This is how I will be able to survive being a vegetarian: I will go only to fine Frency bistro cafes when I go out for dinner, which happen to be adjacent to the best cheese store east of Doheney, and I will order the wine flight and cheese board while everyone else indulges in lamb chops and hangar steaks, and long after they have swallowed their last fleshy mouthful, and collapsed back into their chairs in post-parandial exhaustion, desperately ready to order tarte tatines and sorbet trios and little cups of espresso with a lemon-peel twist sunrise next to the paradisal sugar cubes on the saucer with the shining tiny silver spoon of Grace, I will still be savoring another bite of unpasteurized cow banon paired with pouilly-fuisse, or a reblochon with the 2004 pino noir from languedoc, perhaps with a smudge of guava paste against the crust, and I will portion out slices from my cheese board like a magnanimous medieval queen to whomever asks most nicely. Dining out is an event for taste, not nourishment. That’s what rice cakes and peaut butter are for.
In my match made in heaven, are we the cheese or the wine or the bread? Is he my roquefort or am I his cabernet? Or is he my parisian baguette–an essential, stable, ubiquitous staple, that nonetheless must always embody utter perfection in all of those facets particular to fine bread if it is truly to be able to uphold, support and enhance the flavor of any good cheese? In which case am I that cheese, which must also attain its own facets of perfection if it is to fully realize all of those secret flavors and characters to be found only in commensality with its natural partner, bread? Or am I the bread, thinking I am a cheese, searching in vain for a support that only I myself can lend to another?
Oh where are you my chewy, tangy, cripsy, nutty baguette? Where are you my rare unpasteurized castelmagno? Ah I shall search and search. Maybe one day our flavors will merge in perfect harmony but until then I will wait on my little shelf, biking my bike and labbing my lab and wine shopping my wine shop and avoiding blogging my blog and singing my songs and being PERFECTLY FUCKING FINE WITHOUT YOU!!
No. I am a bottle of soju that I buy with my friends at 1 in the morning with a six-pack of modelo from the liquor store downstairs because we’ve already burned through eight beers and a bottle of sake and five cigarettes and then we all go to the 4:00 yoga class the next day because none of us have jobs.
