Brooklyn in Love Read online

  Also by Amy Thomas

  Paris, My Sweet

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  Copyright © 2018 by Amy Thomas

  Cover and internal design © 2018 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Jennifer K. B. Davis

  Cover illustration © Gary Hovland

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over a period of time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been re-created.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Excerpt from Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan, copyright © 2013 by Michael Pollan. Used by permission of Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Thomas, Amy

  Title: Brooklyn in love : a delicious memoir of food, family, and finding yourself / Amy Thomas.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017015545 | (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Dinners and dining. | Restaurants--New York (State)--New York. | Thomas, Amy, 1971--Travel. | Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)

  Classification: LCC TX737 .T48 2018 | DDC 641.59747/1--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015545

  For Andrew and the peanut.

  For making every step, every bite, and every breath more complete.

  And to all the chefs, bakers, barmen and women, and restaurateurs who unknowingly made our story so rich and shared your own words and time with me.

  “And in almost every dish, you can find, besides the culinary ingredients, the ingredients of a story: a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

  —Michael Pollan, Cooked

  “All dreams are crazy. Until they come true.”

  —Nike ad

  Author’s Note

  Memory is a tricky thing. This is our story as best as I remember, corroborated by Andrew. But it’s been written, alternately, under the influence of sugar or alcohol, in a food coma, or with postnatal hormones surging through my body, and some details may be blurred as a result.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  Part 1: First Comes Love

  Chapter 1: Alternative American Apple Pie

  Chapter 2: The Intricacies of Artichokes

  Chapter 3: Revelatory Chicken

  Chapter 4: Forty Turns of the Carrot Grinder

  Chapter 5: The Perfect Home (Fries)

  Part 2: Then Comes Marriage

  Chapter 6: Decadent Duck

  Chapter 7: Hot Toddy to the Rescue

  Chapter 8: Make Mine a Double (Scoop)

  Chapter 9: It’s Not a Party without Cake

  Chapter 10: I’ll Take a Manhattan

  Part 3: Then Comes Baby and the $1,000 Carriage

  Chapter 11: All Hail the Kale Salad

  Chapter 12: Pounding Cookies by the Half Pound

  Chapter 13: Afternoon Delights

  List of Eateries

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  Introduction

  In the fall of 2008, fate walked through my office door.

  At the time, I was an associate creative director at the New York office of an international ad agency. A thirtysomething career woman with an active social and dating life, I also moonlighted as a food and travel writer. I dined out more often than I ate in and was obsessed with chocolate, pastries, and all things sweet. Life was good. And then in a Hollywood-scripted moment, the in-house recruiter of my agency asked me what I thought of Paris. Our office there was looking for an English-speaking writer to work on one of France’s most iconic luxury marques: Louis Vuitton. Single and thirty-six, afflicted with Francophilia and wanderlust, it took but a moment to decide bien sûr!

  So began two dreamy years in the City of Light (and Dark Chocolate). I built an award-winning portfolio of work and, even better, I got to eat warm pain aux raisins for breakfast every day. My commute was hopping on one the city’s bikes, the Vélib’s, and riding through the Place de la Concorde and up the Champs-Élysées to a stunning Haussmann building with Eiffel Tower views. On the weekends, I tried cooking classes, toured historic boulangeries, and walked miles and miles until the city was mine. With France’s generous holiday and vacation policies, I traveled to Portugal, Belgium, England, Italy, and the charming villages and ancient cities throughout France. And the biggest triumph of all was realizing my own personal dream: getting a book contract, which would share some of those very adventures I was having in Paris.

  But after three successive contract renewals with my agency, I opted out. I decided I was too old to settle permanently in a foreign city. As wonderful as Paris was, I missed my friends and family back in the States. My carefree life of bicycling and pastry binging in Paris probably wouldn’t get any better; maybe I should quit before the Parisians’ maddening ability to make things difficult started bringing me down. I deliberated, vacillated and, in a move as bittersweet as when I packed up for Paris, I rewound five time zones, swapping macarons and croissants for cookies and doughnuts, and returned to my job and life in New York.

  It wasn’t an easy transition. In fact, I found repatriating harder than moving abroad. It took me longer to settle back into my comfort zone than it did to adjust to moving to Paris in the first place. I could never shake the sense of being stuck between two cities and loves. Besides, how do you top a life filled with French fashion advertising, daily pastry sampling, and dinners and parties among the chicest human specimens on Earth? After the golden glow of Paris’s limestone boulevards, the romantic promise of it all, New York appeared gray, dingy, and harsh.

  With a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity behind me and major life goal accomplished, I realized that I had not only closed a chapter of my life, but also seemingly finished the entire first act. Pre-Paris, I had been at the height of my swinging, single thirties. Now, after a couple years romping around Europe, I was staring at the abyss of middle age. Pre-Paris, I had been so focused on getting a book published; now it was written, my mission complete. Pre-Paris, I had been cranking away in advertising without any intentional goals or finish lines. Now, I realized, I’d be hard-pressed to find any accounts at any ad agencies that were better than Louis Vuitton, and my career’s fini
sh line seemed uncomfortably close.

  On the cusp of forty, I started doing some major soul-searching. If my first act was over, what was act two supposed to look like? A new career? A move to Brooklyn? Another book? Should I cash in all my chips and go on an open-ended, around-the-world adventure? For the first time in eons, I didn’t have the answers or a focus. There were no urgent needs or goals. All the go-go-go ambition and adrenaline that had sustained me for two decades risked being relegated to my past. Plodding along in corporate advertising, I felt myself fading to irrelevance and craving something new.

  Once the love of my life, New York wasn’t getting my heart racing the way it once had—not like food still did. Food was more than a personal obsession and the means to a cushy moonlight gig. It helped chronicle my relationship with the city in which I lived. It was how I organized my itinerary when I traveled. It grounded my social life and became the lens through which I saw and made sense of everything. And it was about to become the landmark for everything that happened in my life.

  PART 1

  First Comes Love

  CHAPTER 1

  Alternative American Apple Pie

  New York City. Ask people what they love about it, and you’ll get any one of a million answers: Broadway shows, world-class restaurants, incredible museums, inspiring architecture. Little Italy, Central Park, SoHo, Wall Street. Top of the Rock, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge. Piano bars, sports bars, cocktail bars, dive bars. Diversity, energy, glamour, history. Shopping, boozing, people watching, dancing the night away. Cannoli, cookies, and cupcakes everywhere.

  And when you live in the 8.5-million-person metropolis, there are even more nuanced and magical things to love. Dog walkers who deftly carry the leashes of six different-size breeds, all trotting down the street in sync. Window-shopping at Bergdorf Goodman and bargain hunting at Century 21. Kamikaze bicyclists who deliver your pad thai, saag paneer, or spicy tuna rolls at all hours, in any kind of weather. Obsessing about real estate. The way the rising or setting sun cascades down the skyrocketing buildings. Greasy egg sandwiches from the corner bodegas—so dirty but so delicious. The New York Times’ Sunday Styles section, the New York Post’s over-the-top headlines, and Pat Kiernan on NY1. Dining as a competitive sport. The scientists, chefs, poets, entrepreneurs, and socialites on the Ninety-Second Street Y’s program.

  Yet when I returned to New York in the winter of 2011, after two years of working, eating, and embracing joie de vivre in Paris, I wasn’t feeling the love. Trying to reacclimatize in the bitterly cold, undeniably filthy city, I couldn’t shake my ennui. I couldn’t shed the weight I had put on in my final feeding frenzy in Paris, convinced as I had been that I would never have the opportunity to eat freshly baked pain au chocolat or hot and melty Nutella street crepes again. And I couldn’t evade New York’s germs. As soon as I recovered from one illness, I’d get sick all over again, attracting ailments and allergies I’d been immune to my whole life. It wasn’t the triumphant homecoming I had envisioned.

  More than just feeling physically out of sorts, I felt emotionally adrift. Coming home after two intensely profound and fulfilling years in the most beautiful city in the world was harder than moving abroad to a city where I knew no one. There was no distraction of a foreign culture, no challenge of learning a new language or meeting new people, and no promise of what might be. There was no French romance. I was back in familiar territory, among people, places, and things I knew and had always loved…and yet everything had changed—most of all me.

  I had seen, smelled, and tasted new worlds in France. As full as I was with these fresh memories and the wonderful relationships I had developed along the way, they left me with a new emptiness. I was here, they were over there, and all those magical, transformative experiences would never be again. Poof, history—an era of my life gone—and I had been the one to bring it to an end.

  It was also difficult because everything in New York had changed in the two years I had been gone. At the agency I returned to, colleagues had been laid off during the financial crisis and the company restructured. Friends had left the city for suburban pastures. And seemingly everyone on the island of Manhattan had gotten married and had a baby. Each change and event was relatively small but added up to a seismic shift in the world I once knew. Everything I remembered that once made me happy now made me uncomfortable. I had pined for New York while in Paris, but now that I was back, I was out of sorts. I was divided, emotionally amiss. My heart belonged to two cities, and now neither of them was entirely home.

  • • •

  Feeling chubby, frumpy, and constantly sick, it wasn’t exactly a sizzling dating phase. Nights out with my best friend of thirty years, AJ—who was my partner in crime the years before leaving for Paris but had since gotten hitched and had a baby—were now few and far between. AJ and I did get out for the occasional cocktail, which sometimes led to a late-night flirtation or make-out session in the back of some Meatpacking District club, but mostly my dating life limped along. There was the lawyer—a very decent, kind man, to be sure, but who had such a schlumpy, downtrodden air about him that I was depressed three sips into our first date. The Jersey Boy straight out of central casting with rippling muscles, tats, waxed brows, and perfect veneers, which should have made me swoon but instead just made me giggle. And the supercool Yale alum who was just my speed of preppy and intellectual, and with whom I had several interesting dates—a retro movie at Film Forum, a slow stroll through the Museum of the City of New York, tea in the afternoon. But when the fourth date ended with another deliberately chaste kiss, I realized my passion for him would be best directed elsewhere.

  And passion I had in reserves. Dear God, I was bursting with it. I had been secretly keeping track in my head and could no longer deny the sad fact: I hadn’t had sex in over a year. Every time I watched Sex and the City reruns—as I was wont to do while devouring a pint of Ben & Jerry’s on all those cold winter nights, nursing my various colds, ailments, and steadily shrinking ego—I was in awe of the glut of fun, eligible men parading through Carrie’s, Miranda’s, Charlotte’s, and, of course, Samantha’s lives. Such variety. Such intrigue and promise. Such testosterone! What had happened in the past ten years? Where did a sister need to go to get laid in New York in 2011?

  One night over dinner at Porsena, a small Italian restaurant in the East Village, I recounted my dating misadventures to my friend Joe. The consummate New York bachelor, he was fortysomething, well-to-do, and had impossibly high standards. Joe liked smart, cultured, accomplished women—they just also had to have the face of a Bulgarian fashion model and the body of a yoga instructor, the last point being most essential to him. When he suggested that my teeny chest might be why I didn’t have a man in my life, I sat, stunned, two plates of pasta on the table between us, one of which I suddenly envisioned over his head. It was the dumbest, most infuriating thing I had ever heard. It was also the kick in the pants that got me back to online dating.

  • • •

  Once upon a time, online dating was a stigmatized concept, reserved for desperadoes and unsavories. But by now, at least in New York, it was just another place—like the office, a bar, or Whole Foods—to meet people.

  Before Paris, I dipped my toe in the pool on Nerve.com, which was a relatively small dating site that attracted edgy, artistic types. At the time, it felt bold and adventurous to be browsing men’s profiles as if I were shopping for groceries. But in the years since then, the industry had exploded and the offerings had expanded. Four out of five single people had at least tried it, and one out of six married couples in the United States met online.

  Match.com was the biggest site, having started in 1995—when I was wearing double chambray and listening to the Grateful Dead—and now counted millions of members around the world. Other smaller, niche sites joined throughout the years: sites for Jews, Christians, and Ivy Leaguers. Sites for colleg
e students and sites for senior citizens. Sites that matched you based on a suggested date, like kayaking in the Hudson River, or your physical location, which led to instant hookups. Sites based on DNA, some for single parents, and others that targeted married people looking for affairs. As one of the founders of OkCupid, a site predicated on answering a series of yes-or-no questions that joined the onslaught in 2009, said in a New Yorker article, “We are the most important search engine on the Web, not Google.”

  My friends actually raved about this OkCupid site, saying it was fun answering all those questions. There were tens of thousands of them, ranging from offbeat and quirky to deadly serious. Pourquoi pas? I thought one night at home, glancing down at my A cups that Joe had belittled. Why not enter the fray again? I gathered some photos, entered my stats, and started answering away: Could you date someone who was really messy? Is smoking disgusting? Do spelling mistakes annoy you? And with several dozen surprisingly telling yeses and nos, I was back in the online dating world.

  I don’t know if it was the increased acceptance of online dating in general or the popularity of this particular site, but the pickings were slimmer. On Nerve, I had met journalists, bankers, producers, designers, scientists—even a Frenchie. I remembered them as articulate, ambitious, and interesting. Where were these natty, witty gents now? The smart but goofy guys? The professional, intriguing, down-to-earth characters? And while I was in cranky old lady mode, what had happened to modesty? Every time I logged in, I struggled to find someone I might enjoy meeting face-to-face. There was so much chest-beating and obnoxious posturing, photos seemingly selected to say, Here I am on a yacht! Look at all these beautiful people I’m surrounded by! Isn’t my life fabulous? Don’t you want a piece of this?

  And yet I also didn’t want the sensitive, almost effeminate guys I used to go for. Those multi-hyphenate writer slash photographer slash industrial designer slash musicians used to be my catnip. Now I was too old and cynical to hang out in dive bars, encouraging man-boys’ dreams of making it big while splitting the bill like a good progressive woman. I had reached a place in my life where I wanted someone who no longer slept on a futon, who owned some decent neckties and shoes, and who didn’t balk at spending twenty bucks on a stranger.