Back in New York, as one might have anticipated, I am a bit less well. Jet-lagged, not in a fun way. To cope, I lean into my new Eve Babitz obsession, trying to channel her. I love romanticizing certain habits of vague excess and it is fun to have a muse. I try on being flippant. Drinking too much coffee, staying up late, messing up my hair. I walk on the sunny side of the street, in the cold, thinking of her line: “Pleasure is a lure.”
I say that to myself over and over, remembering a sign I saw in London.
What are we hooking here? I am thinking about the question of brine.
I typically ask for a gin martini very dirty. It is rare, perhaps because I am a little bit depraved (and likely because I have some vitamin deficiency) that I feel satiated with the salt content. At Horses, I had one of the first experiences of my life where the martini was too salty. This is not a bad thing! The word ‘dirty’ is terribly subjective, and we all have different mouths. Actually, it ended up being very meaningful.
Horses was one of the spots everyone said we should go. It’s vastly dim and cavernous, and it was a wonder that we were able to get a reservation.
Horses has four chefs (all very good, surely), but I found myself wondering if that collaboration presented a bit of flavor redundancy. We got the boudin blanc which had the same flavor profile as the pork rillettes which had the same flavor profile as the salmon toasts. Everything very good, but puckered the mouth. Salty, even after I had given my martini a break. Through it all, perfect lighting, accented by the color blue. The romance, I realized, might be in the challenge of salinity and its capacity to cut through the what is plush and cavernous.
The next night, we went to Found Oyster which had a line out the door. We parked next to the Church of Scientology where people seemed to be waiting outside for something in particular, I don’t know what. We scurried towards the restaurant.
The night was chilly and I had my puffer on, ready to slurp some oysters. Found Oyster is billed as “classic east coast” intersection with “west coast flavors”, inspired by “blue collar oyster bars in New England” (they may want to work on that phrasing…). Words aside, it was a wonderful time. The fries were perfect, a graceful levity á la McDo. Crustaceans that felt glowing. Sitting outside drinking un carafe de vin, feeling metropolitan, I thought of Lured Pleasure. Again, salt had powered my night.
It would be wrong of me not to address that a martini and an indulgent (enjoyment!) meal has been trending.
The New York Times imagines that the “Flavor of the Year” for 2023 is ocean salt. “Fresh, bracing marine flavors” and kelp and uni.
A couple weeks ago. E. Alex Jung, the new Diner-at-Large for New York Mag, wrote a sweet and smart series début on what he called the New York Happy Meal aka a martini and French Fries. Popping into different restaurants to test out the combo, he mourns spots like Café Loup where he used to eat the same set. A beautiful moment of feeling lost. “The problem, I realize, is me. I am guilty of nostalgia.”
In the midst of the West flooding and burning dry, and the East oscillating brittle hot and brittle cold, everything mistimed and forecasted future and past, the salt makes sense. Ocean salinity is fresh from The Source, while salt has the power to preserve us.
I found myself wondering what L.A. queen Eve Babitz would say about a part of Horses that’s stuck with me most: its distinctive blue.
Isn’t there something about it that feels particularly saturated, as if the color on the objects the blue covers has been turned up? This deep blue is beautiful and feels definitive. There have always been links between indigo and the numinous; Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, the chakra of the third eye, sacrebleu after all. Something impossible about this shade: too intense to be the ocean, but one can’t help remember it. Lapus Lazuli.
This blue is a pleasure, and it makes me start.
As I read Babitz, feeling the sway of her prose and fun and secrets, I find myself looking up suddenly. I jolt in the moments when I remember her accident. 1997, trying to light a Tiparillo in her Beetle, burning herself badly, shifting her life inward. The details so cosmically cruel, punishing of pleasure. My sense of time becomes disrupted, a stop and start impossible to comprehend.
I don’t say that to be macabre but, in a way, to marvel at salinity. So overpowering a mouth can run dry, so potent that we can preserve anything, so proximate to being too much. I wonder what she would make of that Lapus – not much resembling the sky, but putting off a vibration of something alive. Dark and bright, deep and royal.