amy / new york / french

This dinner (one year ago to this day) was my best Valentine’s Day. I traveled to and from NYC in the same day, since that year Valentine’s fell on a weekday, for a night with one of my best friends from college (from neighbor to blockmate to roommate). I remember seeing Amy sitting at the bar from the window and thinking she looked very cosmpolitan with her cocktail dress, hair swept in a ponytail and wineglass in hand. (I on the other hand was carrying a big book bag and had to change out of my jeans in the bathroom. Am also sure that that infamous knot in my hair was present). The restaurant, Nice Matin, was intended to be modeled after a place you might find in the French Riveria (haha, Nice perhaps), perfectly fitting. The food was heaven. I had sole, which is rarely anything special, but here it was so flavorful. We shared a dessert whose name and ingredients we didn’t recognize but we went for it and it was so worth the risk. Creamy and subtle and sweet and textured. This was all in the company of a girl I could talk to for hours whether it’s been forever or just a day since we’ve talked. Our conversations are always honest, which cultivates humor and emotion. Having experienced together the onset of anxiety attacks concerning Purpose, Love, Family, etc., these are topics we continue to share in comfort. We went for coffee afterwards and talked more until the last minutes I could get my train, and I traveled back feeling much love for and loved by.

tanvi / chicago / indian

I once started writing about my top ten meals of all time, a good meal being one of my top ten favorite (semi)concrete things in life. I couldn't write about them all at once, so will post them as they were experienced, every so often.

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T and I met as the only freshmen in high school biology and have never stopped giggling and neuroticizing together since. Well, there was a gap towards the end of college where we didn’t keep in touch as well, but nothing was lost. Yale gave us a week off for Thanksgiving (what novelty!) so I visited her in Chicago. She took me on honestly one of the best dates ever, with the best Indian food ever. Devon is the Indian & Pakistani neighborhood of Chicago, and streets were lined with Indian restaurants one after another. It was the first time I had Indian style okra (perhaps any kind of okra). I don’t remember the name of the place or what we talked about but I do remember being in awe of how she’d grown, so beautifully, inside and out. I remember that it was very cold outside, that inside was a warm brown haze, and that our table was small; she sat facing a window to outside and I sat facing the restaurant; we were in a corner. Afterwards she took me to a jazz club called the Green Mill. The sounds coating the walls and drenching the silhouettes between chairs, tables, stage, drinks on the table, made me sharply, dizzily aware of fullness.