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“I promise,” he said. Okay. Even if it was terrible, I could do anything for fifteen minutes, as I’d learned at the dentist. So, with still a fair amount of trepidation, I crossed the threshold.
The main room wasn’t as deep and dark as the entryway would suggest. After climbing down a set of steep, narrow stairs, we emerged into a big space that, despite its low ceiling, was brightly lit and cozy with colorful cushions scattered over chairs and benches. A stage was set up on one end of the room; I eyed the standing mic uneasily.
We took a seat at a table close enough to the stage where we’d be able to see everything but far enough where hopefully the comic wouldn’t be able to make easy eye contact. The show still had a bit of time before it went on; people were still trickling in, appearing to be in no hurry as they shrugged off coats and unwound scarves. “So what’s the deal with this place?” I asked. “Is one of your friends performing or something? Or, don’t tell me, you’re the former stand-up comic.” I stopped and considered for a moment. “I could see it.”
He snorted. “No, I don’t have the intestinal fortitude necessary for getting up onstage and bombing in front of a crowd.”
“Then what—” I stopped as a waiter materialized to hand us menus. I’d drank enough last night where I didn’t particularly want to drink again, so I gave the alcohol menu only a cursory scan before moving on to the food. “Hey, wait.”
“Cool, right?” Seth said so smugly it made me hope just a little bit that he’d give himself a paper cut.
It was cool, though, I had to grudgingly admit. The menu was full of foods that felt like home to me, but that also had a flair of originality. Brisket and matzo balls in a hearty bowl of ramen. Lox bowls with nori and crispy rice. Savory potato kugel and boureka pastries with hummus and fried artichokes with kibbeh. Knishes with kimchi and potato filling and a gochujang aioli. “This menu is so…Jewish.”
“So Jewish,” Seth agreed. “And make sure you’re saving room for dessert. The rugelach is unreal, and the rainbow cookies are”—he looked around, then lowered his voice—“better than my mom’s.”
One of the things I actually missed about living in New York was seeing all the fun twists people put on Jewish and Israeli food at restaurants and in delis. Nobody was doing that in Vermont.
Maybe you could do that in Vermont, something whispered in my head. I was used to just pushing that voice away, but, for once, I let myself pause and consider it. Would it be that crazy to sell babka at my café? I bet people would love a thick, tender slice of the sweet bread braided with chocolate or cinnamon sugar or even something savory with their coffee. I could experiment with fun fillings, have a daily special. Or I could rotate shakshuka or sabich sandwiches on the brunch specials menu, since they both involved eggs. My regulars might see eggs poached in spicy tomato sauce and pitas stuffed with fried eggplant, eggs, and all the salad fixings as breaths of fresh air.
“Abby?” Seth said in a tone of voice that suggested this was the third or fourth time he had said my name.
I blinked. “What?”
He gestured at the menu. “Have you decided what you’re going to get? Do you want to share a few things?”
“Sure,” I said. And then, because he’d been so supportive when I’d raised the idea of my specialty coffees, I asked him what he thought about my idea.
His eyes lit up. “I think that sounds amazing. I’ll be first in line every morning.”
The idea of that didn’t even provoke the specter of my usual Category 3. In fact, I hadn’t experienced a headache like that around him this whole trip. Maybe it was something in the New York air. Probably smog. Right, fresh clean mountain air was totally known for making headaches worse.
When the waiter came back around, we ordered a few different dishes to share, and then the room quieted to a dull buzz. I glanced over at the stage to find the night’s first comic setting up the mic—a twentysomething guy with a thin frame and an abundance of dark curly hair. I sighed through my nose, readying myself for some tired speech about adulting or jabs at an imaginary wife.
Instead, the comic said, “Good god, I haven’t had this many people staring at me onstage since my bar mitzvah. Are you going to pelt me with candy again? I don’t even have a Torah stand to hide behind.”
A surprised laugh bubbled up from my throat. What the comic had said wasn’t even that funny, but it struck pangs of familiarity inside me that I hadn’t felt in years. I was right back there, age twelve and thirteen, hurling fruit gems as hard as I could at the heads of my Hebrew school classmates as they finished their haftarah, then pretending I was too cool to scurry up to the bima afterward with the littler kids to gather them up, no matter how much I wanted to. It was a memory of my childhood that didn’t have anything to do with my parents.
I’d spent a lot of time at synagogue without them, actually. I’d almost forgotten.
The guy continued to be not-that-funny, but he kept bringing up things that sent me tumbling back down memory lane. Not like I was trapped in a car with a speeding driver, but like I’d boarded a roller coaster I was really excited about trying out. It was a little scary, but also thrilling to remember things like reading the freaky parts of the Tanakh during a boring Shabbat morning service, or substituting other words for the Hebrew in Adon Olam. Apparently, my friends and I weren’t the only people to take l’ayt na-ah-sa and turn it into I ate my socks.
By the time the guy gave an ironic little bow and stepped down from the stage, something inside me had melted a bit. I didn’t want to analyze it, or I might do something terrible, like cry. So I was relieved when the food showed up and I could devote all my attention to how delicious it was rather than how glad, how grateful, I was to be back in a space like this.
The rest of the night went on much like that. All of the comics didn’t necessarily bring back good childhood memories, but as they regaled us with anecdotes about how people always felt the need to ask them what they thought about Israel before befriending them and jokes about how all of our holidays followed the general structure of “they tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat” and tales about how our generational trauma from the Holocaust sometimes manifested in the impromptu running of marathons (okay, so that one was less relatable), I just felt…I don’t know, like I was back in the club again. Like I’d been reminded that, like it or not, I wasn’t a lone wolf out there; I was part of a pack.
And all while eating what were, however much I hated to admit Seth was right, the most delicious rainbow cookies I’d ever had. They were so beautiful I almost didn’t want to eat them; while many rainbow cookies had only a few different layers, these literally were striped with every color of the rainbow. I kind of wanted to see if each layer actually tasted different or if they were differentiated only by food coloring, but the thought of tearing one apart felt like throwing tomatoes at a masterful painting. “Plot twist,” I said, closing my eyes as I savored the chocolate edge of one cookie and debated taking another. “The guest baker tonight is your mom’s nemesis, Eva Hallac.”
Seth snorted. “It’s the melting of the ice caps all over again. No, the guest chef tonight is some famous TV chef who has a Jewish restaurant nearby. We walked by it the other day, and you thought it looked good, remember? I heard she’s taking leave from the restaurant because she just had a baby, but she can’t stay away from the kitchen altogether.”
Maybe she’d want to help out at the Hanukkah festival, I thought with a burst of inspiration that, just as quickly, fell flat. Seth had already said I couldn’t afford her. “I understand that,” I said. Understandable that someone might take a break from something to focus on another thing, and then come back to it once they remembered how much they loved it. How much they missed it over the years, how good it felt to finally come home again.
I was just talking about the chef. Obviously.
“Hey, do you want to hear a secret?” Seth leaned in, eyes sparkling. A pink crumb was clinging to his beard. I had to stop my hand in midair when I realized I was going to brush it away. What was I thinking? “Something I’ve never told anyone before.”
I tucked my traitorous hand under my thigh to keep it in check. “Sounds like great blackmail material.”
“Okay, if we’ve reached the point where people are willing to pay money for my secrets, I think that means I’ve made it.”
