It’s the way a matzo bowl stares back at you at a Jewish Deli, it’s the cutting taste of a Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Soda to wash it down. It’s Balthazar on a Sunday night when it’s just late enough for all the tourists to leave and all the locals of Soho to creep down from their lofts to sip wine like it’s 1999. It’s the moment you realize the barbacoa in Corona is damn near something you’d find in Texcoco. It’s the slightly nostalgic tinge of walking past Russ & Daughters and remembering when you too, thought it was worth waiting in line.
It’s a martini at Bemelmans Bar and a 10am pint of beer beside the professional drinkers at Milano’s. It’s the way places you loved to grab a cheap cup of coffee or a bagel smear disappear so quickly you wonder if they were ever there at all. It’s the way the old Chinese lady hawks celery stalks and watches at the same stall as your brain simultaneously processes the scent of dried ginseng from the adjacent market.
It’s all the trains that connect you to all the Uzbek plov in Rego, adobo in Jackson, lechón in the Bronx or whatever mini vacation you decide to take on some idle Sunday in October.
It’s that place you met that girl that’s now your wife that’s now closed and feels like it existed like all of New York feels like it exists, only for you.
