Personal Yummy #48
We meet in early January for a late Saturday night dinner at Robataya—an upscale Japanese restaurant on East Ninth Street near Second Avenue. Even better, two gentle and skilled Japanese men sitting on tiny mats, and with their legs bent underneath them, prepare the food directly in front of us.
My friend’s boyfriend—another kind and successful Japanese man, who owns his own restaurant in Westchester, in fact—buys each chef a bottle of Sapporo. At exactly the same time, they pour the beers into elegant glasses, gesture the glasses toward us, and then drink the beers all at once, their right hands cradling the bottom of the glasses as they do so. My friend, who is one of my best girlfriends from the competitive ballroom dance world, tells me that drinking the beer in this fashion is the custom…a sincere sign of thanks and appreciation.
This ritual must have a magical effect on the food, because the variety, amount, and delicious flavors that we enjoy are endless. We share seaweed salad with a miso and ginger dressing, lightly fried tofu in bonito broth, grilled okra and asparagus with salt (served on dainty, square, blue dishes), edamame, scallops, king crab legs, duck, beef (so tender and so perfect) on skewers with a wasabi and garlic dipping sauce, potatoes with salt and butter, and eggplant with soy sauce. On top of all that, we sip some kind of lemony Japanese whiskey the entire time—something new for me.
Having experienced so much good food and abundance, you would think that we would be satisfied to end the night after dinner, but of course we want more. So we head to Azi, a new place on Third Avenue near my friend’s apartment on the Upper East Side.
When we get there, we pass by the long bar and then relax in the dark, candlelit back room on a white, lush, Victorian-style couch, an oversize painting of a martini glass on the brick wall facing us. As the large flat-screen TV plays the top 40 sexiest music videos of all time, our just-as-sexy waitress—long, black hair; all in black; leggings full of slits; her voice like Salma Hayek’s—takes our order.
While I drink my pint of Blue Moon—which is good, but way too warm for my taste—two couples walk in and sit down at opposite sides of the room. And in no time at all, they are drinking and inhaling deeply from the hookah machines that are placed here and there.
Eventually, another couple arrives, and they lounge on the fancy red couch under the TV. He is dark and Latin and is wearing slacks and an attractive business-casual jacket, and she is blonde and fresh and is wearing tight jeans and a revealing crimson top.
They order two glasses of red wine in large, bulbous goblets. They sip it and take their time with it. They look at each other intently. They share secrets. And then his left arm wraps around her. He starts kissing her sensually, and she kisses him back.
It’s difficult not to watch them.
The smoke, the warm beer, the videos, the luxurious decor, the darkness, the delectable food I enjoyed earlier, and the intimacy on display in front of me…
I feel dizzy.
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