Table for One: In Search of Regulars at New York City's Restaurants

My apologies to everyone who has been patiently been asking for more. I've had this story written and waiting to be edited for a few weeks now, so here it is finally for you to read. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed my experience.

Bello Sguardo, Upper West Side
Amsterdam Avenue, between 79th and 80th Streets

"There's hardly enough light for you to read!" she said, offering me a candle wrapped in crimson paper from her table. "Well, that's not going to help any."

Indeed, there wouldn't be enough light for me to read my book, even so early at 8pm on an August night in New York City. The lack of adequate lighting completely defeated the purpose of my mid-week dinner out by myself. After a day of wandering around Central Park and the Upper West Side, I decided to end my day over a lone dinner to read my new book, enjoy a glass of wine and a caprese salad, and savor the lingering heat of day that evening at summer's end.

There is something about dining alone in New York that makes this very lonely practice rather acceptable. Every restaurant in the city has its regulars, and I'd wager that a large percentage of these regulars dine alone. Perhaps it is the comfort of returning every day to the same restaurant; the staff becomes like family, the customer's preferred table like his own dining table at home. But even amidst kissing couples, lively families, and groups of women on friend dates, a crowded restaurant can be rather comforting to those who dine alone. This is why, on that particular night in August, I decided to forgo scrolling through my cell phone contact list and
request a table for one.

That night at Bello Sguardo, a fine enough Mediterranean restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue, I found a bit of unexpected companionship. I was able to read only about a paragraph of my book (Picture Perfect, by Jodi Picoult) when my fellow diner interrupted to engage me in conversation. I found myself entranced by this woman, who told me an story more compelling than the one I read on paper -- the story of a woman's life, where love, family, creativity, and compromising truth and belief in oneself lead her here, next to me, to share my Table for One.

Stella, as she will be called for the sake of anonymity, is a regular at Bello Sguardo. With her jet black hair cut short in an incredibly elegant and stylish bob, she looked like an Italian Cleopatra on whom the waiters doted with a sort of maternal reverence. After she convinced me to order the Chopped Salad in place of the Caprese ("You'll get one tomato and a slice of cheese with the Caprese. The Chopped Salad is more interesting, or so it seems to me."), I ordered a glass of delightfully smooth and inexpensive Chablis, closed my book, and settled back for a simple meal and unexpected companionship.

Stella, like any good regular, called herself a very picky diner. Her meal, for example, was not on the menu. It was rather an accommodation by the restaurant's staff to suit her taste for that particular evening: mixed green vegetables, two rounds of eggplant parmigiana, and a spoonful of penne pomodoro. There hadn't been enough sauce on the eggplant, and she asked the waiter for more. "But you'll have to go downstairs to get it?" she asked, showing her knowledge of the complete topography of the restaurant. The waiter insisted on getting it for her, and so she agreed to have more sauce. Later she told me that she was hoping for string beans rather than mixed vegetables. She also complained --to me only -- that she should have been given Parmesan cheese. She resolved that just for tonight she wouldn't to be too picky.

I was curious to know why this attractive older woman would be dining alone. She was rather statuesque; her dark hair fell closely to her cheeks, as if to frame the features of her beautiful face. She wore the timeless combination of black and white clothing, and her manicured nails were polished a deep purple, just a few shades darker than her lipstick that painted her pouty lips. The only ring she wore was a simple, black band (made of plastic, she later confessed) on the pinky of her right hand.

When the waiter came to take my order, she encouraged me to ask for more feta cheese with my salad. I didn't, for once ordering straight off the menu without asking for changes. When I turned back to her, she looked both amused and disappointed.
"You didn't ask for more cheese..." she smiled.
"Oh, I didn't want to make a fuss. And those people over there look like they have the same salad with a nice bit of cheese on it."
"My children always say I'm too picky," she said, cutting a bite of eggplant with her fork. "I didn't realize I was picky. But I do think that the more I go to a place, like here, the more picky I become."

We talked for a bit about what made her picky: taste in food, taste in clothes, ("I have a pair of leather coolats with silk lining that I bought from Bergdorf Goodman's for $500. And that was in 1986, and I can still wear them... Ten, twenty, twenty-one years later."), and most importantly -- taste in men. She asked me what my past and present boyfriends had to say about my tendencies for pickiness. I laughed, and told her that it was less a question of my boyfriends' commenting on my pickiness, but rather a question of my friends who constantly comment on my pickiness when it comes to picking boyfriends. She chuckled, and then asked me to try to describe my perfect man.

For Stella, her perfect man had been her husband: "When I met him, I ran home and told my mother, 'I met my husband!' I knew right away." She looked nostalgic, and her eyes began to sparkle with dewy tears. "When I first saw him, he was sitting there with his hand on his chin, biting his thumb. His profile was so beautiful, chiseled like a statue."

Stella's husband was the brother of her good college friend, and Stella, after hearing about this brother all throughout college, finally concocted a plan to meet him. Their first meeting was a success, and after a year, they were married. "He made me feel safe and we just knew it was to be. We worked out the questions, and there were no doubts."

She told me about how her husband was a writer who composed beautiful poems to her, two of which she recited to me. Together, they had two children (two boys and a girl). "All I ever wanted were babies," she told me frankly. For her, a career was secondary to having a family. However, once the children came of age, Stella pursued the career of an actress. As a young girl, she did stage shows, but when she was older, she switched to film. "I did all the New York films," she told me humbly. "Serpico, Taxi Driver... I was in all of them. Back then, it was easy to get a part as an extra -- and I could take my babies to the set."

As her story goes, Stella entered the business rather "connected." She was discovered on stage by a fellow who told her to join the Italian-American division of the Screen Actors' Guild. As a bright young thing, she eagerly brought her new friend home to her father. "My father eyed him up and down, gave him a little upward nod. He did the same. It sealed the deal and I was in," she told me, touching my arm. "But when he left, my father screamed: 'What are you doing with a guy like Angelo?? Do you know who he works for?!?' But it didn't matter. Back then for us Italians, everybody worked for somebody."

We spent the whole evening wrapped in conversation about love, careers, food, and family. We touched on subjects that made her cry, we talked about things that inspired me to keep going for what I wanted and needed. At the end of the meal, she moved on to espresso, and asked her waiter if she could smoke. When he casually told her that she could not, she retorted by saying how she saw a friend of his smoking outside a few nights earlier. The waiter clearly couldn't argue with that, but out of politeness, Stella stood up and lit her smoke just on the border of the terrace. Like a star from an old film, she took long drags between thoughts, resting her elbow on the back of her opposite hand. "I think I'm starting to figure you out," she told me. And then she described me in almost perfect detail, and set me on course with a plan.

Once her espresso was finished, it was time for us both to go. We paid our checks (hers considerably less than mine -- another perk of being a regular) and we stood up to walk a bit together up the Avenue. We paused for a few moments at a sidewalk bench, and she lit up another cigarette "for digestion." As the ten o'clock hour neared, Stella turned to me and thanked me for my company, and excused herself to walk home alone into the summer evening.

Stella left me with some important advice, as well as other stories about her life which I guard for the sake of keeping the confidence with which she trusted me by recounting them. Of the many things I came to understand over that dinner with Stella, the most important lesson she seemed to stress was that we do not always have all of the answers. She encouraged us to live life with a little bit of recklessness in order to follow what the heart compels tells us to do. It seems that this philosophy has worked for Stella throughout her storied life. Even though now she dines alone, Stella has lived an entire life of fulfillment, where all of her hopes and needs were fulfilled. It is this life and the memories from it that have remained her trusted company through many a Table for One.

Knife Skills 101

Early this morning at 12:43am, I gave a doctor the finger.

It had been two hours since I arrived at the Emergency Room of St. Luke's Hospital. The nurse at triage complained to me about her late-night hunger. A woman two-and-a-half times my size with a breathing problem whined about being cold through her respiratory treatment tube while simultaneously sucking on Peanut M&M's. A few homeless people came in with "injuries" that required them to stay the night.

I waited patiently, slightly amused by my mishap, with my middle finger bleeding through a roll of gauze that trailed behind me because the triage nurse couldn't find her scissors to cut it properly.

I didn't cry when I sliced my finger open. I didn't panic when our cab driver had a hard time driving straight up Amsterdam Avenue. I didn't even get upset when I had to take a urine test to see if I was pregnant (the absurdity of which was made all the more amusing when my roommate told them she was positive that I wasn't pregnant, and the boyfriend of the sprained-ankle-girl questioned whether or not we were lesbians).

Not even the three-hour wait just to see a doctor had dampened my spirits. There was something rather vindicating about having my first trip to the ER be the result of a cooking accident. I was there because I had cut the cheese.

It was Mimolette cheese, one of my most favorite cheeses -- nutty, orange, and hard as wax. We were having a Delivery Lockdown Cocktail Party (awaiting a delivery from Bed Bath and Beyond) enjoying a bottle of Muscadet, Lemon Apples, Etorki Cheese and of course, the culprit Mimolette.

My other roommate couldn't slice through the cheese, and I offered assistance. I picked up the wedge, proudly poised to show off my cheese-cutting skills, and held the rind in my right hand, picked up the Swiss cheese knife in my left. A chorus of "watch your fingers" went up around the table -- which everyone did as soon as the knife skidded across the cheese and sliced through the tip of my right middle finger.

One bloody bamboo cheeseboard, one picture text message to my father, and one Google search for the best NYC ERs later ("Amanda, what are you expecting, a pre-suture spa treatment?"), I was on my way to bandage up my first serious injury that would allow me to become part of the ranks of cooks who sustain -- and relish in -- injuries from all sorts of kitchen mishaps.

Four years ago, I survived unscathed from a grill explosion in my face while grilling a filet of Tilapia. Two summers ago, I lost a bit of the tip of my right thumb while slicing vegetables on a mandolin slicer. When I was in Paris, I burned myself on my oven while pulling out a tray of roasted fall vegetables. I now have an hourglass-shaped scar on my right wrist. Since then, I've been in good shape. But this cheese knife cut was deep, bloody, and fleshy enough to seek real medical treatment. I like to think that my wound is a real chef's cut. Is it a bit perverse that I'm slightly disappointed that I cut it on cocktail cheese rather than while preparing a four-course meal?

In one week, I will get the stitches removed from my finger, and it won't look like a Frankenstein Finger anymore. I wonder if it will scar like the oven burn, or if it will return to normal like my eyebrows did after the gas grill explosion. Either way, I'm now in the Cut Cooks Club, and if anyone challenges my membership, I'll just show them the finger.

Diary of a New York Waiter

"I miss you." Spray-painted on a sidewalk in Paris, October 2005.

For those of you who have been missing Josh's serial of Diary of a New York Waiter, here on Goûter, don't fret. Josh has opened up his own independent blog, which is hilarious, poignant, and inspiring.

In his latest post about life as a waiter at "Café Roman," Josh reflects on what it means to be alone. As observes two of Roman's most loyal customers, Picky Pam and Two-a-Day-Tom, he confronts his biggest fear of growing old and lonely.


It's what each of us fears most, being alone. And yet, if you look around you, so many of us do end up that way. I find that I look towards my own future and the possibility of spending a great majority of my mature years by myself, and instead of accepting it, I deny, deny, deny. "I'll have a life partner and he won't die first."Or, "I'll have lots of children...children who will be content spending significant amounts of time with their old, lonely Dad."

But then I think of my grandmother, who lost her oldest of two daughters (my mother) to breast cancer, and who lost her husband two years later to heart failure. She, a woman who spent her life giving her entire self to her family, spent these past eight years sitting abandoned, re-watching episodes of Little House on the Prairie, welcoming any distraction no matter how familiar it is. There are, however, things I believe my grandmother, had she pushed herself to do so, could have done to better surround herself with peers and friends so as not to feel so utterly alone. She could have joined a book club - she reads more than anyone I know. She could have worked some kind of desk job that her bum knee would not have prevented her from being able to do. At Cafe Roman, we have two extreme regulars, who, like my grandmother, are elderly and alone. Every day they come in, both with their own quirks, ready to visit their respective surrogate families of waiters.



To read the rest of the post and more about Josh's adventures, visit Diary of a New York Waiter at http://newyorkwaiter.blogspot.com.