Dining Alone on Valentine’s Day
by Jasmine Moy
As Valentine’s Day draws near, the single folks have decisions to make. Do they have a merry get-together with their other single friends, a girls’ or gays’ or guys’ night, partaking in something silly (Dave & Busters, perhaps?) to make them forget that the night has been set aside for lovers and that they’ve not been invited? Do they go to work, ignoring the secretaries in their red cardigans, ignoring the stream of flowers entering the lobby? Do they resolve to head home, watch some TV, and order a pizza? The one thing they won’t do, it seems, is go out to dinner alone.
Granted, most people I know don’t ever go out to eat alone. But I do, and often. I’m a restaurant bar creature, I learn the names of the staff, I often meet the chef and I almost always make new friends when dining solo. (Plus bartenders tend to be generous to the people who keep them company!) Why should Valentine’s Day be any different? I sat at the bar of a fancy restaurant last Valentine’s Day, and although I did start the meal a little anxiously — How pathetic do I look dining alone on Valentine’s Day? — I soon realized almost everyone else there was eating alone, too. The bar was full of regulars offering tastes of everything on their plates, the restaurant’s florist swooped in and gave us yellow calla lilies, we drank until we were woozy, and I headed home feeling warm and blushed from the love of spaghetti neri and barolo.
I just finished Gabrielle Hamilton’s lovely excerpt from her memoir in the New Yorker, and it reminded me of the Valentine’s Day dinners she creates at Prune in the East Village (where she’s the executive chef and owner). She used to cook a cynics’ dinner (bitter greens with dinner, dessert of coffee and cigarettes) and a lovers’ dinner full of things sumptuous, but for the last couple years she’s done meals inspired by places. The “West Yarmouth Mini-Golf Arcade, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 1988” (lobster with anchovy butter), for example, was charming, but the meal that made me swoon was her “Ferry Boat, Bosphorous, Istanbul, 1985” with manti. It brought me back to the time I went to Istanbul and met an actress who insisted in an urgent tone, “You’re going to Cemberlitas? You must stop at this tiny place down the street for manti, it’s the best in the city!” In Cemberlitas I spent my morning at the hamam, getting slapped, scrubbed, and lathered, afterwards feeling entirely spent. And I almost skipped her advice, but looked at my phone and saw that she’d texted me, “Sarimsakli manti 1 porsiyon.” She was telling me how to order it in Turkish in case I hit a language barrier. So I looked around for the storefront she’d described, found it and was served tender, tiny, delectable meat-stuffed dumplings blanketed in savory, creamy yogurt sauce. Each bite of which was better than the last. It’s been impossible for me to find good manti stateside, though if anyone can do it, it’s Gabrielle. Prune has a bar. Maybe that’s where I’ll be this year.
In third grade, Jasmine Moy once wrote, “Love is like a flower, once it blooms it wilts and dies,” but if someone wanted to give flowers to her now she would no longer mind. And she thinks all men should read this.
Photo of manti via IlkesKitchen