Page 28 - My FlipBook 1

WITH THE FLICK OF A KNIFE, if that dish was decent enough to
I felt transported back to my serve in a restaurant, that only ampli-
childhood. fied the melancholia that I feel about
Melted butter, flecked with fresh missing these places where I have
herbs, poured out of a cut in a breaded spent thousands of hours of my life,
chicken breast and formed an amber and it only deepened my anxiety that
pool on my plate. I was in a new many of them will never recover from
restaurant in New York City, Verōnika, being shut down.
which occupies the second floor of a But what is it I’m hungering for?
We cool new photography museum, Lydia Denworth, the author of a book
called Friendship, recently contrib-
Fotografiska, but I had ordered a dish
that I first encountered at some uted a piece to Scientific American
moment in the 1970s when my par- about a groundbreaking study of
ents took me to a fancy restaurant that loneliness. “Psychologists theorize it
probably specialized in the same sort hurts so much because, like hunger
of European grandeur that Verōnika and thirst, loneliness acts as a biolog-
THE SHORT STORIES WE’RE DONE BAKING OUR OWN BREAD
aims to revive: chicken Kiev. ical alarm bell,” she wrote. “The ache
I remember falling in love with of it drives us to seek out social con-
chicken Kiev back then. What kid nection just as hunger pangs urge us
wouldn’t? It’s basically a supersize to eat.” A few days back, during these
chicken tender magically stuffed with monastic quarantine weeks, I flipped
butter. But I also remember falling in open a book to a poem by Liu Tsung-
love with restaurants. My parents took yuan, a Chinese bureaucrat who was
me along to a lot of restaurants over the sent off into political exile during the
years—Chinese banquet halls, taco Tang dynasty and passed the time by
stands with cult followings, dim chop- writing. The poem that struck me—apt
houses where women in vaguely medi- as ever, centuries later—was called
eval garb carved prime rib from roving “Feeling Decrepit.” In it, Liu suggests
carts. My parents did this because they that there is only one antidote to the
loved food but also because they saw slow rot of his banishment: “all I want
restaurants as vehicles for a young per- is good wine / and a few friends to
son’s cultural education, and with me share it with.”
the lesson stuck. If relishing restau- When I think about that alien
rants—and parsing them with the same world in which I got to linger over din-
finicky attention that other critics apply ner at Verōnika, it’s actually not the
to art, music, movies, and Broadway chicken Kiev that makes me want to
shows—didn’t happen to be my job, I race back. What I remember most viv-
would do it anyway. idly is leaving the dining room with my
Except that right now I can’t. I went wife and passing through the crowded
to Verōnika for dinner with my wife bar, which happened to be filled with
on February 25, 2020, and it would friends of ours. We ran into Simon, and
turn out to be one of my last experi- Yolanda, and David, all of them waiting
ences dining out for a long time. for tables and basking in that singular
Within a few weeks, the coronavirus metropolitan electricity that made a lot
pandemic had forced millions of us of us want to plant our flags in New York
to sequester in our homes with tins City in the first place. It took my wife
of sardines and bags of dried beans. and me about 20 minutes to grab our
I am writing this column at a kitchen coats at Verōnika because we wanted
table in a small house north of New to catch up with everyone. And I now
York City while the morning news realize that it is this—that feeling of per-
out programs tell us about rising death sonalities colliding and conspiring in
rates. I spend much of each day in
the serendipity of a moment—that
this same kitchen cooking breakfast, makes a restaurant so essential to the
again lunch, and dinner for my wife and my hum of a community. It is this that I am
craving. People. People savoring a
four children. There have been a few
culinary triumphs. I improvised a moment together. We don’t need ILYA AKINSHIN/SHUTTERSTOCK
sort of ad hoc cassoulet with fat restaurants because we are hungry.
If this pandemic has taught us anything Judion beans from Spain and chunks We need restaurants because we are
about restaurants, it’s the real reason we of bistro ham from D’Artagnan. Even lonely.
love them so much by JEFF GORDINIER

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