In Quarantine, Restaurant Recipes Are Postcards From Another Time

But I can’t do any of those things now. Some restaurants, though I hope not any of these, have already said they won’t be able to come back. Many more are gone and we, or they, just don’t know it yet. The ones that are able to return won’t look, feel or act the same for a long time.

I have a bowl full of matchbooks by my bed that I’ve picked up in restaurants. Looking at them doesn’t make me feel anything except an urge to smoke. The only things I know that can make restaurants come alive when I’m outside their walls are recipes. Even when I don’t cook them, they still do that.

But I’ve had lots and lots of time lately for cooking meals that put me in touch with some place I used to go. Tonight, I’ll make Jim Lahey’s no-knead pizza dough so that tomorrow night, with my broiler running as hot as it will go, I can make pizza in the style of Co., which has been closed for two years.

When You Asked For It was still being published, people generally wanted recipes for dishes they could get at some restaurant that existed. Maybe it was on the other side of town or halfway across the world, but it was there, and the reader who loved that dish so much could still go there and eat it. A recipe in the column was a postcard from another place, one that you might go back to one day.

Any restaurant recipe now is a postcard from another time: The time before this, when you could just take a subway, a taxi, a ferry or a plane without thinking twice, and when you could arrive wherever you were going and walk down a street where the lights were on and the doors were open.

Inside, there probably wasn’t any room at the bar, but you could squeeze in, catch the bartender’s eye and, when your cocktail, so cold it almost hurt, landed in front of you, you could smile, and know that other people could see you doing it.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/dining/restaurant-recipes-at-home.html