“22 Hours in Balthazar,” New York Times:
Alvino is flying, his left hand’s fingers imperceptibly rotating the potato between upward strokes of the peeler, blindly flipping the naked spuds over his shoulder into the tub. I pull up my phone’s stopwatch to time him for a minute, treating each potato as a lap: his slowest is 10.7 seconds, his quickest 6.4. Alvino, a shy man from the Dominican Republic, has been doing this same job for 15 years. “Like anything else, it was difficult at first,” he says, but he caught his rhythm after a couple of months. Peralta has been at it for 14 years.
Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing:
My idea of a perfect night is a good play and dinner at Orso.
Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally…:
Restaurants are to people in the eighties what theater was to people in the sixties.
Ephron’s last line here (delivered through two characters) is pitch-perfect irony. It’s a thin truth that you can visit an authentic brasserie in any metropolis; it’s also undeniable that you can fully escape into it.
Is that theater? No: a play is theater and a french fry is a potato. But on their best days, restaurants like Balthazar deliver a tiny portion of theater’s magic.