2007-10-07 - 12:46 p.m.
A few nights ago Nya and I had dinner at Alinea, the restaurant we got engaged at last year. The meal was delicious of course, with crazy science fiction cuisine. It was also insanely expensive, but we should damn the cost and go there once a year. We had the 12-course �tasting� menu. While the individual courses were small, I can assure you it added up to an awful lot of food. How anyone could handle the 24-couse �tour�, I can�t imagine�
I�ll describe some of the more exotic courses before I get to my main point. There was a fish (ayu) which tasted just like watermelon and in fact was served with watermelon. One of the dessert courses was a fan-shaped candy-like concoction served clipped to a base that tasted intensely of raspberry. As Nya said: �Wow, this is like what you�d get if you asked God for a Jolly Rancher!� Perhaps the most sci-fi course was Wagyu beef (Nya got kampachi, a fish) with its plate set on top of a permeable pillow. The weight of the plate pressed out the air inside, releasing a cedar branch aroma to infuse the dish. Whoa.
But what really hit me, what really brought back a flood of memory, was the butter. The restaurant now serves bread to accompany certain courses (which it didn�t the last time we were there). The place usually never passes up an opportunity to flex its culinary muscles, but the bread was pretty low-key � a small milk & honey roll with one course, a paprika croissant with another, a bit of chicory rye with a third. Although I guess they did dazzle with dessert � we got a little donut made with pineapple and tosaka seaweed. Whoa.
They served two dollops of different butters with the bread. One was a goat�s milk butter from somewhere in France and one was a cow�s milk butter from Wisconsin. Even though there was just a small bit of each, it was almost too much for the tiny rolls. But it was incredibly tasty, of course. After we�d eaten the first roll, I kind of wanted more. I went to scoop up a piece of just pure butter without any bread, but Nya told me to stop and pointed out that we should save it to put on the next rolls they served. Just then, I had such a rush of memory about raw butter.
In the summer of 1993,I had gone to California, a sojourn that ended up lasting over a year. After being kicked out of Harvard, I knew I needed to get away as far as possible from Cambridge and Brooklyn and everything I knew. I only really recognized three cities on the West Coast. Being a native New Yorker, there was no way I�d go to LA. And I�d heard it rained all the time in Seattle. So I picked San Francisco. I had a friend who was going to school in Santa Cruz, which in my vague understanding of geography was right near San Francisco (actually it�s several hours away), so I went to stay with her at first.
I remember being hit by culture shock initially, although not in a bad way. The first morning I was there, I saw an actual convertible Maserati being driven by two blondes in sunglasses. Wow, I thought. Could it get any more California than this? Indeed, I felt like the whole world had gone blonde. And Santa Cruz being a surf town (if a bit college/hippie), there were lots of beach bunnies going around in bikinis (a dream to a hormonal nineteen-year old like I was). Although the other side of things was that at the local bagel shop, if you wanted tomato cream cheese, you had to ask for a �Pink Flamingo��
But the thing was, I didn�t have a lot of money at the time. I had come out there with only an interview with a tutoring company lined up, but no actual gigs came through from this. Eventually I got a prestigious-sounding, but low-paying office job in San Francisco schlepping paper and dialing phones for brokerage house Lehman Brothers, but that�s a story for another time. Right then, I had absolutely nothing � no job, no home, few funds. Looking back now, it seems insane that I did this. But maybe I thought of it as an exciting adventure at the time.
But I know that, while I found the freedom exhilarating (this was the first time I was living on my own, after all), I wasn�t blind and was well-aware that after a bit I�d wear out my welcome at my friend�s house and have even less money. I started worrying about going hungry. I think I knew rationally this was only a future possibility, but I started considering how I could load up on calories right then. How could I consume the most food for the least money? I looked around the house I was in to see what I could eat. My friend�s boyfriend didn�t like me much, so I had to make sure it was something he wouldn�t notice was gone.
Like that stick of butter in the back of the fridge. Yeah. Did butter have 100 calories per tablespoon or 200? Either way, a full stick was a good deal! And no one keeps track of the exact amount of butter there is. Plus an entire stick being gone is even harder to recognize missing than just a few pats. And even if it does get noticed and traced back to me, it�ll be pretty cheap to replace. Yeah. So that�s what I�ll do, I�ll eat the butter. Nobody�s around in the house now to see me anyway. Without further hesitation, I wolfed it down.
I don�t recall gagging or anything. It�s not like it became a habit, but I didn�t think much more about it then. My friend�s boyfriend never noticed (although he did scream at me when I came back to visit a month later for leaving a bag of clothing). I moved on up the Bay Area peninsula to a sublet in Redwood City, then to the YMCA in San Francisco�s Tenderloin, then to an actual apartment in the South of Market district. I even figured out how to eat cheaply without stealing butter by shopping at the farmer�s market and bulk supermarkets.
That night at Alinea, I thought about how far I�d come. Instead of secretly scarfing stolen butter, I was eating the fanciest stuff around at a dinner with the love of my life. Nya! She often points out that, whenever I tell a story about my time in San Francisco, I�ll get a far off look and say �God, that was a long time ago�� Maybe it�s silly, but it really does feel like several lifetimes ago. I�m in such a better place now.
And to my friend who went to UCSF: sorry about that. I owe you a stick of butter.
� 2007 Geoff Gladstone
If you�ve ever enjoyed my writing, please donate to the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis and/or the Montel Williams MS Foundation.
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