The Commonwealth Club sits on the Embarcadero overlooking a bridge and a ferry. I use another person’s name to get in, opting for the stairs and not the elevator, glad that I did or I might have missed the brownies, topped with sea salt, containing nuts.
I do not know the people speaking, but I do know my girlfriend who I greet and sit next to, the lights coming down soon after, I’ve only had one brownie, but I think there will be more after.
There is a stage and a screen behind it. On the stage are two white chairs with very sharp angles. A video starts playing about the Commonwealth Club before anyone walks on stage. The video shows clips one after another of luminaries in their fields. I would list them here were it relevant or I remembered, the lasting impression only that it went on too long and was heavy-handed.
Tonight is what is relevant. A food talk, or a food business talk, or the diary of a bad business man. Ed Levine in conversation with Kenji Lopez. The former of Serious Eats and, from what I gather, the latter a celebrated contributor of Serious Eats. I know neither.
On the occasion of a memoir, Ed begins with a childhood spent amongst communists at the edge of Queens and Long Island. A borderland place, where urban grit meets manicured lawns and somewhere nearby Shea Stadium, before it was decrepit. As Ed describes it, his family’s kitchen table was more city than suburb, all fire and politics, the nightly news precedent over food; but thankfully his grandmother on Sunday is all schnitzel and matzo ball. A few hundred miles north in the same years my dad eats an identical diet: Edward Murrow and latkes.
Ed’s parents die in his teens and Kenji paths his old boss toward the narrative, not to gloss over grief but because there is only an hour. A first calling to music, booking village venues for jazz acts, producing Dr. John who died the week before: How he made it to 77, I have no idea. This draws laughs. I think about gumbo, crawfish etouffee, and boudin, and agree with his sentiment, becoming worried for the heart health of my New Orleans friends.
His twenties were spent eating corned beef and zoning at the Village Vanguard, a place I passed 1000 times but never entered and a sandwich I’ve seen on the menu but never ordered, opting always for pastrami. He falls in love and has a kid, attempts normalcy at business school and advises the audience against it. I feel my girlfriend stiffen at my side.
So far I feel plot summary and not main course: a telling of his start in food, a lucky book deal and a talented debut, an early adoption of blogging and then what sounds like a 10 year struggle for solvency. Debt piles on, from friends and family. His wife, he implies, was near to leave him, but then a lucky break, a benevolent buyer. We’ll handle the money, you eat the food. An inch to the left and this man might not be on the stage right now and his wife not in the front row.
If there is a through-line it is to follow your dreams, or more apropos, your appetite. Pursue your dreams unto the edge of financial and personal ruin, and then keep pursuing them.
I do not know why, but my hands are clammy, and they have been the entire talk, I am thinking about those brownies and plot summary, the men on stage who say good food writing is about the story, not the flavor, the spice blend less important than the person who blends it.
What I’ll take home of this talk is what is immediate: the pleasant air between two men very different and yet very comfortable with another. A subtle moderator meets a rambly interviewee, the two aligned over a bowl of Bolognese. I can lean back in my chair when I’m eating alone at a restaurant and listen to the camaraderie at the table next to me, I can feel good that people in this world have found their place-settings when maybe I haven’t yet found mine; It is all okay, being welcomed by strangers to join their table, to share in their stories, to take nothing home with you more than a full stomach.
The lights rise, there is applause. People circle into their groups outside and share brief words before embarking into the summer evening. I go there too, but only after another brownie. Or three.
June 19, 2019