from the train: I think I found someone for you. He runs a gallery in Chelsea and eats at Otsuki every Thursday.

Lila wrote back: Go to sleep, Wren.

I put my phone in my bag. It buzzed. I didn’t check it. I watched the tunnel lights streak past and thought about the lamb and the panna cotta and Daniel’s hands around that sake cup at Otsuki, which I apparently described in a published review, which I do not remember doing, which means either my editor added it or I wrote it without noticing, and I genuinely do not know which possibility is worse.

I am fine. I have notes to type up. I have three restaurants to review this week and a lead on a Georgian wine bar in Bushwick that Lila might like, or that Lila’s next date might like, or that someone might like. The city is full of restaurants and the restaurants are full of people and the people are full of want, and I can see all of it, every bite and glance and hesitation, and I have never once been wrong.

My phone buzzed. I checked it.

It was Daniel. It said: The lamb was perfect. So was the company.

I read it once. I put my phone away. I read it again at my stop, standing on the platform, the train pulling away behind me. It was raining when I came up to the street. I stood under the awning of a bodega and read the message a third time and I could not, for the life of me, figure out what I wanted for dinner.