I bought a ticket for the California Street Farm x Houndstooth Modern Tavern Farm Dinner two days after a man broke my heart in the same week that he told that he loved me.
That seems to be how it goes dating in your 30s in 2024, after the end of marriages and big loves. There are entire genres of memes and TikToks about this—how dating right now feels so hard for so many of us because collectively, it seems that people are afraid of the hard work of commitment.
This heartbreak sent me into brunch with friends who I had previously told, “No, I think this one means what he said and that he’s going to stay.” They didn’t say anything about that. They didn’t say, “I told you so.” They sat there with me while I tilted my head back and pushed my index fingers into my bottom lashes as if that would make the tears go back into my eyes or put the love I gave him back into my heart. “I don’t understand,” I said to them, “I gave it all I had–I gave more than I ever have. I really tried.”
Being the only really single woman in a group of couples friends in your 30s is a uniquely painful and beautiful experience.
People around you are buying houses together, getting rings sized, moving in, going on camping trips, talking about babies, and you’re telling them that your first date back into the dating pool was with a man who spent 45 minutes talking about goose decor and another 30 minutes reading you a brisket recipe from a internet.
At the same time that I am so happy to see my friends settling into what I hope is lifelong love, I feel this pinch in my heart like, “When will it happen for me,” and on my harder days, “Will it happen for me?”
And sometimes when they tell me about the beautiful things in their lives, they apologize to me, because they know how badly I want it–and I don’t need the apology. I am glad to be the holder of upcoming engagements and fertility appointments and mountaintop wedding plans.
I just foolishly thought after 18 months of being single, I had found the person I would get to do some of those things with. I believed that not because I am naive, but because that’s what he told me.
I used to spend mornings in love with him at two markets. We hit Mill City first (my home market) and his, Northeast.
I knew about California Street Farm before we met, but he converted me to it as my main place for produce at markets. Urban (in Northeast), woman and queer owned, teeny, it’s my favorite kind of farm. The kind of farm I want us to have more of in every neighborhood. We walked up to California Street Farm and got all the produce we could there before anywhere else at the market. I got my first tomato of the season there. They had two small heirlooms ready on the table. I left one for someone else. I ate mine the middle of the market like you might an apple, praising the real birth of summer.
At California Street Farm, he always got spicy greens and turnips. I always got the edible flowers and herbs. One of the people who works the stand told us more than once, “You two look so cute today.” We did–he chose the color of his tie dye shirts based on the colors in my outfit. We did–he carried flowers for both of us in his arms, giant bouquets he bought for me every week without me having to ask. We did–you could tell when we were together that we were both madly in love, even before we said it to each other. Everyone knew. Everyone saw. It was palpable.
It burned hot and fast and he still had healing to do before he could burn the candle the way we wanted it to burn. It broke both of our hearts and left me blinking back tears at markets while I picked up produce alone.
I had loved him instantly. I really didn’t think he would break my heart. But then he did–and with it, every time I went to California Street Farm for a month, I let out a few tears. The first time I went after it ended, I went back to my car and sobbed, because I saw him in the distance, and because he was trying to give the space to be there but I didn’t want the space. I wanted him to say, “I’m sorry. Let’s try again.”
People are embedded in memories–and food is the strongest memory, or maybe I should say, it’s my strongest memory.
Men in my life usually leave with things like new restaurants, recipes, and farms they fell in love with while trying to love me. But this time, it happened the other way around: the things he loved, he had transferred to me.
I bought the ticket to the dinner because I think that doing things for the plot is good, actually, and crying in a port-a-potty is an incredible piece of plot (they had a real bathroom though!).
I went because I think going to the place we shared alone might add one more stitch to the parts of my heart that were burst open and needed to heal, like some twisted kind of exposure therapy. I bought the ticket because I know there is magic in doing the things you wanted to do with someone you love alone. Big magic. Life changing magic.
The day the farm dinner came, I honestly didn’t want to go. I was dreadfully afraid I was going to be surrounded by couples and would not be able to keep the tears inside my eyes, that they would spill over onto the table.
I was worried that I would be the only solo diner at a communal table where people wanting to talk to their partner have pity conversations with me instead of just leaving me alone–this has happened enough times for this to be a valid concern: me sitting there with a couple so in love and I am itching in my skin at dinners like this all over the country wanting to say, “I’m okay, really, you can be on a date!”
And look, that morning, when I got up and thought about going? I was just really missing him. I really did wish he was there. I wrote it in my journal. I wrote, “I wish you were here.”
But I went anyway, putting on my pink cowgirl boots and my pink jacket covered in hand painted horses (pink pony club for one baby). I took a deep breath before getting out of my car and then I walked up to the farm, greeted by a giant rabbit sculpture, a long multi-colored painted picnic table with beautiful floral arrangements, and the last of the season tomatoes still green on the vine. And then Elyssa, owner of California Street Farm, said, “You made it!” And I did. I did make it.
I’ve been going to things like this alone for so much of my life that when you ask people who know me to define me, many of them will include in their description of me, “She loves to eat alone.”
This is both a little bit right and a little bit wrong. I will eat alone. I do eat alone. I am happy eating alone, but I love to eat with someone who can talk about food in the same way I can talk about food.
I’ve been slowly, painstakingly editing a book that follows my journey in eating alone after the end of my engagement. It’s a thing people know about me. It’s a core part of my heart. Even when I’m dating people, I eat alone a lot, because I tend to date people who work long hours or are introverts or can’t travel like I can, sending me out into the world to do the thing I love the most by myself. I wrote more about this in my piece Fine Dining Saved My Life and I won’t rehash it here except to say that people tend to think this is a unique thing to me that they cannot do themselves. But you can. You can do it, too.
I recently went on a date with someone who told me that they haven’t been going out to the places they want to go because they don’t know how to do it alone.
And the hard thing about it is there is no WikiHow, you know? You just have to do it and be uncomfortable at first answering the question, “How many,” with, “One.” You have to figure out if you bring a book or not. What do you do with your eyes, your hands, your ears? (My answer to this is: watch the kitchen, write, listen to the people next to you.) But going out to dinner at say Gai Noi or The Lowbrow alone is not the same as going to Addison alone and is not the same as going to a communal event with long tables alone.
Both fine dining and communal events alone still sometimes suck the air out of me, a woman who literally travels across the country to do this exact activity on purpose all of the time.
So when I walked up to the table and Elyssa told me that I was seated next to two other women who came alone, I let out a huge exhale, because I know how to talk to single women at a table. I know how to make friends. I have made a life out of this business of making friends, calling people to my communal tables and telling them that if they come alone I’ll sit them next to other solo diners who don’t yet know each other.
No one shows up to 30 person dinners at my house without a well thought out seating plan. I’m just not used to showing up to other people’s 30 person dinners with this in mind.
Which—sidebar, I’m gonna call Nightingale out on this. In the same week as this dinner, they sat me as a solo diner four seats away from the next closest diner in a literal corner at Tomato Dinner this year–I was fine, because I’m writing, but most people would not have been fine and would have felt really shitty, and it was the worst moment of hospitality I’ve experienced this year by far. I mean look at this. It’s honestly a little embarrassing that they did that.
But–that’s not the only place that California Street Farm x Houndstooth Modern Tavern (this is the husband/wife chef/beverage team that cooked/paired the dinner) excelled where most pop-ups or one-time dinners fail. Their food, beverage, and hospitality were exquisite in a world of one-time events that normally miss the mark.
I am going to be honest. I was expecting the dinner to be not very good.
That’s not to say anything about what I thought about the farm or Houndstooth going in, but that’s just how events like this are. They are executed by people who don’t have outdoor event experience, who are used to fully stocked kitchens, who don’t know how to use the restriction of just vegetables grown in one place, and they’re often put on by people who do not do one seating tasting menus. I didn’t know that this is literally Houndstooth’s whole thing going in—but it is and that’s why it was so good.
Chefs like to act like every single thing is the same, but a wedding, a pop-up, a food truck, and a dinner service require different skills, different prep, and different restrictions.
The number of chefs who have tried to help me make 30 person dinner parties “run smoother” in a teeny tiny home kitchen who have absolutely batshit ideas of how to make that happen is a lot.
They’ll say things like telling me to make things very, very simple. They’ll tell me to cut all restrictions and just feed people who can eat gluten and meat (excluding most of my best friends). One time a man gave me a list of dishes for a dinner idea that all needed different oven temps but all needed to be served hot. When I asked him how to do it with one (very shitty) oven, it was like I asked him how to build a rocket, like he had not processed there was one oven.
My chef ex-boyfriends tell me to do desserts like cookies instead of tiered and designed cakes (my last party had a plum guajillo cake covered in guajillo dusted blackberries–I am not a phone it in with cookies girl). They’ll tell me to do one pot meals. They’ll tell me to do three courses instead of eight to ten dishes (or 20 for Thanksgiving). One of them told me to get jarlic instead of peeling 10 heads myself and I got the ick. “It’s the same,” he said, to which I said, “The fuck it is.”
The point of me telling you this is that when chefs look at cooking for this volume of people in an event like this, their inclination is often do less.
I have never had a chef look at my menus for my dinners who hasn’t told me to do less. And you can feel it in their events most of the time.
You can feel that they hate cooking for your restriction. You can feel that they asked the question, “What is the most impressive low effort dish I’ve got?” I used to go to a lot of events like this with high ticket prices and long waits for cold food and I ended up stopping, because it just was not worth it. These were talented chefs who know that these events are hard and so they simplify them. And that’s fine, but you can taste it in the food.
In 2024, I normally don’t go to events like this because even really good chefs cut out some of the best parts of cooking to put these events on and make them run on time under restrictions.
I’ve been to events run by chefs I love that are just totally dreadful, boring, and uninspired. I’ve been to pop ups from teams I know have good food (because I’ve eaten it at other restaurants) and it’s just an absolute shit show.
Lynette’s pop up had soft serve that didn’t melt. Ramenhood’s first pop-up in NYC had really, really chewy noodles. The farm dinner at Tangletown had crudité that didn’t even match the dips they put on the table in terms of flavor profile, but I know why they did that dish: it’s easy.
All three of those teams are stellar. It’s not because they are not talented; it’s because events like this are hard.
So when the first plate hit the table and it was 1) pretty and 2) contained multiple elements that actually required a good amount of prep and 3) had a stellar meat substitution I was like, “Oh.”
Because it’s totally possible for you to serve me something like a crudité and dip that don’t make sense together and call it a day and think I won’t notice because I am somewhere beautiful. But that wasn’t this plate.
This was a plate obviously composed by a chef who knows how to run an event like this, who cares about dietary restrictions (I am not vegetarian, but I ate vegetarian tonight), and by a chef who gets produce. It was a menu designed around prep ahead of time, you can read it for yourself.
And that? That’s what I want to eat all of the time—on a farm or not.
My slice of the table was split between people who were there because they loved California Street Farm and people who loved Houndstooth.
I had never had their food and the things I learned about them, I picked up from others that night. They did a residency at the Briar and they do events. This is their blurb for the event that went out on social media and email:
Houndstooth Modern Tavern is a hospitality concept out of South Minneapolis offering custom private dining and small public events. Chef Rick Didora and beverage director Paige Latham Didora focus on high-touch hospitality, seasonal ingredients, and thoughtful pairings while bringing the restaurant to your home, brewery, or, in this case, farm!
And here are some photos from other events along with a photo of them (look how cute they are!).
You can tell by looking at this and reading a menu from another event that they really care about food in this type of setting. I could also tell that when the first dish went down in front of me.
It was beautiful, a small bite, radishes with herb-poached chilled summer squash (scallop on the non-veg menu), nasturtium (love), kombu, and a thyme-smoked lemon spritz. My note on the spritz in my notebook was that if you were going to start on that super smoky note, you need to have flavor throughout. I always worry about that, when people start their first dish with a ton of flavor and hit you in the face with something in a drink that is specific like that. Often times, they don’t follow through. They open with their showstopper and then back down, which is confusing on the palate.
But I didn’t have to worry about it–smoke (and flavor) followed us throughout the night.
I told the woman to my right that I really loved how they paired the dish and that it was inclusive hospitality (a phrase I learned from Dry Wit). The woman to my right was drinking N/A pairings too, but she’s not sober. The woman across from us was jealous of our N/A pairing, saying that it looked and smelled so good.
Then I said something about how it was really thoughtful that it actually paired, how normally people phone it in and don’t think about sober people at events like this. It was really beautiful together. All the pairings would be throughout the night.
The woman to my right said, “There’s a blog I recently read about that by a woman who is super sober–” and I didn’t need her to finish to know she meant my blog. (Also being identified as super sober made my night.)
I let her finish her thought saying, “She went to Dario and—” and I took my sunglasses off and said, “That’s me. That’s my piece of writing.” She said, “It’s my favorite piece of food writing.”
You can read my piece about where I think Dario fails on inclusive hospitality by clicking that link.
To hear someone say to me, “That is my favorite piece of food writing,” when it was a piece I almost didn’t (was terrified) of publishing, it hit me in a tender spot. Her and I were both a little emotional. I gestured to my notebook and said, “I’m writing about this dinner, too.”
In that moment, the table was brought together. The people to our left and to our right cinched in. We became a group of about 8 people who rotated in and out of conversation with each other. United by two women feeling something and sharing something.
She told me to describe my piece to other people. She told them why she loved it. And we started talking about my theory of how restaurants should treat alcohol like a shellfish allergy and my experience in restaurants getting served alcohol. Right there, in that moment, the sadness I felt all day shattered and lifted.
This is why I write my pieces, so that people can engage in conversations we don’t normally have about food. And it was happening here at my table, with someone next to me who had no idea who I was, not really, but who was moved by a piece of writing that got me blocked by the owners at Dario and sometimes still gets me into trouble in other restaurants.
Worth it? Worth it. For moments like this one.
Because here’s the thing, if I had not been there, they would have talked about it without me. That’s the whole point of this project. To make people think. To get people talking. To go beyond review and into something else deeper than, “How was the food?”
After dinner, we exchanged social media handles and I have eight new friends on social media, one of whom said that during the dinner they didn’t actually agree with what I was saying but after reading the piece said, “You changed my mind.”
That’s the magic of good seating arrangements and good hospitality–we meet people we otherwise wouldn’t, we have conversations we wouldn’t have had, if we had stayed home.
And after that one moment where the ice was split and we went from our separate groups into one that spanned across tables, we kept talking about other things, conversation moving to talk about how good Marty’s tomato jam is to sunset walks in our own neighborhoods to how certain local restaurants have outsized pieces of our heart.
Because it just takes one moment to shatter the illusion that any of us were there alone. We were there together.
When the second dish came out, it was a little different than the menu. The menu said tomato sandwich but this was a panzanella-ish salad. The drink was a strawberry caper kombucha paired with a salad that was bright, summery, creamy, and crunchy. One of my favorite pairings is strawberry with tomato so it hit me in a place that felt like the best of summer. The salad was all of the things you want a salad to be.
It was so good that Minnesotans asked for the last bite of it, with the woman who got the last bite being encouraged by all of us to just eat it from the big plate so she could get all the creamy dressing instead of moving it from one plate to another.
She wouldn’t have done that without encouragement from women telling her to do it. We were breaking norms of Midwestern decorum and politeness at a long dinner table on a queer, women owned farm asking her to enjoy those last bites instead.
I don’t normally ask clarifying questions of chefs when I write these pieces–I like to let my experience speak for itself. But I did ask some follow up questions of the Houndstooth team, one of the questions being: was that change on the menu a game day decision? Because when I see something different on the menu when it comes out and it’s good, I always want to understand if they killed something else that might not have been as good because they knew that. I admire when chefs do that.
Chef Rick told me, “I really wanted to do both, actually! I couldn’t quite figure out the best way to do a sandwich, so we decided on a panzanella-ish salad, which had components that you would find on a great tomato sandwich, like figs and mayo.”
The reason I share this is that I think sometimes on pop-ups, restaurants have a menu printed or posted and they choose to go with the thing on that menu, instead of pivoting when they realize it’s not working.
Part of doing events is realizing when you set a menu you can’t do it or something didn’t turn out. Sorry to always harp on this, but the soft serve from Lynette is one of the examples of something that should have never hit a table. They legitimately should have gotten Kemps ice cream from the store and apologized for not having soft serve. It would have been better to bite that bullet and cut it. Go get an eraser and eat it—that was the texture of the soft serve. But cutting dishes you promised is hard!
The ability to say, “This dish actually works better in this context,” and change it even though you want to do a tomato sandwich shows grace under the pressure of one time events.
I’m pretty sure if you had given my table another big tray of it, it would have all been gone, too, not because we were not given enough food (we were), but because the salad was that good.
It’s the kind of dish you think about long after you’ve eaten it. But… also a thing I love is that Chef Rick is saying here that the average person might think of putting figs on a tomato sandwich, but I have never had figs on a tomato sandwich and I eat a lot of tomato sandwiches.
I think the flavor combination is something that was new to a lot to people. It was to me. But Chef Rick knows flavor so well, he takes it for granted that figs go on a tomato sandwich. We kept eating it and eating it and eating it because he’s right, that is something that belongs on a tomato sandwich, but I don’t think most of us have had it on a tomato sandwich before. He got to introduce that concept to us.
That’s what my favorite kind of food does. It breaks up your beliefs about what goes together and shows you something new.
Think about it. Have you ever been to a pop up that does that before? Before this, I hadn’t.
When dish three was set in front of me, I took one bite of it and then I stood up and went to go and look at the equipment they were using.
One of my friends told me if I did that at his pop-up, he would be, “Terrified,” but they kept working like I wasn’t there at all. They had a propane-powered flat top and a single burner camp stove with two chaffing dishes. Now, if you have ever worked events, you know, this is barebones equipment even for an outdoor event. The reason I went up to go and look at it is that I was halfway in on dish three and everything was really good.
Napa cabbage with olives, charred radicchio, bitter greens, yuca, served with an Oktoberfest (Athletic). I think that Paige does an excellent job pairing in a way that most people and restaurants do not. Her philosophy is that she wants to enhance the food and you can feel that. Sometimes people pair on different things and theories, but everything she paired made the food better. I don’t think most people think to themselves, “You know what bitter greens needs? Oktoberfest.” But it does. It does need that. It felt so natural to be there. I loved those things together. The dish was beautiful partly because of her pairing.
The dish was also very bitter in a way most chefs would not attempt. It leaned into the vegetables as they were, not over fussy trying to change them. I appreciated that a lot, because you don’t see a lot of places letting the “harder” greens be themselves. But I like them as they are and a farm is the right setting to challenge people that way.
I also overhead a conversation on my way over to their makeshift kitchen where someone asked another person passing out drinks if they had a good enough sense of who was N/A to drop real beer first. That person said, “No,” and so the person who didn’t was sent behind to follow with the N/A drinks to fill in the spots instead of putting alcohol down—it was something I also appreciated, as a person who has been served alcohol too many times, that whoever had that memory was the one to do the first runs.
The main course had a plated nod to the first course with the radish on top—and a smoky element that was also a nod to the first course. It showed a thread between the dishes. It was smoked eggplant with lots of small elements lifting up the dish. The olives were pulled in on the veg menu from course three to four giving some more consistency and the caper from the strawberry caper kombucha came back on this plate as just a caper. It was clear to me that they were able to find ways to work with limited ingredients that made the meal feel more cohesive and not limited.
Sometimes at menus like this, you feel like someone feels limited and not inspired—but you can feel inspiration here and a feeling of abundance not restriction.
You can feel that Houndstooth really cared about the farm. In his small speech to us, Chef Rick said, “I believe in getting your food as close to the source as possible.” I do, too. It’s why I’m here. It’s why I drive out to 10th Street Farm regularly. It’s why I order from Summer Kitchen Cooperative. It’s why I try my best to put boots down on the farms I get my meat from. It’s also why I go to pick blueberries in patches alone (though, you know, if you’re looking to ask me out, ask me to pick blueberries with you because that is an activity I would rather not do alone.)
This dish was paired with Bruce from Dry Wit, which I joke on a regular basis is my stand-in boyfriend. Someone might ask me what I’m doing with my Friday night and I’ll say, “Watching 90 Day Fiance with Bruce.”
If you haven’t had it, you have to. Go to Marigold and get it and tell everyone you’re busy with Bruce that night.
When I saw there was a cheese course on a six course menu, I was both delighted and surprised.
You don’t normally get a cheese course until we push past seven courses–and even then, that’s rare until we get past 10. People around me were talking about how they have never had cheese plated like that before.
I think in general the dish was a little challenging to people in the best way: it asked them to stretch their idea of what a cheese course could be.
There was either an elemental error or strategic error on giving us a jam so thick it stuck to the bottom like candy (it got caught in my hair), but flavor wise, the dish was gorgeous, with a cheese that was not a standard you might pick if you’re trying to feed 30 people. To most people, it was new. I heard chatter like, “I’ve never had a caramelized beet before,” or, “I’ve never had something like this before,” or, “How do you sage-roast an almond,” and I think the best dinners do this.
The best dinners make people talk about the food. And it was obvious that’s what California Street Farm wanted out of this event. They got it.
The napkins in front of us gave us prompts to talk about the food as more than sustenance but memory and the basis of parts of our life. But I found that the best conversations around us came from the plates themselves and people trying to understand them together. What was different about the meat and non-meat plates? Do you think this specific plate is beautiful? I spent a lot of time talking about the china in front of us, as much of it came from a brand I collect (Noritake).
The cheese course we talked about a lot. In general, this was a meal that made people think and this course exemplified that. It was my favorite dish of the night. It was also my favorite pairing of the night.
Palo Santo iced tea that brought back that feeling of smoke from the earlier dishes. But it also reminded me of being 19 and a little bit wild flying to Austin, TX to spend a week with a man I men in Boulder, CO when I lived there, both of us young and a little bit in love. Good food does that—it transports you to other parts of your life.
Here’s the thing about this cheese dish. It is not simple. It requires you to caramelize a beet, roast almonds, pickle sprouting broccoli. Now, all of that is done in prep, not here during service, so you have to just assemble in the moment.
But it requires you to do all that in balance with each other–and it’s not a phoned in cheese course with simple execution. It’s a cheese course you might find in a Michelin starred restaurant.
For an event like this, we just don’t normally see thought out plates like that. It was at this moment that I had the thought, “Anyone getting married should have them do the dinner.” Because your vegan mom, your sober brother, and your friend who can’t have gluten can all have plates that are just as beautiful and well thought out as your family with no restrictions. And by “anyone getting married,” I really do mean, one day, up in the Northwoods in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan on a long picnic table against Lake Juncob: me.
I don’t know how else to tell you I loved the food except to say that when I ate it, it made me imagine getting married. Food is about emotion, creating it and remembering it, and this food made me feel like one day far in the future, I would be having it another context. The food, the drink, made me feel rooted in the community around me.
But it made me feel hope, because honestly? I want to give these two a list of all the moments my future husband and I shared around food and have them spit out 12 courses. I think they’d fucking nail it.
At the end of the night, with a tarte tatin that is more very good cookie with fruit in it and less tarte, all I can feel as the sun goes down and the candles flicker and the moon comes out is that I wish you were here.
I wish you were here to taste apples three ways (roasted, pickled, and caramelized). I wish you were here to hear a woman say she was hesitant about pickles in dessert and change her mind. I wish you were here to taste yuzu Szechuan cider. I wish you were here to watch the moon come out over the farm. I wish you were here to see the way the food looked against the candle light and not through a screen.
I mean the man I love who doesn’t think I’m his future wife—he would have loved it. I also mean both the you that represents the future love of my life but mostly the you the reader that represents the part of you that is afraid to live your life before you find that person. Don’t wait.
People tell you all sorts of reasons to live your life most of which are you’ll find the love of your life living your life, but that’s not the reason to go–I never think I’m going to meet my husband in places like these.
The reason to go is being surrounded by people who love what you love, who yearn for the kind of night you yearn for, who will scoop bits of cheese and sauce and dressing from their plates and into the mouths just shy of licking the plate. The reason to go is a group of women encouraging another women to eat the last bites directly off the big plate and her saying, “My mom would kill me.” The reason to go is someone at the table realizing that she is sat between three people she knows because she passes them most days, but doesn’t really know them–how life is often like that. The reason to go is that the food might be magic and you might meet people who give a damn about what you give a damn about.
Whatever that is for you: rollerskating, sports games, food, whatever, go alone. Nights like these on a farm in the city of your birth surrounded by people who found their way here alongside you are worth living with or without love.
There were people enraptured with each other, in love, talking almost exclusively to themselves in a world of magic that none of us could reach at this long table. And then there was us–a group of eight or so people at a multi-colored long picnic table discussing how we arrived here, exchanging social media handles like you used to addresses or phone numbers, while talking about bumblebees. You could have been there. We would have included you, too.
I am the first to leave, long before the candles burn out, long before the last person goes.
My favorite late night bartenders know this about me–I will never be the last to leave. I try to slip away before that is possible at all. At dinner, at the bar, at your wedding, at a party. It’s a sober trait—you get out before there’s even a possibility for an event to turn into a night that isn’t for people like us anymore.
Dessert finished, I tucked my notebook back into the front pocket of my overalls and hugged Elyssa on my way out. Her farm—her food—is beautiful. But the space she’s built in two short years with set back after set back including a fire is even more so.
I stopped to tell Rick and Paige that I see them, I see this talent and know it is rare. A thing most people might not know is that even for a dinner like this, they are operating on the tiniest amount of equipment and spinning out plates and pairings better than fully staffed (and stocked) restaurants. They should be proud.
I keep a list of my top 10 meals of the year. I quietly added them to it. As of Sept 13, 2024, this is the list:
Esmé (Chicago) — all time
Ilis (NYC)
Mint Mark (Madison)
Indienne (Chicago)
Albi (DC)
Pietramala (Philly)
Houndstooth (Minneapolis)
Myriel (St Paul)
Demi (Minneapolis)
India street food (Fargo)
To all the people who saw the dinner and thought it was for someone else (couples, mostly), it was for you. Come with us next year. Tell them you want to be sat by me–I don’t need to know you to know that I can talk to you for hours.
Love so much your sentiments about dining amongst other solo diners, having conversations you wouldn't have had otherwise. And the photos of this evening are a dream, so being privy to the play by play is beyond!
Read this right before I shut my eyes to sleep and still thinking about it in the AM- you are SO talented and it just blows me away.