Good morning. I miss restaurants. I miss the bustle of them when everyone in them is in sync, from the customers in the dining room to the cooks in the kitchen, the hosts and captains and servers seeing around corners, hospitality phasers set to stun. I miss the clatter and hum, the music of conversation, the sense of possibility. I miss the people-watching, and the food.
I want to be in the basement of Mission Chinese when it was on Orchard Street in Manhattan, the madness of the dining room crowded as if for a punk show in someone’s loft, everyone drunk on tingly-numbing kung pao pastrami, sharing plates with strangers. I want to walk into Marc Forgione in TriBeCa just to breathe in the scent of the place, crowded with date-nighters splitting chickens and a bottle of wine. Later, I want to walk over to the East Village, and hug my friends at Prune. I want to sit by the woodstove at Joe Beef in Montreal while the snow piles up outside, and I want to wait in flip-flops and darkness for a seat at Hangari Kalguksu in Los Angeles, noodle-frantic, prepared for pork.
Instead, this. It can be pretty good for those of us cooking well and happily, for the family, genetic or chosen, with whom we are bound. You might make that crowd a rhubarb macaroon tart (above), or serve a platter of braised lamb shanks with lemon. Will it be baked cod with crunchy miso-butter bread crumbs this evening? Japanese soufflé pancakes to start the day? Accompany luncheon celery toasts with potato salad? Choices abound, if you have the ingredients and the mouths to feed. (If you don’t have the ingredients, improvise. That cod would be pretty good with flounder or chicken, with tofu, with defrosted turkey cutlets.)
But let’s take a moment to acknowledge, there are plenty of us quarantined alone or close to it, in no mood or position to take full advantage of large-format feeds. What if you’re cooking for one? Tejal Rao talked to the chef Anita Lo about that a while back, and scored us a delicious recipe for cauliflower chaat in the process. The article is worth a read. There are also the joys of the omelet to consider. A red lentil soup you could lunch on for a week — or for two days, freezing the rest for a week or two hence. And don’t begrudge yourself a single cheeseburger, made exactly to your liking, as Janis Joplin sings “Turtle Blues” beside you. That can define self-care.
Thousands and thousands more ideas for recipes you can scale down or up are on NYT Cooking. Many more than usual are free for the using, even if you’re not yet a subscriber. (Naturally, we’d be pleased if you did subscribe, all the same.)
Visit us on Instagram while you’re at it, and find us on Twitter for news. Here’s our Scott Loitsch making bread for the very first time, on YouTube. Would you consider joining our community group on Facebook? It’s pretty fun. And you can reach us directly if something goes wrong along the way, either with your cooking or our technology. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com and we will get back to you.
Now, it’s nothing to do with ham sandwiches and coconut macaroons, but you know what’s great? Kevin Kline in “Present Laughter,” which you can stream on PBS.
I’m late to it, but Simon Ressner, a battalion chief with the Fire Department of New York, based in central Brooklyn, wrote a heartbreaking diary of a day’s work in the time of coronavirus, for ProPublica, that I think you ought to read.
Hey, it’s our Priya Krishna with a fun and very Priya-ish Grub Street Diet.
Finally, tarpon are in trouble. But, man, it’d be good to be fishing. I’ll be back on Wednesday.
