I came upon the Tables for Two column after reading this article in the Saturday Paper about Amelia Lester, an Australian expat who works at The New Yorker. I'd heard her interviewed on The Media Report a while back, a young woman living the ultimate fantasy of so many young writers and journalists. Amelia now writes for the longstanding Tables for Two column, which seems to be a bit of an institution.
This isn't my usual territory at all. I used to love reading restaurant reviews, even though I very rarely eat out, but I kind of lost interest over the years. Now I spend more time reading cooking blogs, even though I rarely follow recipes. So I only really went down this rabbit hole for Sonya's sake, but I was happily transported for an hour or two on a chilly Sunday afternoon.
Amelia Lester describes the column like this: "Tables for Two is a sketch of a place, a time, a neighbourhood. Food happens to be involved, but that's because food means more to residents of this city than just about any other...restaurants have become our personal space, the extra room that New Yorkers often dream of having. They're where love affairs, breakups, and family fights take place, and we have all entered into a contract of pretending not to hear the conversation at the adjacent table when they happen."
As suggested by the quote above, the reviews cover the nuts and bolts - what the place looks like, what the food tastes like, who goes there - but they also deftly tell a story in very few words. A description of a couple of dishes, a couple of anecdotes about the clientele, and you have a fully-formed picture of the place in your mind. It feels like a great hybrid of food and travel writing in consummate New Yorker style, and my stomach was rumbling as I read it.
And for our very own girl-about-town who's about to embark on a NYC adventure, there is an interactive map of all the eateries that have been featured in the column. Even though I'm not planning to travel to New York any time soon (and I never have money to spend in restaurants when I travel anyway), I'm finding the map quite addictive. The concentration of eateries in such a small space is mind boggling.
http://projects.newyorker.com/story/tables-for-two/
And while we're on the topic of dream job, I also happened upon this wonderful job application to the New Yorker written by a young and very sassy Eudora Welty, featured In Letters of Note. Welty never did get the job (or even a reply to her letter), but did go on to become a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/05/12/eudora-welty-new-yorker-application-letter/
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