Notes From Nowhere

Another note on “Food Inc.”: Robert Kenner, the filmmaker, says that hamburgers are his favorite food. This reminded me of a strange aspect of my life here in New York. When you come from Europe, you expect the US to be the country of burgers. But there are, as far as I can see, almost no burgers in this city. Of course, there are bound to be many, but they are not part of the way of life that I’ve been initiated to, by my architecture and art friends. I quite agree with Kenner, burgers can be great. They are certainly not part of my home-country’s diet. But I had a formative hamburger experience as a young student visiting Cambridge (that is, UK’s Cambridge, not MA’s Cambridge), an absolutely perfect burger at a bar in a pub, shared with my brother. There I learnt: burgers need not be fast food!

After several years in Manhattan, I declared that I finally wanted a hamburger. My friends took me to the Corner Bistro at 331 West 4th Street. I saw the appeal (the attempt to be ‘real’ even though this is Manhattan), but I didn’t return. Too crowded for me, and too much as if we were all pretending that we are in a run down pub somewhere in no man’s land. Click here and here for reviews…

But the more I travel in the US, the more I realize that hamburgers are a reason to travel. As soon as you leave Manhattan, it’s actually quite easy to find really good ones. I’ve made a habit out of eating burgers in hotels, for example, at the Eastern Standard Kitchen in Boston’s Commonwealth Hotel, or at the Grille 700 in Baltimore’s Marriott Waterfront.

If I had to choose, my all time favorite hamburger location is perhaps the Park Grill Lounge at the LA Intercontinental. If you go for a late lunch, the atmosphere is almost serene, and the burger is delicious.

So, for me, the desirable hamburger places seem to be outside of Manhattan. Perhaps hamburgers fit better with the kind of ‘normalcy’ of the traveling worker that, at times, I am.

Yesterday, I saw the documentary “Food Inc.,” a take on ‘the way we eat’ in the US. An organic farmer discussed the pig-ness of the pig. Oh well. But his pigs certainly were rather lovely.

One point in the film made me quite nostalgic: the lack of seasons in today’s way of life. I used to have a seasonal mind-set. In my former life in Europe, the year would unfold: you move from oranges in the winter to the first strawberries in March, then you look forward to asparagus in April, to apricots in June, blueberries in July, grapes in September, minestrone in October, and walnuts in November. In the winter you eat game; but not in the summer. Salads divide up into winter salads, the hard and resilient kinds, like radicchio, and summer salads, the softer variants. And so on.

I once spent part of a winter in Venice, and practically lived on ‘winter salads’: in soups, in risotto, in pasta sauces, in the fillings of ravioli – they work everywhere, and they have the loveliest colors. The movie reminded me of this, for personal reasons, rather sad winter. I first spent time in Padua, where one can buy the most delicious game-poultry at that time of the year, and then I moved on to Venice, trying to finish a project and eating my way through the offerings of the cold city. All of this is now, that I’m pretty much here in Manhattan, a way of life of the past. That life comes with a kind of heavy-set traditional trot through the year, not unlike traditional holidays, and large family celebrations. But it’s also charming, and hard not to miss. Anyway, I continue to debate my whereabouts in terms of what to eat where.

So I am walking down Broadway next to my female companion, and for independent reasons state the following observation: “You have become incredibly fit this past summer.” She stops walking. I turn around and ask what is the matter. She looks at me with her mouth open, then closes it, then asks: “Did you just say that I’ve become incredibly fat this past summer?”

Which reminded me of Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” when Marlow returns to his apartment and one of the beautiful and ever-naked yoga-enthusiasts living next door asks him “Have you seen my cat?” and he, absent-minded, responds “No, you don’t look fat.” If two lines ever summed up relations between a man and a woman, there they are.