Vol. 15
On the life changing power of lunch
This is a bit of a cheat issue—our last zine was all about the initiation of, and argument for, Sunday Lunch at Smithees. But turns out we have a lot more to say about lunch.
In the pieces gathered here, from Chef Nick’s remembrance of lunches past and Nikita’s reflections on Latin classes in middle school, to Haran’s misplaced dreams in Jersey Mike and Leslie’s tête-à-tête with a Lunchable, lunch seems to lead us inevitably to the past: to reckonings with a time when the cool kids ran the lunchroom, a manager job at a sub shop could lead you to a lifelong love of restaurants, and lunch at one of the best fine dining restaurants in the city cost just $48 bucks.
The lunches of our dreams might be packed in plastic, wrapped in wax paper, or served on a white tablecloth, but in all cases they promise so much more than a meal.
In Nikita’s piece on ushering in a new chapter of the wine program featuring volcanic soils, she speaks of the beauty of these regions—placed as they are so precariously close to disaster. Maybe the beauty of lunch lies, then, in the temporary fending off; of time stolen away from the precarity of the day, to enjoy yourself for just a minute or more.
So come in for lunch sometime soon, we’ll have strawberry tall cake waiting for you.
See you soon,
Smithereens
First up, we are so thrilled to be on the New York Times 100 Best Restaurants in New York City this year—we’re in great company.
Come hang with Chef Nick, who “cooks with the obsessiveness of a certain demented sea captain.”
Line Cooks Who Lunch
—Nicholas Tamburo, Chef/Owner
In 2011, I had just graduated from film school and was working part time as a line cook at a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts called EVOO. Throughout high school and college I had worked at cafes, bakeries, and a butcher shop—but this was the real beginning of my culinary education. Somehow, despite having no professional experience, Chef Peter McCarthy gave me a shot on the hot appetizers station. I added what I thought was an appropriate amount of salt to a batch of parsnip bisque, had Chef taste it, and then proceeded to watch as he added fistfuls of kosher to the pot. I thought I knew about food but turns out I couldn’t even season a soup.
The previous summer, my girlfriend and I drove 16 hours to Chicago to have dinner at Alinea. It was the first fine dining experience of my life, and despite (or really because of) the luxurious meal we had booked, we stayed in the cheapest room we could find: a hostel with no air conditioning. It was 2010 and Grant Achatz was at the height of his powers in pre-Michelin guide Chicago—a few months later Alinea would go on to earn three stars. We didn’t order any drinks because we couldn’t afford them on top of the meal (not to mention that my girlfriend was only twenty years old at the time and I had just turned 21). When they offered to pour us a red wine with the meat course, we sheepishly asked them if it was on the house because we dreaded seeing it show up on the bill. Turns out it was a gift—I think they were just glad to see a couple of kids in the dining room spending every dollar they had on dinner. It was the first tasting menu I ever had, and I was hooked.
Aside from working in a kitchen, dining at a great restaurant is the best way to learn about cooking. My education in fine dining started at Alinea but would continue over lunch.
The following summer, my friend Michael was doing an internship at a bank in Paris. He had a small apartment but this meant that I had a free place to stay and I just had to save up for the plane ticket. He was working at the bank during the day, so I was left on my own to explore the city—and eat lunch. This was more than 15 years ago, and all of the French temples of gastronomy served an affordably priced lunch menu. I booked a table for myself at Pierre Gagnaire and Le Cinq. I couldn’t bear to walk around all day wearing a suit in the summer heat, so I found myself changing out of my shorts and t-shirt in the bathroom of a McDonald’s on the Champs-Élysées.
Once again, I relegated myself to drinking only water, but this being Paris I had to shell out for bottles of Sanpellegrino or Acqua Panna. I didn’t have the guts to just ask for tap water. One of the captains at Le Cinq took pity on me and poured me a pairing with my main course, noting “This is spring water from the Black Forest in Germany.” Maybe he assumed I was some kind of water connoisseur.
When I moved to New York City in 2012 I found it to be a paradise for lunch. I was making $10.50 an hour as a line cook but I was determined to continue my education. I couldn’t afford to eat dinner at many of the city’s great restaurants but I could scrounge together enough for lunch. A two-course lunch I had at Jean-Georges in 2015 was $48 complete with an array of canapés and mignardises. Bouley down in Tribeca offered a five-course lunch for $55, not to mention their bread cart with 11 different types of bread. I can still smell the aroma of apples lined up in the entry way, the room ensconced with thick velvet curtains and paintings of the French countryside.
Del Posto was a consistent favorite among the cooks that I knew—$49 for three courses where you could add an additional pasta course for just $10. It was my first time witnessing the wine service on the guéridon, the white-jacketed captains, the live pianist and, around the holidays, a towering Christmas tree.
Lunch at Jean-Georges will now cost you $128, and the other grand dining rooms I mentioned are long gone. In New York City, lunch is a lost art. It’s still alive and well in cities like Paris and Tokyo—why have we let it die?
I’ve long lamented that there’s less of an appreciation for great food in the US, a waning reverence for the art of dining, for eating and drinking well. What little fine dining culture there was is disappearing, even in a city like New York. Do we simply not have the patience for lunch anymore?
Next weekend, go have lunch somewhere. Or better yet, take the day off work and have a leisurely weekday lunch. Order a bottle of wine, take your time, suddenly it’s late afternoon and you wonder where the day went. Go for a long walk, watch the sun set over the East River. You can be home by 6pm, content knowing that you’ve lived a life worth living.
The Lunchables
—Leslie Vinyard, General Manager
I was a kid on school lunch, a free lunch program that your parents had to apply for. In my case, this was a single mother who wasn’t very inclined to deal with bureaucratic paperwork or things like electric bills, but this time she really did the thing. What this meant is that I always ate whatever the school was serving that day: rectangle pizza, Salisbury steak, or the most delicious dessert ever invented (I will die on this hill)—peanut butter chocolate squares.
I was always jealous of the kids who brought packed lunches. They had these lunchboxes that were soft and puffy and full of food that someone had thoughtfully prepared. But the kids I was most envious of were the Lunchables. Yes, you can just call them that. They were rich rich. They wore clothes from the dELiA*S catalogue or Abercrombie and they always had a Lunchable.
If you’re not familiar with the format, let me explain. Lunchables were created in 1985 to sell more bologna for Oscar Mayer. The goal was to sell to working mothers who didn’t have time to make breakfast and lunch. Which honestly feels very American: identify exhausted women and then market processed meat directly at them.
One might say this was the earliest form of girl dinner, or charcuterie for children. I bought three Lunchables last night in the name of good journalism. Also, I was hungry. In fact, when I was looking for the Lunchables in the grocery store I found a fancier version with wine-infused salami and artisan white cheddar cubes and suddenly realized Lunchables never actually disappeared in adulthood, they just got rebranded and moved closer to the deli section.
And honestly? They were not good. The cheese slices somehow both sweaty and dry at the same time. The crackers dissolving instantly into sweet salty dust. Don’t even get me started on the pizza Lunchable. The actual taste was catastrophic. It tasted like someone described pizza over the phone to a pharmaceutical company. The crust is essentially an unbaked DiGiorno pizza crust, while the sauce manages to be both aggressively sugary and weirdly metallic. Eating one as an adult feels like uncovering evidence from a failed government experiment conducted on third graders. The fact that you’re not supposed to cook them feels like a prank.
But the experience itself was incredible. Because the point of Lunchables was never the taste. The point was status. Lunchables were bottle service for eight-year-olds. A Lunchable said your mom went to a different grocery store than mine. One with a cheese counter. A Lunchable said your house probably had matching towels in the bathroom.
Kids understand class long before adults admit they do. You notice whose sneakers light up. Whose field trip money is already turned in. And weirdly, one of the clearest markers in elementary school was lunch. The hot lunch kids all kind of existed together in a little ecosystem. We knew exactly what “meatloaf day” meant. We all drank the same tiny milk cartons that somehow exploded if you opened them wrong. We all accepted that fruit cocktail counts as a vegetable. But packed lunch kids had individuality. They had choice. And Lunchables kids? They had prestige.
Of course now, as an adult, I can buy as many Lunchables as I want. Nobody can stop me. I have adult money and a fully formed frontal lobe. But standing in the grocery store holding those little yellow boxes, I realized the appeal had nothing to do with hunger. Which is maybe why so many childhood foods become emotional artifacts. They’re not really about flavor. Even Happy Meals understood this. The burger was forgettable, but the box was a stage. You didn’t just get food, you got a temporary identity to go in a cardboard box. Packaged in a way that made you feel like someone had designed a small, contained gesture of care (with a toy).
Although for the record: to me, the peanut butter chocolate squares still clear every modern dessert. Michelin stars mean nothing if you can’t serve it on a stained plastic tray next to canned green beans.
Turns out, all along, the Lunchables were the ones missing out.
No Spitting
A new chapter for the wine program evokes volcanic existentialism
—Nikita Malhotra, Beverage Director/Partner
My parents keep threatening to move, and so I’ve been staring at items in my childhood bedroom and cataloging my belongings: a portrait of Derrida, an ashtray I made in a ceramics class, the massive book collection I amassed after many years of working at a book store. Strangely, my middle school Latin text book calls to me. Alongside basic vocabulary and grammar lessons, you follow the story of a family from Pompeii. I can’t recall much from those two years of Latin, but I distinctly remember the family and their horrific fate. It was like Latin class was actually preparing us for an existential moment, a crisis, granting us an understanding of finitude. Maybe I can attribute my pursuit of philosophy in college to my middle school Latin days.
The imagery of Vesuvius, the fate of all the colorful characters in the textbook, the archaeological digs we studied in class, and the frescoed walls from a Roman villa on view at the Met—these brought the past alive with vivid immediacy. When our class visited the cubiculum from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale for the first time, that room haunted me; buried in the eruption in 79 AD and discovered in 1900, I felt I could hear the screams from thousands of years before. It is a small room, one thought to have been a bedroom, but the colorful paintings on the wall expand the space. In captions describing these frescoes, which had survived nearly 2,000 years, the museum mentions the lavish retreats Roman aristocrats built in the countryside and around the Bay of Naples—this one being just north of Pompeii and a working farm that offered a respite from the city. This location, though ill-fated, was entirely intentional; the volcanic rich soils were important to agriculture.
For our next chapter of the wine program, we turn to volcanic soil (see, we finally get to the wine part of the story). Volcanic soils mean we have a chance to make our way through a variety of grape varieties and regions, and a diverse range of environments; Jory soil, for instance, the official state soil of Oregon, is a deep, well-drained, red soil formed from volcanic basalt found on over 300,000 acres in the Willamette Valley foothills. Nutrient rich soil like Lanzarote, found in the Canary islands, absorbs humidity from the air, enabling agriculture in a semi-arid climate with almost no irrigation.
This theme allows an investigation into what these different regions across the world have in common. Our inaugural list centered around white wines, and we had a bottle of Passopisciaro ‘Passobianco’ on there, a Chardonnay from Mount Etna, the highest elevation Chardonnay in Europe. This bottle is such a unique expression of Chardonnay, and I kept stressing how this was a volcanic wine as opposed to speaking about it as a bottle of Chardonnay. Exhibiting intense minerality and bursts of citrus, volcanic wines tend to accentuate high acidity, savory, and brighter fruit notes.
Here is a quote from the winemaker, Andrea Franchetti, that is both poetic and insightful:
“There’s no mold, no moss; the ground sparkles black like the night; the wine slowly becomes very elegant and strange. During the day, a soft light penetrates everything and then there are starry nights; Etna has enormous poetry. Making wine, you have access to it. There isn’t Mother Nature here. You are conducting your viticulture on stuff that comes out of the terrible below.”
This imagery brings me back to my Latin workbook, the vineyards hinting at the destruction and chaos of the past, with vines winking at rebirth. Volcanic wines have a vibrancy to them; I like to say that they convey a ton of energy. Pulsing electricity. It’s this characteristic that drew me to the wines from Mount Etna, and the ash covered vineyards in Pico Island in the Azores, and even the extinct volcanic soils in Baden, where the Pinots can exhibit a characteristic smokiness.
Many enjoy wine because it can convey a sense of place, something we discuss with the complicated term terroir, which speaks to how a myriad of things like soil, culture, and history intersect. Volcanoes represent a cyclical movement—from extinct, to dormant to active—these are geological features that have provided nutrients for all living beings on our planet, while also serving as a reminder of the temporal nature of our existence.
Something to ponder while sipping on a glass of wine from the new list.
A Detour to Adulthood by Way of Jersey (Mike’s)
—Haran McElroy, Sommelier
Have you heard of Jersey Mike’s?
It’s a pretty big counter service restaurant chain that I think everyone except actual New Jerseyans have been to at this point. They’re well known for being “A Sub above.” This is a sandwich shop of substance, unlike the shallow and uninspired Subway. One of them opened up near me in Scottsdale, Arizona around 2010 and I was very curious about this East Coast sandwich business. I don’t remember every single detail, but I do remember that I ordered the #9, Club Supreme, got it Mike’s Way (I’ll explain it later), ate it in my car while listening to Saves the Day and wow, what a revelation that was for young Haran. It actually tasted good, the textures weren’t bad, and I had a coupon to get free chips and a drink. My standards may not have been the highest but I was impressed, and I wanted to meet Michael from New Jersey so badly that I decided to get a job there in my senior year of high school—and change my life forever.
To be honest, I really just wanted to work a job with air conditioning after my summer stint as a maintenance guy ended when I quit mid-shift so I could go to Warped Tour. My first manager at Jersey Mike’s was named Ken, and was often asked if he was Jersey Mike but he was not Jersey Mike. Turns out there is no Jersey Mike; the owner of the company is named Peter Cancro and he bought the original shop in New Jersey—then just called “Mike’s”—as a teenager with the help of his football coach.
Despite my dream being shattered, I decided to keep the job because I really wanted money to buy weed. School was never a terribly important thing to me and eventually I started ditching 4th period to go help with the lunch rush, because the lunch rush was the shift you wanted to work. All the best employees were there and you just shredded. The line was out the door, phone orders flying in, every time someone ordered a cheesesteak we’d all yell “hot sub!” and I know it’s just Jersey Mike’s but I truly didn’t know anything about restaurants, so to me this felt like working the line at Spago.
There’s a hierarchy on the sandwich line: you start out wrapping, you move up to topping the sandwiches, the grill is next, then the register, and finally the big kahuna: THE SLICER. You control the flow, you take everyone’s order, you slice the meat and send it down the line. Every dude wanted to be me and every girl wanted to be with me, even though I smelled like bread and onions at all times.
Eventually, I graduated high school and they were worried I was going leave and go to college but they didn’t realize I was kind of a fuck up who just wanted to abuse substances and go to punk shows. When they found out that I wasn’t leaving, they made me a manager at the age of 19. It was ridiculous. I listened to Bruce Springsteen on full blast at 7am while baking the bread, cooking bacon, and prepping produce for the day’s service. I did inventory, I attended managerial classes, and I got really really good at using the deli slicer. Like sooooo good at using the deli slicer.
I was living Mike’s Way through and through, but not really—because Mike’s Way is just how you top a sandwich. It’s onions, lettuce, tomatoes, olive oil, vinegar, oregano, and salt. If you want all of that except for the onions just say “Mike’s Way, no onions” which is what I would have to repeatedly tell the adults when they would pick all their toppings one by one, because they slowed the line down.
I had people confess that they were dying of cancer, I witnessed multiple family disputes, I consoled a woman after her dog died, I got called the f-slur, “sandwich boy,” and “loser,” all throughout my time there.
I am the person I am today because I thought a sandwich was good one time.
I got Jersey Mike’s recently to see if I could recapture the feeling but it’s gone and not just because they wouldn’t let me behind the counter to make my own sandwich. It was more like seeing a band play your second favorite album of theirs for a ten-year anniversary show; it was good but not what you really want or need anymore. The sandwich still tasted good, the textures weren’t bad (bread was overbaked) but I didn’t have a coupon for chips and a drink, which is fine because I have enough money to buy them now.
I spent a lot of lunch rushes just slicing my life away and now I owe it to myself to slow down for a nice lunch here and there. I’ve only got so much time to do stuff, and at this point I would rather just go to New Jersey to get a sandwich MY WAY.
Before You Go . . .
There are many ways (12!) to make your way through the New York Times 100 Best Restaurants list, via a love for wine or a craving for dessert, and what we love most of all is this much-deserved tribute to our neighborhood.
It’s lobstah roll season and Infatuation ranks the best in the city, featuring yours truly at #1!
From our Substack buddies, Nikita chats about our wine list over at Thirst Behavior and Eddie Huang came to visit, read all about it on Canal Street Dreams.
Wondering where you can find out what we’re serving up for Sunday lunch? We share the menu on Instagram each week, don’t miss it.
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