“Come On-A-My House”
Written for the @W42ST Food Issue, #41, in May of 2018.
The first time we lived in New York was back in 2005. My wife and I rented a two-room apartment on 71st east of West End. The kitchen was a sink and a stove, and we had to buy a butcher block table on wheels at Bed, Bath & Beyond to do any prep or serve a meal. One night we invited a few friends over for dinner. My wife is Greek-Cypriot, and we made hummus and a village salad. The meal was a success, but I don’t remember cooking anything else in that apartment. Like most New Yorkers, we usually ate out or ordered in, and we met our friends out. We rarely invited anyone over, and we were rarely invited over: it was easier to meet at that Turkish place, at that Starbucks, at the Met…going home is something you do in New York when the night is over. It’s rarely the setting for the night itself.
In 2008 we left for Cyprus, where my in-laws had purchased a two-bedroom apartment within a half-mile of my wife’s childhood home. It had a huge kitchen, with enough counter space to perform an autopsy, and a dishwasher. It was like I died and went to Cyprus. I began cooking.
The food in Cyprus is inexpensive and everything is local. Your milk is bottled half an hour away from the bakery or supermarket where you shop, the pork and chicken and eggs are from nearby farms…even more exotic produce, like spicy peppers and bananas, doesn’t travel more than an hour to the farmers market. I soon became a beloved purveyor of classic American meals like tuna melts and macaroni and cheese to our friends and, like any American dad worth his Bisquick, on weekend mornings I whipped up banana pancakes for my son.
I started cooking chicken tikka masala and chana masala, burritos and huevos rancheros, potato latkes and scallion pancakes…cooking soon became a superpower and, on special occasions, like my brother-in-law’s birthday, I would spend a half-day making eggplant parmesan. I cooked Christmas dinners, New Year’s brunches, creamy broccoli soups and homemade Bolognese sauces, even Pork Florentine, and I served everything with homemade garlic bread. My crowning glory was my first-ever cherry pie with a crust I made myself. My father-in-law is from a mountain village, Pedoulas, which is famed for its cherries, burgundy red and dense as super balls. One summer I had a huge bag of them and decided to bake a pie. When it turned out our supermarket, AlphaMega, didn’t have a readymade pie crust, I found a recipe online and had at it. The feeling of adaptability and self-sufficiency was a thrill, and the pie was a dulcet duet of buttery crust and sugary cherry compote. I called my mom and shouted into the phone, “I just baked a cherry pie!”
Our apartment became a café and commissary for our friends and their kids. We hosted at least one dinner each week, parents on our patio, hidden from the street by the deep green leaves of the two eucalyptus trees in front of our building, children amok everywhere else, either destroying the bedrooms with magic markers or destroying the bathroom with liquid soap and toothpaste. I fed the kids homemade chicken fingers or pan-fried hot dogs at a Kermit-the-Frog-green IKEA kids’ table in the living room, Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom or Frozen, in Greek, on my wife’s computer; out on the patio it was red Cypriot table wine and roast pork and mashed potatoes. The cats disappeared, the dog suffered myriad indignities, and I had to stay up until the wee small hours of the morning loading the dishwasher and discarding broken toys and half-finished collages, Nice ‘n’Easy on my iPod in the living room. I didn’t mind.
We returned to NY in 2016, flushed from our island home by the country’s faltering economy. Neither my wife nor I could make a decent living and, cruising into middle age, it seemed making it in New York was something to be assayed sooner than later. We once again crossed the Atlantic, this time with our heir in tow and the hope in our hearts that the streets would still be paved with gold, or that we’d at least find decent jobs and a good public school. We’re on the West Side again, in an apartment with a loft and some counter space, though the sink and the stove are smack against each other.
I’ve decided not to give up the domesticity I honed in Cyprus. It’s de rigueur to meet everyone out here, regardless of the expense, which is often astonishing. I love restaurants and, if I could afford it, I’d eat even more meals out. But inviting friends in – even if it’s a bit cramped, even if they have to schlep all the way uptown – isn’t just about the food. It’s about comfort and intimacy, about the joy I feel if even one of our guests asks for seconds, when someone declares, “I’m stuffed!” I put out piles of hot food, I tell everyone, ‘take off your shoes, put up your feet…’
For less than $20 I can make an elephantine stir-fry with brown rice and fresh broccoli and carrots, some extra-firm tofu, everything sautéed in garlic and onions and ginger and top-shelf olive oil and soy sauce, everything bought from the guy with the produce cart in front of Whole Foods and from Associated, and after dinner I can make you a hot cup of coffee or a lemon green tea or just a plain old black tea with milk and sugar, and I’ve got a turntable now, and piles of records, so we can listen to Aja and Swing Easy and The Magical Golden Hits of the Platters, and you can take your shoes off and put your feet up and stay as late as you want. You can even sleep over. I’ll make breakfast.