A Feast Moves On

Last night, I got an email from the owner of one of my all time favorite New York City restaurants, Village, to announce that the establishment would be closing on Saturday. Yes, I like this place so much that two years after I moved to Texas, I continue to subscribe to the patron mailing list. The closing announcement lingers in my gut with a palatable sadness - the reason for closure felt like a calculated, personal injustice - "Our lease is up and, in a distinct irony given the times, the landlord was able to find a new tenant to pay double our rent."

Nothing makes me more nostalgic than talking about New York, especially the glimmering, golden, remembered and reconstructed New York of my youth, the evidence is all over my face. Village is a shining relic from my most recent time living in NYC in 2006. Unlike the cheap bars and restaurants I frequented as college kid on summer vacation, Village seemed to meet me where I was in my mid-twenties, refined, deco / European / Parisian flair, solid, delicious, and affordable. The service was always great and the dining room, well-appointed. Among the mainstays of the menu, one of the best roast chickens I've ever had - a steal for $30 prix fixe, a fabulous, bad-day-fixing, fluffy yellow omelet paired with simple salad and matchstick frites, and an ooey-gooey grilled cheese that was exactly what a wise, foodie friend called "the sleeper hit" of the menu.

I won't take any unearned credit for discovering the place, but once was I turned onto it, I claimed it, it became my go-to spot. Back in '06, I worked in Harlem and lived on Long Island. On a daily basis, I endured a one-way commute that routinely took between 60 and 90 minutes, depending on the mercy of the train deities. In that year, we did very little entertaining at "home," a crummy one-bedroom apartment with an even crappier kitchen that was 60-90 minutes away from the culinary capital of the world. Therefore, Village became a kind of surrogate dinner party space. It was a neighborhood kind of place, even though I lived nowhere near trendy 26th Street.

As I was reading the email about the restaurant's closing, in my mind, I saw a parade of cinematic flashes. I imagined myself seated at the various tables in the dining room - sharing a downtown dinner with my husband before rushing to hear Josh Ritter at the Beacon, a late dinner with a film professor friend on a rainy week night, reconnecting over wine with an old friend who deals coins. I remember meeting Yoshi for Belgian beers at dark bar downtown, and after several rounds of Chimay, stumbling out and finding Village - exactly what we needed at that moment - salty, yummy, bistro perfection. Village always fortified me with exactly what I needed.

What will now forever be my last trip to Village, was a wonderful, exuberant send-off. It was the Friday dinner of a long-weekend spent in New York City with friends last September. We were giggly and beside ourselves to spot one of the most famous contestants of Project Runway sitting a few tables away (in my reality tv-infused world, this constitutes a major, A-list celebrity). We tried to play it cool - when BAM - a piece of plaster fell from the ceiling and landed on Jack's shoulder, leaving a white trace behind on his black jacket. It took a minute for us to realize exactly what had happened, but once we determined that everyone was fine, we moved on to our appetizers, a free round of champagne cocktails helped.

I am usually prone to photographing my food, or the company around the table, at restaurants. For some reason, I never took a single photo at Village. There was probably part of me that wanted to take a picture during the most recent trip - especially one of those "you think I am taking a photo of my friend, but I am actually snapping something behind him - in this case, Austin Scarlett." I can't share it with anyone else, but I find great pleasure in replaying this jovial slide show of the stylish dining room in my memory, sipping it up in tiny portions. I am very sad thinking that I'll never be going back.

A day late...

And my guess is that this post will come up more than a dollar short. After a quiet month, some sort of chatter is needed to revive the conversation.

I feel like transition is all around me these days, yet, it's my path that seems to most certain.

It's strange, for years, I was the one moving every summer, looking for and then starting a new job, and exploring a new town. Every year, it was revival - everything new. Yet, this year, I am the one in stasis. One friend is launching a new business, another has just given official notice and plans to start law school in the fall, while another has an eye-turned to the market and considering making a move. In another city on the East coast, two of my friends are simultaneously awaiting their own big changes - one is sitting for her nursing exams on the brink of launching a new career while another awaits the birth of her first child (a son, due anytime now). P and I just learned that two of our friends are ending their relationship. My sister is looking for a condo and my parents are planning to sell their house, downsize their monthly bills, and take up residence in my grandmother's home (she moved to a nursing home over two years ago). I don't have plans to visit the East Coast until next December, but it's odd to think how different it all could be.

At work, my building is over pretty intense construction - walls are coming down, sprinklers are going in the ceiling, doors are barricaded by rubble, and you have to watch your step with all the nails and wires all about. It's noisy and dusty and it's given the summer a distinctly chaotic and distracted feel. After eight hours of drilling the other day, I insisted on a junk food dinner and several hours of lounging on the couch before bed - I was wiped out. The great irony is that the construction should wrap up in August, the completion date coinciding with my vacation.

An Editor's Meeting

Generally speaking, I've never shaken my youthful wanderlust. In fact, as I've aged, hitting the road has become a more frequent practice as I now have greater means and cause to roam.

For me, there's a special and almost equal pleasure in both visiting and revisiting places. I'm not claiming this as some earth shattering original observation, but all travelers know that in returning to visited city from one's past, it is often easier to spot the changes in yourself than the geography of the urban landscape. I believe that there's always a new adventure to be had on familiar terrain.

True to form, 2009 is already a year marked and defined by travel. In the past three months, my husband and I have crisscrossed the country visiting our relatives in Las Vegas, Scottsdale, and now Boston. This most recent weekend brought us to a symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While P completed his obligations, I was left with a very open schedule, ideal for leisure and play. On Friday, I met one of my closest friends from college (a frequent co-contributor / editor to this blog). In a sense, considering that we were both playing hooky from our professional obligations, we forgave ourselves from letting another week lapse without a CM post. We did TALK about the blog over our Wagamama lunch, taking stock of where we are and thinking about the future.

While we haven't been entirely faithful in our pledge to post weekly, one of the main reasons we launched this blog was to deepen the dialogue between friends separated across the miles. Our shared creative venture is a way to get beyond the brevity of a text message or dashed off email and move toward something more substantive. For me, I can say that it has been nice to write something that is not purely utilitarian - something that I know a handful of friends will read.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I want to make it clear that we're not claiming any great literary genius here. It's not that we shun the superficial - in fact we've done the opposite - we've taken the care and time to explore topics from the Octomom to sweatpants, but we've done so in more thoughtful, painstaking depth. My friend and I are both a little disappointed not to have a larger community of contributors, but it's good to have a goal and vision for the future.