Issue 50 - The taste of New York City
MARCH 2023
The days in New York City were so bright. The light had a quality to it. The clarity and the colour, of the sky and the sidewalk and the electric bar signs. Steam rising in clouds from the drains, a cold, biting wind between sky scrapers. A world away from my work in London with its grey muggy chill, from the island in Wales I call home and its overcast beaches.
We visited people we supply with our products. Restaurants who bought our sea salt to sprinkle atop their expensive entrees, confectioners who used our it to finish their perfectly rectangular chocolate caramels.
There was a jewel-box of a shop on the Upper West Side, that sold only spices, bitters and salts from the world over, with a single, wooden table running through the store, dense with decadent, fragrant flowers. The server was so excited to meet us – the purveyors of a product they were so fond of – that the visit was charmingly awkward. We tasted bitters upon bitters for what seemed like hours - from lime coriander to housewife’s grapefruit – each drop more puckering than the last.
Then there was a cheese store so trendy it hurt. An afternoon spent tempting the neighbourhood’s athleisureweared occupants to buy our gourmet sea salt alongside their slivers of extortionate, wax-papered Quicke’s cheddar and goat’s milk caramels. We got lost on the way to the subway in this edgy part of town, our loud footsteps emphasising the tourists that we were.
In between work appointments, we ate.
Bagels spread with cream cheese and ‘everything’ seasoning. Shitty fruit in the 24 hour hotel lounge when our jetlag demanded it. Salads that were fully customizable to our every single whim, and yet almost utterly tasteless. There was a weird, flaccid vegan meal in the middle of Manhattan followed by a perfect, salty, toothsome plate of cacio a pepe far too late at night.
There were donuts, oh there were donuts. Cracked snow-white glazed, matcha creamed, yuzu curded. And potato chips, glistening with oil, flecked with dill, eaten greedily by the bag outside in the crisp sunshine.
There were tiny, airy fish-shaped pastries stuffed with chocolate, amidst cheap suitcases on the sidewalks of China Town. In Tribeca, there were warm, macademia studded cookies with buttery rivulets of white chocolate. Vats of pickles, in every shape and size, heat and colour, open to the elements for pick and mix jars downtown. Gigantic slices of pizza, served on paper plates atop checked tablecloths, with shakers of chilli flakes and slicks of rather evil-looking but wonderful tasting scarlet oil.
We drank coffee, from takeaway cups in our hotel rooms, from achingly sexy cafes downwind of the high line. From bowls without handles in a ‘European’ café, from a Brooklyn joint where people were too cool to look you in the eye when they took your cash.
And, we drank. Natural orange wine in dark pizzerias, expensively chilled mineral water in the mornings, Campari spritzes outside oyster bars by the roadside, sweetened iced tea on a hangover.
One day, we filed into a bar/restaurant in a ridiculously expensive part of town for a meeting. I felt dressed the part, settling into the few days of glamour so apart from my day to day life. The handsome waiter took notice of my new, nipped-in coat. Asked if I’d been in before. It was too much, but I enjoyed it.
I spoke to the chef, who we had come to meet. He wore a strange t-shirt and a very serious expression.
Looking back, it was obvious that he was interested.
He was attentive, concerned that everything was right, there were lots of questions about our trip so far. We were shown inside the kitchen – the immaculate pass, the stairs plastered with memes to make sure you didn’t slip. It was dark, even in the daylight. He ordered coffees from the barista next door – the kind so caffeinated that you immediately feel like you’ve downed two cocktails on an empty stomach.
We returned the next night for an event with press and customers of ours. He was cooking at the chef's table, dipping live prawns in tempura and then screaming vegetable oil. He served them spread on a platter, dressed with lemon and our own salt. I avoided them in as polite a way as I could as he watched.
As the evening drew to a close, he asked if I was vegetarian (yes) and then if my dad would mind if he took me out (a first).
It was already late. We started in a bar that felt every inch as it was from the movies. Towering ceilings, hundreds of backlit bottles. Japanese whiskey, English gin. Walls in a deep shade of red. He asked what I wanted from life. Complimented the depth of my eyes. Asked what dishes I liked. What I thought of the city.
Then, a comedy club. One where so many of my favourite faces had started life. He pulled two cans of Pale Blue Ribbon and a sticky square of sweet lemon cake from a paper bag. We giggled and drank and nibbled.
Next, a jazz bar in the small hours. Sprawling, underground, damp and heady. I fell asleep on a stranger's shoulder, my Brooklyn lager spilling over the edge of the glass I couldn’t keep level. We kissed for so long, and my jet lag was so real, that I genuinely couldn’t be sure if any of it was really happening.
The next evening, I was back at his table for another press dinner. Work that was undeniably also pleasure. We started with popcorn, an American staple lifted to new heights with the addition of a powder seasoning both sweet and savoury, just the right amount of spice to make you need a sip of something cold and hoppy (a recipe borrowed from his grandfather)
As the food began to arrive, the server let slip that my menu was markedly different to everybody else's. What he was unaware of was that it featured several of the dishes I'd casually mentioned as a favourite the evening before. There was rich, creamy poutine, an array of bitter leaves, excellently dressed and finished with candied citrus. Burrata, the kind that was so milky, so fresh, that you could cry. A bowl of salt-encrusted chips that made you feel as though everything was going to be OK.
I turned a deeper crimson with the arrival of each dish, drinking so deeply from the incredibly salty, acidic gimlets, that I lost track of the following deliciously seasoned plates that came to the table.
When I returned to my hotel room that night, somehow both thirsty and satisfied, there was a small, bright bunch of flowers in the corner of my bedroom and a card with his name and number.
It was official, I had fallen in love with New York.
Sweet bitter
Since I've shared an article on New York City, here are a handful of my favourite lines from Sweetbitter, the debut novel by Stephanie Danler:
“She belonged to herself only. She had edges, boundaries, tastes, definition down to her eyelashes. And when she walked it was clear she knew where she was going.”
“I had a ritual—and having any ritual sounded so mature that I told everyone about it, even the regulars. On my days off I woke up late and went to the coffee shop and had a cappuccino and read. Then around five p.m., when the light was failing, I would take out a bottle of dry sherry and pour myself a glass, take out a jar of green olives, put on Miles Davis, and read the wine atlas. I didn't know why it felt so luxurious, but one day I realized that ritual was why I had moved to New York—to eat olives and get tipsy and read about Nebbiolo while the sun set. I had created a life that was bent in service to all my personal cravings.”
“So—some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning.”
Good Things to click on
Last month, I did a Welsh language course at Nant Gwrtheyrn, good god it's beautiful
Jaya sent me this and it made me cry
A recipe for dark chocolate, clementine and sea salt Welshcakes (they are ludicrously easy I promise)
I'm a big advocate of growing these indoors
'Getting stabbed in the neck is a first person story' - an interview with Salman Rushdie