Midnight at the Bodega by Phoebe Damrosch

As this was not a bun taste test, I reached for the flavor-neutral Wonder Bread buns, forbidding André to ever disclose this to my mother. If it tells you anything about my upbringing, my brother Sam rushed home from school one afternoon dying to tell my mother that they sold bread at the donate/store—sliced!

André doesn't do sauerkraut and I don't do relish, so ketchup and mustard it was. We still had some mustard in the fridge left over from the night we checked into the Plaza with a few bottles of wine and half a ham, a story for another time. The perfect pairing would be Beaujolais, he thought, but there was none to be found under the sweaters, so he opened a Californian pinot noir as I lined up the dogs in alphabetical order so that we would not—god forbid—confuse the Sabrett with the Hebrew National.

Maybe that was what hot dogs were supposed to taste like, I proposed as we tried the first selection, an all natural beef dog the color of a new bruise and sausage-like in flavor. No, this is what a hot dog is supposed to taste like, he countered, handing me the slim, deep red Hebrew National. It was the closest to a ballpark frank we tried, the Sabrett proving to be bland and mushy and Nathan's to be a little tough (although we agreed that it would hold up the best on a grill). After the formal part of the tasting was done (and by formal, I mean that we were still paying attention), we opened the tarragon mustard and dug into the Wonder Bread with true relish.

As usual, it was after 4 AM when we finally crawled under the covers and only hours later that we awoke to our alarms with wine-stained lips and the sweet smell of grease still on our fingers. Should we look into other hobbies? Probably. But I am curious about the differences between boxed macaroni-and-cheeses. I will not, of course, tell my mother that ours won't be made of whole grain pasta, nor will we add a wheat germ crust. It'll be nuclear orange as mac 'n cheese should be, and perfectly paired with the finest Mersault we can dig up.

Note from Storyscape:  Phoebe Damrosch worked at Per Se, Thomas Keller’s four-star restaurant, which has a 60 day waiting list for reservations, and is located in the Time Warner Center in New York City.

previous page