Warm.

I wanted a place with a Velvet Underground CD that made you nod your head and feel warm with recognition. I wanted the lettuce and the eggs at room temperature. The waiter to bring you something to eat or drink that you didn't even ask for when you arrived cold and early and undone by your day in the city. I wanted the toasted manti from a Turkish wedding I'd been part of in Göreme-Nevşehir, the butter and sugar sandwiches we ate as kids after school for a snack, the tarnished silverware and chipped wedding china from a paladar in Havana, and the canned sardines I ate in that little apartment on Twenty-ninth Street. The veal marrow my mother made us eat as kids that I grew to crave as an adult. We would have brown butcher paper on the tables, not linen table cloths, and when you finished your meal, the server would just pull the pen from behind her ear and scribble the bill directly on the paper as Margarita had done. We would use jelly jars for wine glasses. We would put a rubber band around the middle of the wine bottle like I had done with Kostas and Iannis in Athens, and if you wanted to drink only half, you could pay for just half. Like Margarita's place at that far dark end of the port of Serifos, when we ran out of lamb for the night, we would just run out.

There would be no foam and no "conceptual" or "intellectual" food; just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry. There would be nothing tall on the plate, the portions would be generous, there would be no emulsions, no crab cocktail served in a martini glass with its claw hanging over the rim. In ecstatic farewell to my years of corporate catering, we would never serve anything but a martini in a martini glass. Preferrably gin.

Amen!!! Read the rest of the gospel according to Gabrielle here.

Thanks, Jessica.