Meet me in NYC!

Plus: Warm Pastrami, Smoked Sable, and A Rosh Hashanah Feast.

Hi from New York!

I’m having a grand old time here in the big city. Too grand a time. So much eating, so much walking, so much cocktailing, Broadway show-watching, and book store perusing. It’s actually pretty exhausting but I’m enjoying every second.

Before I tell you about the pastrami sandwich in the above picture, I want to meet you! In person! That’s right: I’ll be signing books with my co-author Gideon Glick and our illustrator Justin “Squigs” Robertson at The Drama Book Shop in midtown New York this upcoming Thursday, October 6th, at The Drama Book Shop at 7 PM.

You can get your tickets HERE and the price includes a copy of the book.

Let me know if you’re coming! Would be fun to finally meet you.

Okay, as for the pastrami, I ate that at the recently revamped Eisenberg’s in the Flatiron district. I ate at the original one back in 2005 (!) and the new one, now called S&P, has the same spirit but it’s brighter and the food is the same classic Jewish deli food, but amped up a notch. The pastrami was perfectly tender and spiced and just the right amount on toasted rye slathered with mustard. A perfect expression of the form.

The sweetest moment came when the man on the left side of the picture came in and announced that he was glad they reopened: “I’ve been coming here for seventy-five years.” He must’ve been in his eighties and he was better dressed than I was.

If I had to pick an adverb for how I’ve been eating in New York that adverb would be “Jewishly.”

We started with pastrami, but now we’re going to go to smoked fish world with my Shtetl plate at Russ and Daughter’s Cafe:

That’s smoked sable with goat cream cheese, a toasted everything bagel, and the obligatory sliced tomato, raw red onion, and capers. It was a classic and comforting combination though wildly priced at $28. It’s called “the shtetl” because you have to move to a shtetl after you eat it.

Finally, our friend Dara cooked us the most extraordinary Rosh Hashanah dinner on Monday night.

I’m not the best at observing Jewish holidays (my mom is still reeling from the time I Instagrammed myself making bagel bombs on Passover), so this was a reminder of how fun they can actually be — well, the non-depressing, penitential ones.

There was so much food, I’d be hard-pressed to include it all here. But Dara tapped into the butter board craze and made a Jewish New Year’s one topped with honey, homemade apple sauce, and blood orange jam that we ate with challah bread:

There was a smoked Caesar salad and then spiced duck from an Ottolenghi recipe that was a meaty, spicy treat.

There was also salmon baked with wasabi and tahini, a terrific combo:

And there were multiple desserts, including a Matcha cake with Matcha ice cream, and this elegantly presented halvah:

Thanks Dara and Kirean for hosting us and for such a great night! It almost made us want to move back to New York. Almost!

Now for some links to round out your week:

• How to get a meaty flavor into a vegetarian chili (The Guardian);

• The Best Dumplings in L.A. (LA Times);

• NY’s finest pizza-by-the-slice joints (Eater NY);

• Bonne Maman Jam, an essay (Taste).

That’s all for this week folks!

I made today’s newsletter free so if you liked it and want to get next week’s late-week dispatch, be sure to become a paid subscriber.

See you back here on Monday and I’ll see you IN PERSON on Thursday.

Your pal,

Adam