Eating Out and Ordering In

Eating Out and Ordering In

I spent forty-five years (minus two years for bad behavior when I got sent to Gulag Toronto) living in New York City. Just to get everyone on the same page, the two-year stint in Toronto was literally a three-year sentence (starting in 1990) by my employer, Bankers Trust Company, to run our Canadian Bank. I had been running a vast empire of the Global Derivatives business and the Global Commodities Group, which spanned locations in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia when a certain cotton merchant in Memphis defrauded us out of $125 million by colluding with a disreputable bonded cotton warehouse which didn’t have the cotton collateral it was supposed to to back up a loan we had made to that merchant. This sort of thing happened in the commodities market about every five years, but the cotton music stopped on my watch and the Group I was responsible for (a relatively small group compared to the massive risks we took in the derivatives world) took the largest loss our bank had ever had in its eighty-five year history. I had offered to fall on my sword, which I felt was the noble thing for a highly paid manager who was the victim of a crime of omission (at least not one of commission). And my boss, the President of the bank, had told me directly that the issue of my resignation had been discussed (gulp!), but that they preferred that I stay since my brand of enthusiasm was a rarer commodity (pun intended) than not. Well, in those days, if they disliked you they fired you, but as a wag colleague of mine who was gleeful at my demise put it, if they hated you, they sent you to Toronto.

I was recently divorced, so I packed up my one-bedroom, divorced-guy, Battery City apartment in lower Manhattan and moved my act to a luxurious two-bedroom luxury apartment paid for by the bank as part of my expat package. I remember that move because at the age of 36, for some strange reason, my mother came to New York to help me execute the move. She had been retired then for some ten years and never been much of a helicopter mom to me, but she somehow sensed that the divorce and exile of her youngest son was worthy or some parental attention. Given that I had left home rather unceremoniously at seventeen before my high school graduation ceremony to take my first pre-college internship, I don’t ever recall getting that amount of direct motherly attention from her. It is one of the aspects of my mother-son relationship that I admire the most, since she taught me young to be my own man and lead my own independent life. But now, here she was, in my little apartment in Divorced-Guy Towers, cooking me dinner. It was a new apartment and she started by asking me why, after living there for almost a year, the oven baking pan was still in the oven in its plastic vacuum-sealed wrapping. I had to explain to her that the New York City lifestyle was such that one was always either eating out or ordering in. She did not buy that reasoning. I then tried to explain that it must be a busy senior-global-executive, divorced-guy thing, but she didn’t accept that either. I finally admitted that it was really a character flaw in a thirty-something overweight man who had been raised by a too-busy working mother and had never really learned to appreciate the fine art of cooking for himself. That explanation resonated with her and she nodded as she proceeded to overcook something I then had to work through eating for dinner.

If I was a non-cooking man when I left Manhattan in 1990, I returned in 1992 from Toronto an even less committed chef. My two years in Toronto had ended with a visit from the bank’s President, who commuted my sentence in the Gulag by saying that he and the Chairman were impressed with my determination to muscle it out in the north country (luxury apartment and lake-view CEO office notwithstanding) and that I was now officially a great cautionary tale for other bank executives, which gave me added value to the firm. A rehabilitated and humbled miscreant is always a good thing to have around to fetch and serve for senior management. During those two years I remarried (only three months prior) and imagine my new wife’s surprise when I told her, “Surprise! You know how you were looking forward to living in Toronto? Well, how do you feel about moving back to New York right away?” She hadn’t even gotten the chance to take the vacuum-packed racks out of that new oven, which were two years old when she arrived. I think while I was in Toronto, since my apartment was in the very hip Yorkville area, directly across from the mother-ship Four Seasons Hotel and with an endless adjoining block of great eateries, I hadn’t even ever ordered in, but had rather just eaten out continuously. A Toronto bank CEO has an endless supply of clients and employees to entertain, for Pete’s sake.

When I moved back to Manhattan, I rented a triplex apartment in Tudor City that overlooked the UN and East River from its 24-foot leaded window penthouse living room windows. That apartment was a gothic holdover with actual gargoyles on the roof-top terrace where there was what the owner’s called a “summer kitchen” from which to entertain. It was a dark green historic structure on the roof that had been used by the free French Resistance during WWII since the radio sight lines out over the Atlantic were quite good from there. I imagine Charles de Gaulle calling in the evening asking what they were cooking for dinner in New York that evening. That apartment also had a minuscule kitchen tucked away in a corner between the living room and den. It seems that when these penthouses were built as the very first residential skyscrapers in New York in 1926, the rich and famous that could afford the penthouses were not much on cooking their own meals. In fact, this apartment had been occupied in the early 1940’s by actor Charlton Heston, who got his start in film playing Ibsen’s famous ne’er-do-well itinerant and bon vivant, Peer Gynt, the anti-hero who roams the earth living lavishly. In those days, the apartment had a dumb waiter that brought food for dinner up from the first-floor restaurant. I guess Charlton chose to neither eat out nor order in (as we know it), but rather to dine in and send the dishes back without a trace. That was a nice apartment to live in for a few years even without the dumb waiter.

Now, Kim and I live out here in Grubhub land, where it takes an hour to get delivery of Chinese food and there is only one “restaurant” within five miles. We still order in probably once a week or more depending if Kim is weary or not. We go out to eat less than I ever have during my adult life. Last night, on a whim, I invited Mike & Melisa and Faraj & Yasuko out to dinner at our local pub, called The Sideyard. It is an expansion of the deli market in Hidden Meadows that I was dubious would work, since they literally converted their narrow, old trash sideyard into a bar/pub that is an indoor/outdoor affair that is actually quite nice and pleasant for a beer or for a quick lunch. We go there for dinner occasionally as they expand their menu and service offering.

If we have become homebodies living out here on the hilltop, Mike & Melisa and Faraj & Yasuko are some advanced form of the same since neither choose to dine out or order in…ever. Mike actually thinks its funny that I eat out so often. Faraj didn’t even know that the Sideyard existed and its been there for eighteen months. Everything is relative and I was happy to treat my friends to a night out ala Hidden Meadows. The next person I plan to work on is Handy Brad, who recently came over and put his lunch in the garage cooler. He had bought an egg salad sandwich at the gas station at the bottom of the hill. That project might take a bit longer.