October 9, 2023 Issue

The two pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are Ben McGrath’s “Talk” story “Dystopian Sublime” and Hannah Goldfield’s “Top of the Line.” McGrath’s piece is an account of his attendance at a bizarre opera staged on a barge floating on Newtown Creek in Maspeth, New York City. The creek is grossly polluted. McGrath says of it, “Black mayonnaise is the connoisseur’s name for its sedimentary ooze.” The event is watched by an audience riding in canoes, kayaks, and other types of boats. McGrath writes, “Boating spectators gripped one another’s gunwales to hold position against the southerly breeze. A skein of geese passed overhead in eerie synchronicity with the end of a scene like fighter pilots after “The Star-Spangled Banner.” My favorite line in the piece is this beauty: “A stray horn, a searchlight upwind, a marine radio hissing intermittently about bridge traffic: sometimes, amid this dystopian sublime, it was difficult to distinguish the choreography from the merely urban.”

Goldfield’s “Top of the Line” is a profile of chef Kwame Onwuachi. She tells about his career – his attendance at the Culinary Institute of America, his competing in “Top Chef,” his ownership of the successful restaurant Tatiana, in Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, and so on. But, for me, the piece really comes alive in its last part when Goldfield describes Onwuachi in Tatiana’s kitchen, making a corn-bread pudding:

He bloomed curry powder in butter in a pot on the stove, then crumbled in the corn bread and added heavy cream and oat milk. When it had cooked down into a smooth, thick paste, he tasted it. “Fucking great!” he declared. “That’s fun.” Instead of crème fraîche, he decided to top it with the white sauce that he makes for his halal-cart-inspired shawarma chicken. In the finished dish, the gentle heat of the curry and the sweetness of the warm pudding were offset by the cool, tangy white sauce and a salty plink of caviar at the end of each bite.

That last sentence is superb!