From the Editor’s Desk: Eat (Premium)

Last Thursday afternoon, my wife and I headed into Philadelphia for an appointment at the Mexican consulate, where we were granted temporary residency in the country, allowing us to stay there for longer than 180 days at a time. It was a rainy, dreary, and stressful day, and so we decided to relax after our appointment at a nearby restaurant that I had previously starred in Google Maps for a drink and a snack before making the 90-minute slog home in the dark.

It was 4 pm and so the place was mostly empty, and the happy hour menu was … interesting. It featured tinned fish, country pate, duck rillettes, liver mousse tart, and pickled vegetables, all of which are unusual and, I’d guess, not particularly popular with most people. But this menu was curiously perfect for me, seemed almost custom-made for me, as this is exactly the type of thing I like to eat. Indeed, I am infamous among my friends, who consider my love of things like sweetbreads, Andouillette (basically pork stuffed into pork intestines), steak tartare, and the like to be strange if not somewhat suspicious.

I don’t know how this happened. I grew up in what can only be described as a normal, middle-class American household, and we ate out very rarely, and only on special occasions. But I do have specific food memories, steps that got me to where I am today.

I recall being at a fancy restaurant, where we had been forced to dress up, and tasting the curiously pale butter on some bread. At home, my family followed the incredibly misguided food advice of the day, and we used easily spread, bright yellow margarine on our whole grain bread. But this was the real thing.

“What … what is this?” I asked my parents, astonished.

“That’s butter,” one of them answered, adding, “real butter.”

“Why don’t we have this at home?”

“Because it’s not good for you.”

“I don’t care. We should always have this.”

I had a similar experience a few years later when my family arrived at a rented cottage on Cape Cod—our vacations were, with rare exception, short, local, and drivable—and, famished, opened the refrigerator to discover just a single item inside: a big jar of curiously large pickles. I asked my parents whether it was OK to eat them—the only pickles I had experienced to that date were small, sweet pickles—and was given the OK, but with a warning.

“You’re not going to like them,” my mother told me. “They’re not like the pickles you’re used to.”

She was right about that latter bit, but I loved these large, dill pickles, with their mouth-puckering sourness, and I once again asked why we never had such a thing at home. By this point, I suspect my parents were counting down the days until I was ready to fly on my own. Regardless, I was headed down a path of steadily escalating food experiences, as I broke away from the limitations imposed on me by my incurious parents.

As an adult, we graduated into international cuisine of various kinds, thanks in large part to European travel, multicourse dinners, and, to many Americans, ever more unusual foods. The first time I tried sushi, interestingly, was at the Internet Explorer 4.0 launch in San Francisco, where I tailed Bill Gates around the expo floor, surprised that he wasn’t taller, and hoping for some usable B-roll. But I didn’t like the sushi: indeed, I channel Tom Hanks eating caviar in the movie Big and couldn’t get it out of my mouth fast enough. But on a later work trip, also to San Francisco, my boss demanded that I give sushi another shot, God bless her, and that day I loved everything I tried, save the eel, which I still don’t like to this day. It’s been a love affair ever since.

Writing this, I’m reminded of a more recent experience at my favorite sushi haunt in Dedham, Massachusetts several years ago, before we moved to Pennsylvania. My friend Charlie and I would often spend long Friday afternoons at the sushi bar while our friend and sushi chef treated us to a seemingly never-ending series of inventive off-the-menu dishes, or omakase. On this particular day, someone sat down near us at the bar, alone, with a plate from the restaurant’s incredible buffet. And then he ordered one thing, and only one thing, from the sushi chef.

Intrigued by this, we had to know what it was. And so when the man left, we asked, and we were told he had gotten a single piece of uni—sea urchin—in a gunkin (battleship) style roll. So we ordered two. Charlie immediately did his best Tom Hanks impression, echoing my first sushi experience and describing it—sorry—as having the consistency of snot. But I loved it. And one of the things I always appreciated about this sushi chef is that he would never serve me uni that had started to go bad, when it takes on a metallic taste. I have not been so lucky at other establishments.

This month, I’ve written about some other addiction-related topics—drinking and videogames—and I probably have a few more in me. But food is interesting in that the escalation in quality over the years hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm for simpler foods. I enjoy garbage like Doritos Locos Tacos from Taco Bell or KFC fried chicken (always dark meat, always original recipe) as much as I do sushi or other expensive foods. This may have a lot to do with the addictive nature of processed foods, I guess, but I’d like to think there’s some kind of culinary nostalgia at play too. Every once in a while you just want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, right?

But there have been problems. During the pandemic, we did what we could to support our favorite local restaurants as much as possible and quickly settled into a schedule in which we’d get sushi to go and then have one night out (when the restaurants reopened) at our very favorite spot each week. Depending on your perspective, this may or may not sound like a lot, but each meal was expensive—$120 or more, each—and we were also tipping a lot more than usual. So we had gone from having sushi once every month or two to having it every single week. And by the time the pandemic started winding down, we weren’t sure how we could get off that treadmill without hurting some feelings.

We did, eventually, slow down both the amount of food we got and the tipping. And today, that $120 weekly sushi run is a $40 meal done less frequently. As it turns out, a simple $5 roll is about as enjoyable as a piece of nigiri—a slab of fish on top of some rice—which can cost $5 each or more, and it goes a lot further. We’ll save the more expensive stuff for more occasional or celebratory events.

There are other issues around food, of course, and the impact that it can have on your body and your health. That’s a big and contentious topic, and if my reading of the country’s leading newspapers is any guide, one where the advice changes almost daily. For now, I’m just happy to have come down from the pandemic-era craziness. We’re back on the right track.