Taste: My Life through Food(20)
My first apartment was a mere two blocks away from La Caridad and therefore I could be found at its tables quite often. There were always at least a few taxis idling on the street outside with drivers eating the restaurant’s food from takeaway containers, because like the rest of us they knew that the food was good, the service lightning quick, and the prices absurdly low. The restaurant is almost like a kind of terrarium, as two sides of it are long glass windows looking onto Broadway and Seventy-Ninth Street. Pedestrians love to peer in as they wait at the bus stop just outside the entrance for the downtown Broadway local, just as customers will spend hours at one of the restaurant’s tables watching the shirtsleeved multitude outside bustle through their daily lives. It’s a modest-size place that seats about forty people, with no décor to speak of. The staff can be at times brusque but is for the most part friendly in that slightly jaded way that professional waiters are for the most part friendly.
One might order a wonton soup to start, followed by an oxtail stew or shrimp fried rice as an accompaniment to pulled beef in a rich brown sauce, known as ropa vieja, all for very affordable prices. Slightly-too-greasy but delicious fried chicken (mostly dark meat) with a side of yellow rice, red or black beans, fried plantains, and an avocado-and-onion salad would cost you somewhere between $6 and $8, as I recall. Obviously the prices have increased in the last forty years, but it is still very reasonable. Like other Cuban-Chinese restaurants years ago, it was one of the only places with an espresso machine, and although the coffee was not quite like they make it in Rome, it was a welcome respite from the acidic dishwater that passed for java at most of the coffee shops around. At La Caridad, a large oval plate of shrimp with yellow rice and peas and a side of black beans could sate a young actor for quite a few hours, until he got hungry again and was forced to make himself yet another dinner of pasta marinara washed down with the remains of a cheap bottle of red, because he had spent his allotment of cash for the day. But in his heart of hearts and stomach of stomachs, he knew it had been worth it.
Whenever I am in New York I go to the Upper West Side and visit the neighborhood I was thrilled to be a part of for so many years when I wore a younger man’s clothes. As I have said, it has changed distinctly, a bit for the better and a bit for the worse. It is safer and cleaner, but so much of the texture of the past has been lost. I still make a point of eating at La Caridad not only because I love it but because, along with most of my other dining haunts, all of the other Cuban-Chinese restaurants within a twenty-block radius have disappeared. Their square footage has been transformed into soulless cafés ruled by tattooed baristas who ask you for your first name so they can write it on your eco-cup and then scream it for all the world to hear when your order is ready. It is in these kinds of places that today one can purchase a cup of coffee for what, when I was young, was once the price of a hearty meal served with an unusual slice of ethnic culinary history on the side.II
I?As this goes to print, I have just discovered that Gage & Tollner has fortunately reopened.
II?While revising this chapter, I discovered that La Caridad closed abruptly on July 23, 2020. I don’t know the reason why, but like so many customers, I am heartbroken.
6
After we had been dating for four years, I married my late wife, Kathryn Spath, in 1995. She had two young children at the time. In 2000 we had twins, Nicolo and Isabel, and in 2002 she gave birth to our daughter Camilla. After being diagnosed in 2005 with stage-four breast cancer, she died four years later, in 2009, at the age of forty-seven. She was extraordinary as a mother, wife, and friend. She was highly intelligent, beautiful, kind, patient, and one of the best people I will ever know. I loved her and always will. Her death is still incomprehensible to me and her absence still unreal.
Like me, Kate enjoyed good food, as was obvious on our first date in a little French restaurant in Manhattan called Tout Va Bien. It was opened in 1948 and I am happy to say it is still there. We both ordered their always delicious coq au vin, and I think Kate finished hers, half of a baguette, and a couple glasses of wine before I’d even made a dent in my coq.
When I first met her she was a single mother running a day care center out of her home to make ends meet. Yet, no matter how tired she was after a grueling day, she cooked a well-balanced meal and had a proper sit-down dinner with her children every night. The meals were, for the most part, very simple and kid-friendly, but they were varied and nutritious, and subsequently both of her children became very good eaters. When I joined the family, Kate and I naturally started cooking together, and the number and the types of dishes we prepared changed and grew. I introduced my family’s recipes into our daily fare and eventually, exactly like my wife, Felicity, Kate usually ended up making them better than I did. Some of them much better.
I remember one instance not long before she was diagnosed when Kate made my mother’s recipe for lasagna Bolognese, a dish that was every family member’s favorite. Handmade plain and spinach pasta are layered into a baking pan with Bolognese sauce, besciamella, and grated Parmigiano. The result is an absurdly rich yet delicate dish that no one who eats it seems to be able to stop eating. Needless to say it is very hard to get right. The pasta has to be the correct thickness, just thick enough to hold its shape and the sauce but just thin enough to almost melt in your mouth after a single bite. The Bolognese sauce cannot be too meaty, as this would make it too heavy, and it must also have the proper ratio of carrots, celery, onion, and tomato to give it the necessary sweetness. The besciamella cannot be either too runny or too “claggy,” as they say in Britain, and it must all be put together with great care so as not to damage the sheets of pasta. In short, if you have a lot of time and patience, you should try making it. If you don’t, then, really, just don’t. You’ll make yourself and everyone around you very unhappy.