never take a perfect meal for granted

On Tuesday night, I was sitting, sipping a cider, at the bookstore near my house in D.C. The author I was there to see, C Pam Zhang, was running a bit late, which meant my brain had time to wander. And it wandered immediately toward anxiety over this newsletter.

I was sick last week and skipped my usual essay/recipe post, and that was eating at me. I was also clueless about what I should write this week and terrified about finding time to write next week. (My husband and I got married last year, but our wedding reception, which is basically just a wedding minus the ceremony, is looming in just seven — SEVEN!! — days.) That’s all to say, I was spiraling — and then Zhang showed up and started talking about her new book, “The Land of Milk and Honey,” which I’ve only just started. It’s a work of fiction set in a dystopian near-future, and it’s very much about food. So when someone in the audience asked Zhang to share some of her most memorable meals, I expected to hear about a steak with a perfect crust or an elaborate pastry. Instead, she spoke generally. “The best meals,” she said (I’m paraphrasing), “are the ones where you love the company you’re with and feel happy in your surroundings.”

And behold, a newsletter topic.

I felt wobbly, fizzy, a sip away from bursting. I’d just finished one of the best meals of my life, at Zahav in Philadelphia, and the late-September air was chilly and damp, a shock to my system.

Zahav had been perfect: fun music at exactly the right volume; dim, warm light; kind, friendly service; more food than I could’ve fathomed. No bad bites. No underwhelming bites, even. But as I sit here typing, a week later, the memories of those dishes are fading. There was halloumi, salty and sharp against a phyllo crust and smear of peach jam. There was a smoky labneh, studded with caviar, into which I dipped a puff of sweet potato, and pomegranate-glazed lamb buried under a sauce laden with chickpeas. The rest is a blur of conversation and laughter: a joke about eating oranges in the shower, a glimpse of Zahav’s owner and chef serving a nearby table, sighs and smiles and the repeated refrain of this is just so perfect.

But what, really, was perfect? The food, yes. But also everything else, the buzz of a thrilling meal with people you love. And that might have mattered more. My husband had invited his two best friends to eat with us, and there we were, in his hometown, in the middle of one of those stolen moments when everyone’s in the right place at the right time.

It might seem strange to read in a newsletter about food that the food is secondary — but here we are. It’s not that what you’re eating doesn’t matter, it’s just that in the long run, it matters less. Send me to a mediocre restaurant with my favorite people any day; that’s so much better than the best food with anyone else.

I’ve eaten well — and eaten at good restaurants — for most of my life. There was a Baked Alaska at Antoine’s when I was 12, who knows how many double steakburgers at Steak ‘n Shake. I can still picture the chicken satay skewers I nibbled on the first time I ate Thai food, at a hole in the wall in Palm Springs, of all places. I remember the food — but more clearly, I remember the joy on my dad’s face, showing his kids a restaurant he loved, indulging in a cherished routine, trying something new.

I was lucky enough to take it for granted that food and joy went hand-in-hand. Then, in my late 20s, right around the time I started making enough money to not blink at a dinner check, I met a guy. He had one of those jobs that entailed going out to expensive dinners that someone else paid for, so he knew a lot about overpriced food, restaurants with dry-aged beef and obscure cocktail garnishes. We started going to those kinds of restaurants — and some really fantastic ones, too. I’d never been anywhere with a Michelin star before, so we went to one spot, then another, then another. The food was usually very good, I think, but I can’t quite remember. I remember the minutes, which added up to hours, I spent waiting for him to come back from the bathroom. I remember gulping my glass of wine because he’d decided it was time to go. I remember a teeny-tiny clothespin that clipped a sprig of rosemary to an orange-pink cocktail that didn’t taste particularly good, though maybe it did. As I said, the tastes are blurry. Only the ugly emotions are sharp.

When I met my husband, I’d just broken up with that guy and those dinners. On the night in question, a group happy hour bled into more drinks, then into karaoke, then into late-night food at a Chinese restaurant that served beer after last call alongside lo mein and sesame chicken. Maybe everyone else wanted another drink; I, however, was starving. In the middle of the massive table was a massive lazy susan, and I was grateful that our group ordered enough food to cover it. My now-husband was sitting next to me, and he said later that he’d never seen someone’s face light up the way mine did when the table spun and the plate of hot crab rangoon landed squarely in front of me, like I’d just won deep-fried “Wheel of Fortune.”

I swear I remember how that crab rangoon tasted, better than all the crab rangoons I’d ever eaten before. Is that true? No idea. But that’s how it’s burned into my consciousness, alongside the feeling of hope and excitement and who-knows-what-happens-next.

I remember these dinners like they were yesterday

I remember the first takeout Jesse and I ate together in the summer of 2020 — orange-ish chicken from CHIKO — and everything I cooked our first Christmas, when restaurants were still off-limits and I was determined to feed us better than we’d been fed in months. I remember spreading delivery sushi on the coffee table on New Year’s Eve. Ask me about a memorable meal, and I’ll tell you about how we ate crab dip out of a plastic container or the floor of an emptied-out apartment on my 33rd birthday, playing music on a phone while it rained outside.

When the world did open up again, we returned to restaurants in earnest, and we started a list on Jesse’s phone of everywhere we ate together. It grew and grew (and is still growing), from Akar to Zona Cucina; point to a restaurant now, and I’ll chime in with a memory — some tasty, some awful, some funny. Beef bacon. An unexpected deejay. Otherworldly trout. That crazy-clear block of cocktail ice.

One night, a year and a half ago, before we were even engaged, Jesse and I went out for an evening walk. We wanted to grab a drink at one of our favorite restaurants, Maketto, but when we arrived, there was a sign on the door: closed for a wedding. We made eye contact, and I’m not sure who said it first: “We should have our wedding here.” We went home, and we sent a few emails, and before long, we were telling our parents we’d picked out a venue. There was no ring on my finger, but we were already thinking about sharing a place we loved to eat — sharing bao buns and passionfruit-rum cocktails and shiny little shrimp dumplings — with the people we loved the most. The ring came a few months later, and then we jumped the gun and got married, too, and next weekend, finally, we’re hosting the dinner party of our dreams.

So maybe that’s why this is all on my mind, food and love and perfect meals. The older I get, the more I think those should all feel like versions of the same thing. And I’m not sure I’d have realized that if it hadn’t been for all those terrible good dinners. Without them, maybe I’d take perfect meals for granted.

Food is wonderful, and wonderful food is even better, and getting to eat wonderful food with wonderful people is just about all you could ever ask for.