017: September
Nostalgia, through food.
And so we turn another page of the calendar — September is here. While it still (literally) feels like summer, it doesn’t feel like summer. If August was a rumpled and oversized oxford hanging off your shoulder after a long sticky sandy day at the beach, September’s oxford has an extra button done. It might not be starched, but it’s crisp.
It’s crisp, but it remembers.
I saw a tweet (er, an X?) a few weeks ago that perfectly encapsulates that late summer feeling:
Today, we’re going to go down memory lane. Nostalgia, through food.
The scene
…is 2014, twenty-five year old Faust still trying to find her footing. Beginning a “real” “career” but feeling adrift. Holding on to evolving college friendships, dipping a toe into new ones that will ultimately be just as deep. Dating but not really dating but then really dating. #vscocam on Instagram. Trying. Trying really hard.
Enter: Spring Street Social Society. It’s exactly what it sounds like — an “exclusive” community to meet fellow aesthetes, fellow searchers. For an annual membership fee, plus an extra hundred (or more) per event, you could join New York City’s twenty-and-thirty somethings around extremely Instagrammable tables and attempt to create meaningful connections. There were magicians and musicians, lots of make-your-own floral arrangements, calligraphy (the cool kind) everywhere. Doughnuts and balloons on the High Line. Moody lighting thanks to giant candelabras, airy spaces hidden behind SoHo alleyways.
The SSSS imploded a few years into their social experiment due to artistic differences between the charismatic co-founders, but I’d checked out long before that happened. I had no business paying hundreds of dollars for entrance into this echelon, but it took five or six events before I realized these just weren’t my people.
One gathering stands out, though, as a particularly magical evening. Was it because I asked a Real Friend™ to join me, and because it was my birthday and I was Living the Good Life™ in New York City? Yes, probably. And because it’s when I learned about Camille Becerra.
Camille cooked dinner for us that night, and I was smitten. With her, with her wizardry, with her food philosophy and approach. For the past few years, she’s been quietly doing her thing, concocting beautiful potions in her LES kitchen, collaborating with the literati, just being an all around vibe. And as of late June, she’s the head chef at As You Are, the restaurant within Brooklyn’s Ace Hotel.
I made a reservation for a solo dinner during restaurant week. I went early — and was the only one in the dining room. Even better. Oysters with a husk cherry mignonette, dreamy. Chicken Milanese, ft. popped quinoa breading, saffron aioli, and a summer succotash with the world’s most perfectly cooked zucchini. Deconstructed strawberry pavlova, a revelation.
I sat and savored and reminisced about how much has changed, and how much has not. Still living the good life. Still an aesthete, but not searching as hard. As You Are, indeed.
The scene
…is 2017, twenty-eight year old Faust feeling more than a little weird about the state of the world. The past year had been rough — both for the country, and for me personally. Without Lemonade I’m not sure I would have made it.
For the past several weeks, though, I’d been corresponding with a blond guy who lived in Texas; when he told me he’d be in New York for work, it felt like a no-brainer to meet up. While I was a little hesitant to see whether our flirty banter could translate IRL, I felt a little reckless, too. Why the fuck not? Let’s see where this goes.
I remember getting a text telling me to meet him at Marta. I remember being floored that he’d thought and planned ahead to make a reservation (that he thought I was important enough). I remember thinking how out-of-character it was for me, a bona fide homebody, to be leaving the comfort of my couch on a Sunday night (in January), and I remember feeling a little tingly in my extremities as I walked up to the restaurant (reader, it was not the cold air) and saw a slow smile spread across Adam’s face.
I don’t remember the meal.
But I remember the feeling.
And I remember, later that week, an energy shift.
Clearly, that dinner at Marta went well. So when Adam and I learned a few weeks ago that the restaurant would be closing indefinitely, we made a reservation (it was important enough).
To be honest, the food was fine. The supplì were perfect, the pizza just okay. But sometimes that’s not what it’s about. It’s about restaurants as scaffolding, “making myths out of how ordinary or almost-ordinary people lived.”
In the very first Tablesetting, I quoted this piece from Helena Fitzgerald on nostalgia, cities changing; about places where we build our lives and our selves, then outgrow but love forever. And I never answered the question: what restaurants have shaped you, welcomed you, made you feel at home, or are catalytic in your growth and development as a human?
Marta is one of those restaurants. And, judging by the tenor of the room during that last meal — the reunions, the hugs, the bittersweet smiles — it was one of those restaurants for a lot of people.
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One of the best movies I’ve seen in a while is Past Lives. It’s a beautiful, quiet film about, as a friend put it, “reconciling who we are with who we were, and the grief of the lives we didn’t get to live.”
Seeing the movie is what got me thinking about nostalgia as a theme for this newsletter in the first place; walking around New York, since then, has felt like an deluge of memories.
upper east side oysters, blocked phone numbers
midnight at Corner Bistro begets midnight at the B63 stop
meaningless goodbyes after three martinis
a cab outside Katz’s, closing a chapter
Past Lives is about nostalgia, but it’s more than that. It’s what if. It’s wondering what could have been, and choosing what is instead.
I love what is. And I love what’s ahead.
Did you read all of that? Wow. Thank you, I love you.
Please note that October’s Tablesetting will be delivered mid-month and will be mostly photos of things I ate and drank in Europe over the course of the next three weeks.
London » Berlin » Amsterdam » London, here we go!
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