Story 1: Buttered (Introduction) Bread

I have this theory. Actually, I probably always had this theory, but it graduated to its realization on a bad date a few months ago. I was turned to ask the bartender for another glass of wine—something to help mask the draining lecture this guy was giving me about trading my Sunday brunch routine for church. Mid-“I’ll have another glass of…” I felt his hand on the small of my back and I suddenly snapped. “You should probably keep your hands to that beef tartar,” and immediately thought to myself, because that beef tartar is the closest you’ll get to sharing anything with me. Ever.

Sharing a meal all seemed too close, too intimate for me and this man. How close had the few tapas dishes at this Lower East Side restaurant gotten us? I yo-yoed this idea back and forth, kneading it to what I like to call, “The Spectrum of Intimacy.”


(It makes me a little sad that I birthed this quite sensual theory over a bad date.)

I want you to imagine you and your dining buddy sitting in two mismatched chairs at a table that can barely hold two plates and a candle. The warm bread basket arrives with a ramekin of perfectly balanced sweet-and-salty butter to interrupt your conversation. You both reach in. The steam from the bread covers both of your fingertips at the exact same moment only to have the cool, steel knives immediately offset the sensation. You hear the knives graze against the ceramic ramekin and watch as the butter comfortably lounges on top of the bread. Before you know it, you both take a bite. You hear the crunchiness of the bread break into the background noise of… wherever. And as you both taste the ooey, gooeyness of the buttered bread, your eyes meet. You're probably both be smiling, and I can’t imagine you’re thinking anything besides, “Isn’t that delicious?”


And you hadn't even gotten to appetizers yet.

You see, I genuinely believe that the most intimate you can get with someone without, well, getting intimate with someone is to share the exact same meal at the exact same time in the exact same environment. When else--besides the obvious--can you touch, taste, smell, hear and see the exact same thing as someone else at that exact same moment? 

This isn’t a blog about food, but more of a collection—a bazaar, if you will—about all the adventures that food brings me. After all, on a spectrum of intimacy, my range varies from line-at-the-DMV to a-lot-of-different-somethings-in-between to sharing-a-meal to, ahem, well, you know where this ends.