Hello and welcome back to Mess Hall, the internet’s most endearing cooking newsletter! Thank you to everyone who sent kind words about last week’s installment. I was a bit nervous to put that piece of writing back out into the world, and was grateful that it landed so gently.
A programming note: I’ve just returned from vacation (see below), and I’m leaving town again this week, to begin a low-residency MFA program at Bennington College.1 Mess Hall will continue to publish but might look a little different (re: less recipe-heavy) over the next few weeks. I hope you’ll bear with me. I’ll be back in full force in July with some hot hot hot (and some cold cold cold) summer recipes. Should July be TOMATO MONTH? Sound off in the comments.
Lastly: I’ve started a new column at Gothamist, called DISHING, in which I dig into a different dish from a NYC restaurant each month. The first installment came out while I was gone: on the perfect and perfectionist gildas at Txikito in Chelsea. I hope you’ll read it, this was a lot of fun to write.
I arrived in Rome mostly blind. I’d collected a slush pile of recommendations from friends in a disorganized Google doc, but hadn’t had time to do anything about it before boarding the plane. I figured I’d fly by the seat of my pants, as close as I wanted to the sun. Jackson was in charge of finding us a place to eat our first night—the one bit of foreboding I’d remembered from all the emails was you need dinner reservations—and I figured we’d take it from there. He’d been in Berlin for a few weeks, then Sicily with friends, and Rome was the most logical place for us to meet, so that’s where vacation began. Only upon landing did I realize why my flight had been so expensive. To everyone here for to the Bruce Springsteen concert, a flight attendant said, have fun tonight. In a car to the airbnb, I asked my driver if Springsteen was popular in Italy. Of course! he said proudly. He’s the boss!
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