Finding Escape in Food and in Fiction
As the second year of our pandemic winds down, I find myself hard pressed to think back fondly on the year just passed. It’s true we had the joy of seeing our daughter graduate from Barnard and start a challenging job, but we could not go to a ceremony and we watched her on a giant TV screen. She started her job, albeit remotely in her new apartment. I count ourselves fortunate that the Chef and I and our children were in good health, but I find myself turning to this article by Adam Grant, one of the most read articles of the 2021 New York Times, to encapsulate how I feel: languishing. Not exactly depressed, but not joyful and not making significant progress. I have loving reliable family members, friends, challenging work and absorbing hobbies, but it’s hard to concentrate, and I do not feel like the usual Nancy whose tail, no matter what ills befall, is set to wag. No, I am hang dog. In fact, speaking of hanging, my curly Nancy hair went straight about three months ago. Just like that. Not a single bounce, just as there is no bounce in my step these grey days.
But there are two things that have never let me down in the foggy, saggy-baggy year just past, and those are stories—whether in novels or short stories or on TV—and food. Even in those first terrible weeks after my sister’s brain bleed and after her death, it was reading that got me through. Night after night I escaped into the stories of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano who broods by his favorite olive tree, fights reliably with his girlfriend Livia , and also, reliably, stops in the middle of an investigation to eat four red mullets at his favorite trattoria. And like Montalbano I could still be transported by the Chef’s culinary creations.
So as COVID-19 has closed in and created a sense of limited options and claustrophobia, fiction has proved as reliable an escape hatch as ever. In the past two weeks it was a joy to be swept into a the fascinating and multi-faceted family of dysfunctional Presbyterians circa 1971 Illinois thanks to Jonathan Franzen’s masterful Crossroads. Before that I swooned over Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where are You? Here this young author performed the magic feat of explicating the emotional tenor of entire scenes without once telling us what was in her characters’ heads; we just knew, from the incisive dialogue, a glance, the way one character crossed a room. Isheguro’s Klara and the Sun made me ache with sadness for an AI helper and Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This (which everyone was talking about) plunged me into the “metaverse,” often with hilarious effect, before we knew what it was (and I’m still not sure). Lily King’s collection of stories Five Tuesdays in Winter got me through at least five days in winter. If I ever write a story, I want it to be like her “When in the Dordogne,” in which she drops us into the life of an awkward wealthy tween and his college-aged house sitters who give him a sense of freedom and the courage to be himself while his stilted, unstable parents are off in the Dordogne one summer. As soon as I enter her stories I am captivated, and this has been my experience of every one of her novels.
So if you worship at the altar of fiction as I do, the 200-year-old Center for Fiction, now located in a light filled glassy space across from BAM in Brooklyn, is your temple. During lockdown I attended so many of their virtual events, excellent writer talks, including this one on Shirley Hazzard’s brilliant, difficult The Transit of Venus (a novel worth reading, rereading and then reading again) and Lily King’s interview of Gabriel Byrne on his oh-so-Irish memoir Walking with Ghosts. So, on a whim I paid what seemed like a pricy membership fee in the spring of 2021 only to have us be swept up in Delta Variant and be unable to use in and work in their library. Finally, I visited the member spaces in November and what a haven! You are surrounded by novels from high ceiling to floor and the rooms are filled with light. Particularly charming in the library rooms are the shelves of old clothbound books of authors I’ve never heard of before, perhaps popular authors in their day, worthy second-, third- or fourth-raters, in with today’s Patricia Lockwoods and Jonathan Franzens and Ben Lerners. Yet, at the same time as the shelves bulge with hoary old series no one will ever read, Center for Fiction cafe area has a “short story dispenser,” which dispenses stories in scrolls the size of CVS receipts. The one I got was surprisingly good, “An Urban Legend,” by Arielle Maidon.
Tastes of Mexico Near BAM and BBG
Tacombi: While Center for Fiction has a lovely cafe next to the downstairs bookstore, I can’t exactly eat the luscious Budapest cake for lunch. I headed across the street to the sleekly retro-designed Tacombi, which you can see out the bookstore window. Even though their tacos are a little pricy, compared to the average authentic taqueria, I like this Yucateco Mexican chain because the fare is reliably excellent and they offer a pared down menu; it’s nice to have limited options. For lunch I had one taco “al pastor,” ($4.49) because I cannot resist the combination of pork and pineapple, and then a baja crispy fish taco ($6.49), with beer-battered chunks of Alaskan cod. Tacombi rightly brags about the quality of its Hermosa Vista tortillas, made of nixtamalized corn (by treating the corn with lime, nixtamalized tortillas are both more flavorful and nutritious). However, I wish they’d give you TWO tortillas per taco. I asked my waitress if I could have another, to better handle the ample ingredients. The owner came over and seemed incensed, as if I was impugning the quality of the tortillas. “No,” I said, whining a little. “I just need two to keep everything from falling out!” Most street taquerias give you two tortilla tacos, so why can’t Tacombi? But that’s my only grouse! Another + for Tacombi. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, it has combatted food insecurity by distributing 4,250 thousand wholesome Mexican meals a week through its Tacombi Community Kitchen.
Chavela’s: For a true Mexico City experience, you can stay in the borough but go to lively Franklin Avenue in Prospect Heights. We came to this restaurant after strolling through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Lightscape that city-critic Ginia Bellafonte had called “the therapy we need” in our pandemic times. But I think Chavela’s was truly the therapy I needed. Every detail— from the lovely Mexican Anfora plates with patterns of swirls and birds to the rosy lights and the muy amable waitstaff made me feel like I was back in Mexico City.
We started with Taquitos de Cangrejo ($9.00), four crispy taquitos in a pool of salsa verde, stuffed with fresh chunks of white crabmeat, daubed with chunky guacamole and piquant pico de Gallo. We shared a chicken “Tinga” tostada ($5.00) piled high with refried beans, lettuce, queso and crema. My chicken tortilla soup was a perfect mix of taste and texture, with mouthfuls of crispy tortilla strips and chewy, tasty shredded pollo, all flavored by lime and tons of tomatillo. Highlights of the “Platos fuertos” were Richard’s “Molcajete de carnetas” ($18). Indeed, the slow roasted chunks of pork came in an actual molcajete, a mortar carved of volcanic rock. The melt-in-your mouth pork was nestled with avocado, nopales, queso fresco and a “salsa borracha,” that translates to drunken salsa, because it is made with Mexican beer. Julie ordered the Costillas, braised pork short ribs, with mole sauce. I have to say, the Chef’s mole sauce is damn good but there is a dark richness that my British-Italian Chef can’t duplicate and, again, there was that fall-off-the-bone pork. Bathed in the party lights of Chavela’s, sated after a satiny Mexican flan, I vowed I would ditch New York City next year. That our family would spend Christmas in Mexico City. But I don’t have to wait until next year to explore Mexico City D.F. I can start, as always, with a story. This one, The Interior Circuit, by Francisco Goldman looks intriguing…
Tacombi
25 Lafayette Avenue (near Fulton)
347-294-0647
Chavela’s
736 Franklin Avenue (near Sterling Place)
718-622-3100