28. or we could go out

written 8 months and 2 days after

This, of all things, was his favourite DQ order

There was a rare break of sunshine this week (don’t worry, it’s snowing again today) and I met two of my friends for a socially distanced coffee and donut.

While I bit into a horchata sour cream glazed donut, my friends talked about what restaurants they wanted to eat at when the lockdown lifts. There was talk of a newer restaurant in town; one of my friends had gone there with his partner and he raved about the mushroom bao; my other friend wanted to go there as well, but his plans had gotten delayed by the lockdown which settled back into place a week ago.

“I love eating out,” I said and my friends agreed. One of them said it was one of the primary things he and his partner did when they went on dates, which was the same for myself and my sweet man.

We just loved sharing a meal out together.

The first time I can remember he and I going for a meal was lunch, on our second date. The patio was just five minutes from the house he was living in at the time. He wore cowboy gear and I didn’t. I ordered a turkey burger and added bacon. I drank lemonade. I can’t recall what he ate; if he were here, I doubt he would either. He was always marvelling at my memory, the way in which my brain traps the major and minor movements of what happens around me. He called me a ‘steel trap,’ and he always meant it as a compliment.

The next time I recall eating out with him was when we went for sushi together. I hadn’t grown up eating Japanese food and he was the first to introduce me to sashimi, chicken karaage, nigiri sushi (and sushi of any kind), takoyaki, agedashi tofu, miso black cod, and on. Sashimi, in particular, was a revelation.

Over the years, we ate at so many different sushi places in the city and around the world. Small, hole-in-the-walls with only a few tables; modern, low-lit, overpriced hotels; brightly-lit, open concepts where Top 40 pop played on a constant loop; commercial chains with iPad menus; cramped, bar-only’s where the rolls were made right in front of us; conveyer belts where the food was delivered in a continual rotation; the food courts of Asian supermarkets; and, of course, our home, in front of our television, white cartons of food piled in front of us. Whenever we ordered for home, we laughed at how many chopsticks the restaurant would throw into the bag, always four or more pairs.

“It’s a feaster,” he would say, eyeing all of the cartons.

I acknowledge, of course, that we were lucky to be able to afford the pleasure and theatre of dining out.

We budgeted for it and saved in other areas, but in the end, we often would reflect on the privilege of being able to experience different kinds of cuisine across all kinds of places. Sometimes, we speculated about cooking in more but then he would look at me with his shoulders up, his eyes sparkling, a grin emerging and say, “or we could go out?”

Of course, usually I agreed, and he would exclaim, “Mind vibe, baber!” with such insouciance that I would feel a deep, resonant joy.

The next time I distinctly remember us eating out was a few months into dating; he and I went to San Francisco. We dined at a tremendously fancy restaurant downtown where I had my first ever glass of true champagne. The sommelier told me that he remembered his first glass as feeling like shooting stars were glittering over his tongue. Upon my first sip, I couldn’t disagree with him. The bubbles were so fine and sparkly in my mouth.

I also recall a particular dish at this restaurant which was served with two sous vide red stripe shrimp. I ate mine quickly, amazed at the tender sweetness. He ate his first and was in awe of its texture too, but his second he left sitting nestled in the greenery on the side of his plate. As he was drinking some of his wine, I sneaked a hand out and snagged his second shrimp, popping it in my mouth.

“Hey!” he said, but he was laughing and there was no real protest in his voice.

“Thank youuuuuuuuu,” I said.

Later, I would learn that previous to this moment, my sweet man never shared food. As a child, it was explained, he would lick his food dramatically, just to prevent others from trying it. It was, in some senses, a historic moment for him when I nicked the best part of the dish and he let me. There was a joke about that being the first root in the earth of his love for me.

I couldn’t believe this when he told me. There had been absolutely no trace of chagrin when he let me eat his shrimp. I would never have known.

We would go on, or I should say, I would go on, to eat the best bits off of his plate for the rest of our relationship. He always let me. Sometimes, I would ask, and sometimes I wouldn’t, but he was always “happy to share, baber.”

It still seems impossible to me that he could have ever have been someone that refused to allow others to try his food. I used to say this to him and he’d just shrug.

“You’re just special, I guess,” he’d say.

He was always so cheesy.

Quickly, too, in those early months, we established Saturday date-night.

On these nights, we would choose a specific meal that we wanted and then grocery shop for it, sometimes together, sometimes not depending on our weeks. He would usually cook, while I talked or chopped vegetables (though I was haphazard and impatient so my vegetables were usually odd shapes that made him laugh).

In the first year, or so, I was still eating beef and I specifically recall that we used to eat open-face steak sandwiches because the house he lived in at the time had a barbecue and I didn’t. He always sliced the meat with one of his ridiculously sharp Japanese-made knives and I would ooh, and ahhh at the way the meat fell in neat, perfectly symmetrical slices.

Later on, after we both stopped eating beef, we made and ate a lot of spicy, crispy tofu tacos (without cilantro because while he ate basically everything, he could not abide by cilantro) or homemade pizza with spicy chicken sausage.

One of the pizza nights, after we worked out

He was amazing at rolling out the pizza dough. It was so effortless, the way in which he would flour the counter and knead the dough, rolling it tidily with a pin until it was the perfect thin crust. I would lean against the kitchen wall and watch him and whenever he offered to teach me how to do it, I would shake my head.

“I don’t need to learn,” I would say, happily watching him. “I have you.”

Recently, I tried to roll out a ball of dough into a pizza base for myself. I couldn’t get it right. The flour lumped up and the dough became a stringy mess that I sobbed into before eventually throwing it away. (There are so many of these moments lately, these small things that don’t seem it at the time, but I have come to realized were load-bearing.)

For birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, apologies, bad days at work, good days at work, promotions, the end of report card season (teachers know), or just because, we would eat food from a list of places that we collected, loosely, on a shared iPhone Note.

The week after he died, we were supposed to go for dinner at one of our favourite Japanese restaurants downtown. There was another restaurant, Korean, opening up soon and we’d just added that to “the list,” as well. Even still, when I read about a restaurant that I know he would have insisted we add, I have to take a moment and stop myself from making a mental note to tell him about it.

The lists started a few years ago, when we were in Los Angeles.

We were on holiday and also getting our engagement photos done in the city. We had a long list of places we wanted to eat but one day, he took me to an industrial-seeming area of town. It was blazing hot and I forgot a hat (he gave me his) and I was unsure of what we were getting ourselves into. Eventually, after wending our way through nondescript buildings, we came out into a wide, open plaza, packed with people and food trucks and open stalls.

There were so many good options that we had to do several laps of the plaza, making and amending our short list of places to try — even for us, famously enthusiastic eaters, our list far exceeded our belly’s capacities.

Eventually we narrowed it down to two places. He stood in one line and I stood in the other. Then, together, food clutched in our hands, we hovered by a picnic table until a family with three kids finally packed up all their things and left. We swooped in, delighted to sit and surveyed the food in front of us with real delight. We swapped food so we each had a little of everything we had ordered and dove in.

The Gjusta sandwich in Los Angeles

Later, when we had come home to the cold, he shared the first of our many food iPhone notes with me. This first one was snappily called: Restaurants in Los Angeles We Ate At On March-April Trip 2018.

In the list he wrote:

• Delicious pizza from Rose Cafe in Venice

• Smorgasbord event at Almeda Market and those amazing paratha pork belly Goa tacos

• Chaya Japanese - with the delicious cooked salmon belly

• Gjusta had the delicious build-your-own fish sandwiches

• Gjusta porchetta melt - so good

• Gjelina had the super delicious perfect crust pizza (on the perfect crust opinion he and I different, but he insisted it was the best)

• Salt Air - super good restaurant and the wine was so great I forgot part of the night (true, we swam home in our own alcohol)

• Hinoki and the Bird - super tasty cod, and the matcha dessert was killer

• La Isla Bonita taco food truck, tasty and great value

• Blue Star donuts - a delicious treat

I read over the note while he asked me if he had missed anything (he hadn’t). Below the list, he had left a place that read Kurtis Top Eats and Amy Top Eats. We filled them in together.

He insisted on the list because in 2017 after I had graduated from my MFA program, we had gone, with my parents, to an incredible restaurant in Chicago. The courses were stunning — part of the restaurant itself was edible — and it had bothered him ever since that dinner that he couldn’t recall each course.

Or at least, that’s what he said. I think, as was the case with him most of the time, the list was more about anchoring the memories — the way the food dredged up the experience, the way it bound the two of us together in a specific way.

Even now, I look over the list, still exactly as he typed it, and I can feel the faint bass playing through the walls of our LA AirBnb that our UberEats driving commented on when he dropped off the pizza; can see the dim lighting of Chaya and the way it made his skin glow; can hear the perfectly dressed blogger couple talking about the photos they’d taken of their Gjusta plates while he and I watched stuffing food down our throats; can feel the way we hung onto each other as we came from cocktails to Salt Air, laughing at how we had gotten drunk on empty stomachs; can feel again the heat on the pavement as we stood in line for tacos; can hear the way the rain beat down on our shared umbrella as we split a milk chocolate chunk cookie (okay I ate 3/4 and him 1/4) and declared it the best thing we’d ever eaten (though we forgot to put it on the list so it must have been the rain that made us so dramatic).

The next year, in 2019, when we would go to Japan, we created a visual food diary, taking photos of almost everything we ate and sorting it into a folder on his phone. At night, we would flip through and debate which dish had been our favourite of the day. He always took such good photos of the food that as I would look over his shoulder at the images, I would swear that I could taste the tofu, the fresh fish, the roe on my tongue.

That was where the food always brought us, overstuffed and overtired, flopped in bed beside each other, talking about what we did or did not like. Usually, those talks led us elsewhere, into other avenues of conversation, but other times, we just stayed on the food.

We often debated his ice cream flavour choices (he loved vanilla and mint chocolate chip ice cream) and I relentlessly reminded him of the time he ordered a double scoop of mint chocolate and the young guy scooping said, “Man, there are a lot of things to live for but this flavour ain’t it.”

Other times, we imagined what we would eat together.

We looked up restaurants all over the world and tried to decide what we would order. Sometimes, we put our imagined child into the fantasy and other times it was just us that we pictured. We always saw us both there, sitting across from each other, taking it all in, savouring each wild and lucky and beautiful thing set in front of us.

“I can’t wait,” he would always say. “It’s all going to be so good.”

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