Midnight at the Bodega

by Phoebe Damrosch

One might assume that food and wine would be the last things on my mind after I spent a ten-hour shift at Per Se, expounding upon the mineral compositions in an array of Hawaiian salts, decanting rose champagne, and shaving walnuts tableside. Untrue. When not heading downtown for bone marrow and oxtail marmalade or up the street for a chocolate diner shake, I undertook rigorous taste tests of household staples.  My current selection of butter, mustard, raspberry jam, and 2% milk owe their presence to previous such taste tests.

I spent most of these wee hours with my sommelier boyfriend, André, who was not only game for a taste test, but always had wine on hand.  Bubbles? Spanish?  Burgundy?  When we worked together at the restaurant, he always posed the question towards the end of the shift when the bread-baskets and chocolate trays—forbidden to employees—began to beckon.  Maybe a nice German Riesling?

Sometimes we were stumped in our quest for a perfect wine pairing, as we were the night we tasted all the salsas sold in the corner bodega.  That night, we pushed aside the pile of sweaters on top of the milk crates that housed his wine collection, debated over a few possibilities, and finally ran back to the bodega for Corona. On the night of the meatball sub tasting, we cracked open a Rioja as we waited for each delivery when, perhaps, Barbaresco would have been more appropriate.

On an evening not long after the meatballs, we found ourselves in the mood to experiment. Having asked all we could from the bodega, we moved on to the 24-hour Food Emporium. Peanut butter? Could be dangerous. Vanilla ice cream? André's freezer couldn't hold more than a pint, even if he ever defrosted it. And then we came upon the hot dogs, uncharted territory for a reformed vegetarian (me), intensely appealing to a ballgame junky (André).

André's only pot lived in his only cabinet with the rest of his minimalist kitchen collection, a Riedel decanter and—strangely—his wallet when not in use. It occurred to us as we browsed through buns options that our cooking methods were limited. We could throw them all in one pot, thereby risking cross contamination of flavors; we could boil them individually, thereby risking the sun coming up and the stark reality of hotdogs for breakfast; or we could microwave them. This, we decided, was the practical solution.

next page