C.R.A.S.H Landing with Brooks Headley
Drummer/Pastry Chef at Del Posto and his Bandmates Tear Ass from T.J. to Oakland: A Travelogue
SATURDAY January 11
I wake up on my bandmate Cundo’s floor at 8:00 a.m. It’s 47 degrees outside, so that means that it’s also 47 degrees inside his unheated balsa-wood bungalow. l still have my clothes, ski cap, and shoes on, and am wrapped up in two blankets on the carpet. I left New York hoping for a balmy, 80-degree Los Angeles January. Fuck, I even brought a pair of shorts.
I am in Los Angeles to do a mini-tour of western America with my band C.R.A.S.H. They all live in Los Angeles; I live in New York. Why don’t they just find a drummer who lives out here? I don’t know. Being in a band is like being in a relationship, which means you do lots of things you can’t rationalize for vague reasons like “chemistry.”
It’s going to be a quick tour, nothing like the month-long commitments all of us have willingly participated in in the past. We formed in August of 2011 after Hurricane Irene interrupted reality, including operations of the pastry kitchen of Del Posto, where I work, as well as a flight I was supposed to take back to New York. During my extended LA layover, we recorded a 7-inch and played a great show, and now I’m back seventeen months later to do it all over again. Businessmen we are not. We just want to play our eleven-minute set as many times as possible. We are using shitty equipment foraged in the LA area. It’s like Cook It Raw with raggedy drums instead of lichens and eighties tube amps instead of pig’s blood. Luckily, Chef Mark Ladner, my boss, understands my completely irrational compulsion to take a week off from Del Posto to go on tour with my crummy punk band in California. Not quite sure why he thinks it’s a good idea. But here I am in Los Angeles. This is my vacation for the year.
We’re headed to Tijuana today. I dump out my backpack on the floor, hoping there aren’t any random marijuana stems or anything else that could get me sent to a jail in Mexico. I don’t smoke pot, so this is just straight paranoia. Or, more charitably, “attention to detail” — I’m a pastry chef after all. I make sure I pack my passport and two pairs of socks.
When Cundo wakes up, we go downtown to Gaucho — the warehouse where we’ve been practicing all week — to silkscreen some shirts. Yesterday we made a C.R.A.S.H. banner to hang behind us when we played. A punk band is not a punk band without a banner. It was a ten-foot trash-bag thing that we hung up in the warehouse and spray-painted our logo on. The paint mist that filled the room looked identical to the chocolate mist that fills the air in the Del Posto pastry kitchen when we use a Wagner paint gun to finish the gratis chocolate birthday cakes. Except this shit was toxic. I held my breath.
We set up the screen and pulled out the baby-blue ink. T-shirt making is very assembly line, it feels like dessert production. We listen to the Equals, Eddy Grant’s first band in the sixties, violently catchy, perfect T-shirt/pastry-assembly background music. I ask Cundo if the Equals were from Jamaica or the UK. He doesn’t know. I resist the urge to Google it. Sometimes, you just can’t Google the answers. It’s not right. I make a vow to remain ignorant about the Equals’ history until a drunk dickhead gets all superiority complex on me at a bar in the future.
Cundo’s brother walks into the shirt-screening room and asks us if we are hungry. There is no real kitchen in this quadrant of Gaucho, so Braulio cooks us a full American breakfast on an electric griddle: bacon and scrambled eggs. I am a little upset there is no sriracha in house, but I deal with Heinz ketchup as the sole condiment. A dude materializes from the back room with potato pancakes. They are perfect. He even grates and drains the potatoes before making them. Wait, who is this guy? Where did he come from? I get a bit restauranty and start picking his brain about potato-pancake technique. He claims he is a Jew, but nonpracticing, and that I should back the fuck off because he was born into latke-ness. It’s a perfect breakfast — well, it is sort of lunch now — totally home cooked, and I realize it has been months since I’ve had a meal like this.
The mood is mellow and very California. No one seems to be freaked out or stressed about our imminent crossing of an international border to play a stupid punk show. I go around the corner to the dollar store and buy a twelve-ounce can of Squirt, and then start heat-setting the T-shirts. It involves numbingly boring ironing, but it is so cold that I welcome the iron’s warmth on my hands. My mind drifts and I start daydreaming about Sandwich Island.
Sandwich Island is a kiosk in the USC food court. The owners, a maniac husband-and-wife team, are inspirational folks. I think of them often when I am at work in the kitchen. They work fast and clean (Thomas Keller’s jaw would drop in awe) and ooze hospitality. Their food (yeah, it’s just sandwiches, but hold on) is made with love and care, which you don’t really see that often. My go-to sub is a vegetarian turkey thing that always seems to be filled with the freshest tomatoes, lettuce, jalapeños, and squirts of yellow mustard. It’s California, so even a sub shop in a college food court gets good produce. The finished product is a work of art, the layers multicolored and so inviting, like a grade-school textbook illustrating the earth’s crust. I think of this quote:
One of the great American arts, which varies from being a triumph to being a disaster, is the art of sandwichmaking. — James Beard
Dean and Michelle show up to the warehouse. Dean plays bass and moonlights in a really famous band that occasionally plays on TV; Michelle plays guitar, goes to university for astronomy, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of all the great punk bands. They are accompanied by Noonan, a longhair who has agreed to drive us around the West Coast in his green cargo van. I’ve only just met Noonan, but I can tell we will get along famously, because he has agreed to drive us around in his van for below minimum wage. We pile into the car and set off for Mexico.
Dean is 100 percent vegan; the rest of us are omnivores but complete vegetarian sympathizers. At the first gas-station stop I buy a bag of Flamin’ Hot Munchies, which is like a Chex Mix knockoff but with Cheetos and pretzels with the mildest nonthreatening cayenne powder sheen. Dean eagle-eyes a woman selling fruit across the street and returns with a plastic bag of mango, cucumber, papaya, pineapple, and watermelon — all coated with chili and salt. It’s delicious. Way more tasty than the Cheetos garbage, and sort of a natural version of the same thing. I’m instantly jealous and start demanding mango chunks. The mango is sweet and delicious but hella slippery, so it frequently escapes my fingers and falls onto my jeans, dusty with Cheeto powder, a cross-pollination of snack foods.
As a dude employed by Mario Batali and Joe and Lidia Bastianich at a really swanky restaurant in New York City, I am obviously engaged with food on a spiritual level. I have always had a crush on the narrator of PBS’s Great Chefs, based on her voice alone. (Like, for years. Do you have her number?) My bandmates do not always share my psychosis. They love food and all, but they don’t loooove food in the same stupid awesome way. And that’s fine. On tour food comes to you, and sometimes it really sucks.
We get on the 110 going south. Traffic is at a dead stop. Noonan puts on Motörhead’s “On Parole” and then maneuvers the van through a bunch of South Central side streets and back onto the freeway where traffic is breezy. With the van moving at top speed I fall asleep, drool on my jacket sleeve, and wake up in the parking lot of a Del Taco. We have not even passed Anaheim, but on tour you’re always kind of hungry.
We’re on the way to Mexico, making a pit stop at a shitty faux-Mexican fast-food place. I think back to when my old band Skull Kontrol would trek from DC to New York to play, and stop at a Jersey Turnpike rest stop and get horrible pizza from a highway Sbarro — usually a broccoli-stuffed abomination, greasy and nearly inedible, tasting of shame, and only slightly removed from the fartiness of nearby rest-stop bathrooms — when we were less than an hour from the pizza nirvana of NYC. We all get shitty burritos: crummy, unseasoned beans; cold, crumbly tortillas; xanthan-gum-thickened hot sauce; and lettuce shreds that are free of any lettuce flavor. Vegan Dean says he can get more nutritional value from licking the toilet seat at the Del Taco, and he’s probably right.
We buzz down into San Diego on the 5. There is a cool stretch before you hit the suburbs of San Diego — the Camp Pendleton area — where the car dealerships and strip malls disappear for a bit, and it’s just rolling hills and the Pacific Ocean. Fucking beautiful, a fantastic reminder of the greatness of nature. We listen to Reagan Youth (from New York) and Iron Cross (from Washington, DC) and argue about stupid shit relating to said bands’ recording styles.
At the last exit before leaving the USA, we pull out into a parking lot to meet up with Rene, the dude who has set up the Tijuana show. He lives in TJ and walked north to chaperone us into Mexico. He hops in the van and we drive through the checkpoint with no problems and no van search.
The show is at a bar called El Tigre. It’s in an old-school Mexican plaza, very close to the border. We’re all thankful it’s not on the main strip in downtown Tijuana, where all the terrible tourist bars are. We unload our equipment into the venue, and instantly fall in love. It’s a total punk bar, covered in flyers. Rene informs us that the show is free, and that we will be paid in nachos and Tecates. Perfect.
Somehow Dean the vegan is hungry again. Rene perks up and tells us there’s a health-food store across the street. Crossing the street in Tijuana is a bit of a blood sport: sidewalks just vanish, and cars are going full force. We barely escape hood-ornament status and get to the parking lot of Panadería Integral Comedor Vegetariano. Inside, there are bags of quinoa, TVP in bulk, soy milk in aseptic boxes, and the joint absolutely reeks just like a hippie health-food store should. Dean buys a weird bun thing that looks dry, but turns out to be moist and wildly delicious. And vegan. Fuck this guy. He also purchases a plastic clamshell of “vegan soy ceviche” with pesos (why does he have pesos?). We all get a hearty chuckle out of this.
Rene takes us on a sidewalkless walk into downtown TJ. “Most bands, when they come here, want to go to the really nasty places. Do you guys?” We politely decline, and just enjoy the stroll around the jai alai stadium and the iconic arch that anchors downtown Tijuana. We have all played punk shows here in the past and are having a great time soaking up the local flair. We walk by a cook on the street making tacos al pastor, but the red, blubbery meat looks like something they ate in Alive, rather than delicious, pineappley pork. I pass.
The show is fantastic. Not a single tourist, just stoked Mexican punk kids. We play with two local bands. Even though it’s cold as fuck, the bar is open air. I could see my breath as I set up my drums. And, yes, they give us as many plastic bowls of loaded nachos — bagged tortilla chips with canned chili and cheese sauce that solidifies instantly like gas-station pump cheese — as we can stomach. We love it. Dearly.
A passed hat nets twenty dollars in pesos. Noonan informs me he is trying to get a job in LA as a pizza assistant. I offer him advice as we pack the van (“Just tell them you want to learn!”). He also tells a grand tale of the third-world Blue Hill at Stone Barns around the corner from El Tigre. A place advertising barbacoa, with cute little goats in a pen watching their brethren get turned into tacos.
On the road again, we pass a street sign with “USA O-TAY” graffitied on it. The van conversation turns to the Little Rascals, Bill Cosby, and Eddie Murphy’s leather jumpsuit. The line to get back into the US is preposterously long. Dean has squirreled away his vegan soy ceviche, and we emit a van-wide groan when he pops the plastic clamshell top. “You have food, you dick?!?” We pass it around with the tense vigor of suburban teenagers sharing a single warm Milwaukee’s Best.
Brake lights string onward in front of us to the horizon. Miles and miles. Fearless Tijuana locals march between cars selling blankets and snacks. One guy has puppies. Cundo is restless, so he’s either telling tales of questionable truth from the passenger seat, or jumping outside the rarely moving car to smoke cigarettes. At one point, he disappears completely, claiming that he cannot wait to urinate in the US, and needs to pee in Mexico. Somehow he finds a pay toilet for a quarter, and re-finds the van just as we are two cars away from the border gates.
It’s 2:57 a.m. We got in line just before midnight. I make a dad joke, like, “Wow, we made great time,” but everyone except Cundo has to go to the bathroom and the joke falls flat. Our border guy is actually very funny, charming even. He asks for our passports, makes some second-tier dad jokes himself, and we laugh our asses off, like we’ve never heard anything so grand. Let us through, man, gotta piss. He checks the van quickly and barely goes through anything. We creep onto US soil, and Noonan punches the gas pedal. We put on I Get Wet by Andrew W.K., crank it, and speed off north up the 5.
We stop for a pee break at a 7-Eleven a few exits in. I’m starving and exhausted so I buy a jalapeño/cream cheese GO GO Taquito that’s obviously been hanging out on the roller for a while, some peanut-butter-filled pretzels, a bag of Swedish Fish, and an orange-flavored Vitamin Water. I down it all. Michelle gives me half of a Reese’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup. We eat in the darkness of the back bench seat. I think it’s safe to say we all need a salad. Noonan gets us back to Echo Park by 5:30 a.m. We all go our separate ways, and agree to meet up at 8:00 a.m.
SUNDAY January 12
Wake up on Cundo’s floor again, 7:00 a.m. This time I passed out without a blanket. My ears are blasted from the Tijuana show; they register a relentless, high-pitched ringing with a slight undercurrent of cardboard-box-over-the-head deafness. I have always eschewed earplugs while playing live — it’s like taking a shower with a raincoat. The ringing doesn’t wake me up, but it’s the first thing that greets me after my seventy-five-minute slumber. I take a shower.
I have always been the guy who takes a shower on tour no matter what, no matter how gross the house is where we are staying. (Years ago in Columbia, South Carolina, I braved a bathtub with an inch of fetid, purple sludge and a broken sliding- glass door.) This bathroom is frigid. It’s a fast shower, too cold to linger.
I vow to myself that I will eat nothing but salad today.
Just north of Los Angeles, Interstate 5 gives way to Six Flags Magic Mountain and then a real mountain pass, the Grapevine. It snowed last night, so the hills are white. We are only thirty minutes out of LA and now we’re driving through big, looping mountains. California does not fuck around. Everyone stares out the window, daydreamily. Noonan drives with his knees and texts girls.
Cundo puts on this amazing album that I’ve never heard, some sixties record that somehow slipped through the cracks, I think. I’m half asleep in the backseat, going in and out of consciousness and totally digging the music. I ask and find out it’s an Amy Winehouse record. Everyone laughs at me. “It won a GRAMMY!” they shout. I claim ignorance due to being a pastry chef with an unplugged TV and shaky internet service.
At our second gas-station stop, I cave on my salad vow. In the candy aisle I buy a Nerds Rope, which is a six-inch-long gummy bear studded with Nerds. Then I walk across the median to Carl’s Jr./Green Burrito and get a quesadilla. It’s packaged in a facsimile of an airplane barf bag. It’s the opposite of delicious. In comparison, Del Taco is fucking Del Posto.
We need to arrive in San Francisco by 4:00 p.m. to play a show that may or may not even happen at Lung Shan Restaurant at 18th Street and Mission — a ramshackle hole-in-the-wall that houses one of the most exciting restaurants in America, Mission Chinese Food. The plan is to play to no one, maybe a couple of friends we tell at the last minute. And we don’t even know if the owners will let us do it. But this tour is about keeping it stupid, so we are all very excited. Somehow we make it to the parking lot by 3:45 p.m. Twelve hours and 850 miles earlier we had just reentered the USA. We made great time.
Anthony, the guy who founded Mission Chinese, shows up with two dollar-store orange extension cords. He seems unfazed at our request to play in the dining room at 4:30 p.m. to no one. We walk through the kitchen, downstairs into the basement, and run extension cords up out onto the street and back in the front door of the restaurant. We push away the tables and chairs and wheel the host stand off to the side. We open both front doors to the street and begin setting up the gear. Behind us the Chinese staff of Lung Shan are playing a very important game of afternoon mah-jong. No one looks up.
While setting up, we call a few friends and tell them we are about to play a ten-minute set at Mission Chinese. Only two of Michelle’s friends make it, plus Anthony and a sous chef from Commonwealth next door.
Anthony: “Are you in the shits next door?”
Dude: “Yeah kinda.”
A: “They are about to play.”
D: “What kind of music?”
Us: “Um, punk, I guess?”
D: “Oh rad, I’ll stay.”
We play to the street, to people walking by.
Two other random Sunday-afternoon record shoppers look in from the street and recognize Michelle from her old band; they stay for the rest of the set. Yet another almost-open-air show in unseasonably cold California.
The owners’ mahjong-playing does not stop for the length of our set or the subsequent equipment breakdown and flip of the dining room back to dinner setup. Anthony gives Dean and Cundo each a Tsingtao. I decline booze, got two more shows to play. We give Anthony a T-shirt, thank him profusely, pack the van, and head to the next show.
Casa Sanchez is a taqueria a few blocks down the road, left off Mission Street on 24th. The show here has actually been promoted. No one makes flyers anymore so it’s all been shilled via Facebook. None of us have active Facebook accounts except for Noonan, so he reads us the show advert. Cool folks and friends mill about. Almost everyone sits down at tables and orders enchiladas, Mexican Cokes, and Coronas. I eat nothing. Drink tap water.
We set up in the corner. If the last show was at a not venue, this show is at a sorta venue. The trash-bag banner goes up to the side and we play our hearts out. It’s all very civilized and we pack up as fast as we play and get everything back into the van. Of course, being San Francisco, there’s a couple shady folks casing the van from the sidewalk. SF is known for punk-band-van break-ins, so we are über-cautious. A few years back, our buddy Joe had his van breached around here, losing a pair of sentimental leather pants
The next gig is a proper hardcore show with seven bands at a proper venue across the bay in Oakland called Metro. The bands are all spastic hardcore, but for some reason we stick out like a sore thumb. We sell an unsurprising zero of our baby-blue shirts.
We are paid real money at the show and plan on blowing it on Mexican food. Michelle, band treasurer, gives us each a five-dollar per diem. We all pack into the van with Northern California burritos (immediately perfuming the air with the scent of raw-oniony salsa), along with Michelle’s buddy Jon, who came to both Casa Sanchez and the Oakland gig. We are gonna stay at his house tonight. We drive for what feels like a very long time, but eventually reach Jon’s place, a few blocks from the beach.
There’s a rocking chair made of old skateboard decks on the front porch and a wetsuit hanging in the bathroom. We finish our food and watch skate videos, one by one passing out on different quadrants of the living-room floor. Noonan and Dean call the couch. I fall asleep next to a bandsaw adjacent to the bathroom. A bandsaw? is my last thought.
Back home in New York I spend my days obsessing over sorbet textures and cake moistness, wearing Birkenstock rubber kitchen clogs and an apron and paper hat in a $50 million four-star kitchen. My days are filled with thoughts of guest hospitality and front-of-the-house education. I live two blocks from Del Posto in Manhattan in a studio apartment equipped with a bed, a shitload of cookbooks, and not much of anything else. I generally wake up, go to the restaurant, and go home. Repeat. It’s a lifestyle that I would not exchange for anything. So sleeping on the floor right now is both liberating and stress filled. Chefs split town a lot for work-related events, but knowing that you are still kind of “on the clock” in those situations soothes the angst of not being in your own kitchen. However, I ain’t in any sort of kitchen right now. Maybe I should sleep in Jon’s kitchen.
MONDAY January 13
Still not acclimated to West Coast time, I bolt awake at 7:00 a.m. I remember the half-eaten burrito next to my head. It surely hasn’t cracked 40 degrees in here, so I feel fine downing the rest of the burrito. Even the NYC Department of Health would deem it out of the danger zone.
I take a shivering shower. Unable to find any towels, I shake off the water like a dog and dress myself, still slightly damp, but glad to be clean.
Michelle is awake too, so we take to the beach. You can’t even see the high-rises of SF from here. I despise sand in my shoes but go for a beach hike all the same. I know I’m going to have to live with it all the way back to LA, and through our gig tonight. Oh well.
We walk back to the house and everyone is still fast asleep. I write Jon a thank-you note and put it in the fridge in the vegetable crisper. Hidden thank-you notes are the best. I also empty my pockets of $1.75 in change and put it on the windowsill. A tip! Then I remember a squirreled-away bag of Flamin’ Hot Munchies mix that was in my backpack. I leave it on top of the refrigerator. Someday someone is gonna be psyched.
We drive the van back into the Mission around 10:00 a.m. We’re on a food mission. I have a plan, Dean has a plan, Cundo has a plan. Michelle is my deputy protégée so she’s on my team. Her greatest attribute is her unbridled enthusiasm. Normally it would pertain to obscure punk records released years before she was born, but on this trip I am Colonel Klink and she is Sergeant Schultz and we are going to bumble and stumble through the promised land of Mission District snacks. We are going to eat the shit out of some shit! We are psyched. We listen to Devo and the Weirdos, neither of which are San Francisco appropriate, which I know irks Cundo. Yesterday, Michelle said the “entering San Francisco” music for her old band Mika Miko was always Lightning Bolt.
First stop is Craftsman & Wolves, a new bakery that I’ve been hearing about. Inside it’s stark and minimal, almost museumlike, austere but in a cool way. I get a savory financier with kimchi, scallions, and peanuts. Killer. Perfectly textured even though it has been sitting under glass. Michelle snags this little masterpiece called “the rebel within.” It’s a bacon-studded muffin that encases a perfectly soft-boiled egg, yolk still not fully set. I don’t eat any (cooked egg whites are my Kryptonite) but marvel at the quiet scientific technique at play. Dean gets a horribly sexy olive fougasse as a gift for his vegan lady friend Beth back in Los Angeles. It’s a good gift.
Next I force everyone to walk over to Tartine Bakery. I’ve been talking big talk about the Tartine croissant for the past few days. Michelle shares my enthusiasm; the others are not so keen on another bakery stop. I made a pilgrimage to Tartine in 2011 on a research trip to San Francisco. I ate the best motherfucking croissant I’d ever eaten. Tartine croissant consumption is a nearly religious experience. It’s flaky, it gets all over you, it becomes one with your hoodie, it is sharp to the roof of your mouth, and tastes of the wisdom of the baker, Chad Robertson, the Jim Jones/David Koresh/L. Ron Hubbard of croissantdom. I drink deeply of the Tartine Kool-Aid and am puzzled by those who don’t.
Dean the vegan is getting restless. All these bakeries, all this butter, all these eggs. So we wander up to Bi-Rite Market, which is cool like Whole Foods wishes it was. He gets this cold yuba salad with a really funny health-food ketchupy General Tso’s sauce; plus a carrot-cabbage slaw thing that pisses me off because the sesame seeds that garnish it are not toasted. Sesame seeds just have to be toasted. They have to. My only taste memory exception to this rule was a devastatingly delicious sesame ice cream made by Sam Mason at wd~50 in the early 2000s. It didn’t taste like toasted sesame and I still cannot figure out how he did it. Some illuminati shit, I’m sure of it.
Our last two stops are Truly Mediterranean (Cundo gets these weird rolled falafels) and Pancho Villa Taqueria (everyone gets multiple burritos). I’m still confused that all these LA natives find the Mexican food of SF so drastically different from the stuff of their hometown. I honestly cannot tell the difference between the LA and SF burritos; Michelle claims to feel an electrical charge upon entering Pancho Villa, so I chalk it up to old tour memories. But I’m an East Coast guy, so I guess my burrito palate is not as sharp as those of these cats.
Not yet noon, we head south out of SF. I request more Amy Winehouse: “Play the Rehab song!” Along the way I attack the uneaten half of my under-the-seat Tartine croissant. Bliss.
Halfway down the 5, Cundo breaks out the Stick Men with Ray Guns on my barely functioning iPod. We all thoroughly enjoy the song “Buttfuckers (Try to Run My Life!).” Cundo and I know it very well, but somehow Dean, Michelle, and Noonan have never heard it. It’s a great classic song featuring the vocal stylings of one Bobby Soxx, a Texas punk-rock legend from the mid-’80s. The intro vocals depict a gentleman of extreme inebriation, and possibly mental illness, but we all find it truly beautiful. The lyrics go:
Buttfuckers try to run my life, well
Buttfuckers try to fuck my wife, yeah
Buttfuckers, fuck with me, yeah
I’m gonna show you how to do it.
Up the mountain, down the mountain, and we are back in Los Angeles County with time to spare. We head to Cundo’s house to freshen up. There, I sit on the couch and listen to Pagan Day by Psychic TV. It’s soothing and I ponder the fact that in the space of forty-eight hours we have gone from LA to Tijuana to LA to San Francisco and back to LA and played four shows. With the exception of our Mission mission, we’ve eaten some pretty terrible food.
We get down to our venue, the Smell. It’s simultaneously cavernous and homey with disaster bathrooms that rival the old Mars Bar in NYC. We love it to death. The show is fantastic. We play great, tight, loud, fast. There is a circle pit with a scandalous crazy woman who has apparently shit her pants and is going nuts. She is escorted out. At one point during our set, Cundo falls off the stage onto a woman’s head. There are no injuries to either party, and after we finish, the woman tells Cundo, “My bra strangely unclasped when you fell on top of me!” Right before our final song, Cundo looks into the crowd and says, “This next song, my friends, is about ALL. OF. YOUUUUUUUUUUU.” And at this point we are all friends, minus the poo lady, who is long gone.
Exhausted, the last thing I remember from that night is a plate of nachos at a taqueria a few doors down. The nacho cheese sauce is ice cold but totally fluid — not even a little bit congealed. How is that possible? My mind races back to the Del Posto pastry kitchen and to an agar/locust-bean gum synergy technique. Or maybe it’s just plain old cornstarch used as a thickening agent, maybe even just an old-school reduction.
Then another thought creeps through: in fewer hours than I’m comfortable admitting to myself, I will be back at work. But for now, once more unto Cundo’s floor I go.
The following excerpt originally appeared in the Travel Issue of Lucky Peach, a quarterly journal of food and writing. If you loved this — or even just strongly liked it — why not subscribe to the magazine? At least visit our website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
