The Brief, Wondrous Food Diary of Junot Diaz
My affinity for Junot Diaz knows no boundaries (like “I’ve got a half-written book proposal on my computer with the working title My Year Stalking Junot Diaz” no-boundaries), and his weeklong food diary for NYMag’s reliably great Grub Street Diet feature is such a little delight. Here’s just one day:
Friday, July 26: I drive down from Boston in the early a.m. Get lucky and miss out on all the Cape traffic. Spend the whole three-plus hours listening to this crazy podcast called “The Leviathan Chronicles.” High-level nerditry. When I reach Manhattan, I pull onto Dyckman and have a café con leche at the ever-reliable Albert’s Mofongo House. Coffee in the Heights amidst the morning bustle, the waitress calling me cariño and that’s how I know I’m home.
I have uptown errands and by the time I finish it’s lunch and so I shoot over to Jin Ramen, which is as close as uptown gets to Ippudo. For a starter, I’m usually all about the steamed pork buns (the chashu is nice and dense) but today I tuck into the shishito peppers instead. Followed by the miso ramen with an extra boiled egg. Boston, where I spend half my time, is extra weak in ramen so I try to score some every time I come home to NYC. Jin never fails. The broth is consistently mouthwatering, the noodles nicely rendered.
Afterwards I drop down to the Village to hang out with anthropologist extraordinaire Arlene Dávila; we talk the explosive growth of shopping malls in Latin America. We’re nerdy like that. That evening I have to run back uptown to do a reading/conversation at Gregorio Luperon High School on 165th. This is a school close to my heart, with some of the most committed faculty in the five boroughs. Tonight it seems like half the Dominican left is in attendance. Conversation goes well enough and since Word Up Community Bookshop — one of the only bookstores in the Heights — is having its grand reopening party across the street, I hit that too. Dinner is rotisserie chicken from El Malecón, which I devour right on the sidewalk in front of Word Up. El Malecón is an uptown institution and its chicken is a personal favorite. I once saw a scuffle break out in El Malecón because they ran out of chicken. It really is fight-worthy pollo.