Writing about dining and drink in New York City since 2007, I partly grew up in New Jersey, in suburbs of NYC since the 1990s, so I knew the region intimately. I can still navigate NYC subways and neighborhoods easily, with decades exploring its hidden gems, museums, tea houses, jazz clubs, bookstores and old haunts. I’ve eaten and tasted at literally hundreds of restaurants, cafes and bars here over the decades.
The great Gramercy Tavern was one of my first fine dining experiences. Back in the aughts at Marcus Samuelsson’s Aquavit, I first fell in love with Scandinavian food (and already loved aquavit from numerous cocktail bars serving it at home in SF. Likewise I was not at all smitten with David Chang’s Momofuku. I was even at Angel’s Share in the late 1990s as a girl, then Milk and Honey (now Attaboy) just after it first opened in 2000 and Sasha Petraske (RIP) was running it, both kickstarting the cocktail speakeasy trend that is still trickling down to many cities almost 30 years later.
My parents lived in NJ well beyond my departure to LA solo at age 18 to start my own life. For summers and Christmases through the mid-aughts, I went back a couple times a year with family and friends a good 15 years. I’ve visited most every year since, sometimes more. My history of NYC articles are linked to here, starting with the most recent.
When I Fell in Love with New York
I’ve talked about this for decades, one of those defining moments that sets the backdrop for your whole life. Like millions the world over, I’ve had many times where I fell in love with NYC, from film and books, to all the real life memories that defined my high school years as we saw Broadway plays, did all the NY holiday “things” from Fifth Avenue windows to the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
When we first moved those few thousand long miles, road tripping across the country from LA/OC, NJ was a strange and bleak land for me. I was suddenly isolated from the world compared to the Mediterranean-esque beaches of Laguna and nightly Disneyland fireworks I’d go to bed to in OC over my elementary school years… years defined by sun, community, family warm and magical sunsets and endless hours dreaming and creating as a homeschooled girl. But in NJ at age 14, homeschool became isolating and vastly lonely. The forests and dated strip mall culture of North Jersey felt cut off from everyone and life itself.
We drove to NYC from Newark airport that first night we all arrived, our NJ house not yet being ready to move into. Our trusty family station wagon made it the 3000 cross-country miles. As all six of us took the circular drive from the woods of Jersey to the sudden panorama of the Manhattan skyline just before we entered the Lincoln Tunnel, I immediately put my hand over my heart with a steep intake of breath.
Sheltered from the world in one way, as a homeschooled, evangelical church girl little exposed to “the ways of the world,” I was also an old school from the beginning, connected deeply to dark and layered books, films and songs as I was to the magical and dreamy. And I sure wasn’t a small town girl. In addition to our first couple years living in East LA county, I’d grown up visiting aunt and uncle and great aunts and uncles regularly around LA, exploring its vastness and many millions population. Yet seeing Manhattan was like witnessing a city for the first time.
I felt only further enamoured as all six of us crashed in my father’s midtown apartment that night, where he’d been living the prior six months, as it took us that long to sell our SoCal home during a rare SoCal housing slump, as he had to start work at his NYC radio station. Me and my three siblings camped out on the living room floor. My lifelong insomnia already showed early signs as I sat up half the night while my sister, brothers and parents slept.
We were in a midtown highrise, some 30 floors up. I sat up past 3am watching ceaseless yellow cabs flow by, honking horns, loud and lively with midtown traffic all night. The city that never sleeps, indeed. Sitting there, I wrote a letter to my best friend, a sadly lost art form I devoted countless high school hours to (in fact, I often wrote my best friend letters so long I had to mail them as stacks in manila envelopes).
I wrote of my fascination with the City, its life and energy, its wonder and people, its architecture and lights. This was just the beginning. Wait until I dug into its art and music, its hidden restaurants, bars and bookshops, its museums and theaters, its history and diversity, its neighborhoods and vast streets, especially its people from every corner of the world, making it the great American beating heart that it is. Exploring and falling in love with it as teens with my lifelong best friend was a bond that unified us as sisters and lovers of “The City.”
My love for the world was birthed in the books, music, films and poetry of my youth. But it burst into flames in New York City. Here, it became embodied, as incarnational as the Christ of my faith, the symbol of the Divine in the pulsing, beating flesh.
Read the rest on Substack: NYC’s Gifts to the World