Maxwell's Lost Again

This space is meant to be dedicated to the spaces I’ve inhabited and the things they’ve shown me, though I feel I have held much back. Since my last post about Miami, I have been to Kansas City three times for work. I have been to Scottsdale and Las Vegas/St George on bachelor parties, to New York twice, to Chicago once, and the Bahamas most recently. But volume of travel is meaningless without insight. I have spent the year struggling with what’s worth saying.

Chicago gave me the mix of new and old I’ve been seeking the past two years, gave me something to hold on to. I had two of the most incredible dinners of my life there, thanks to my two good friends. Dylan’s father was a chef—a rather well known one, foundational to the Chicago food scene—and I came up to try his father’s illustrious menu, put on by the esteemed Grant Achatz, at his Next restaurant. Dylan recently shared a photo of his dad in the kitchen with a young Nobuyuki Matsuhisa—whose cuisine has shaped my tastes more than any other.

My love of sushi is well documented, and I had been looking forward to the opening course of Uni, Caviar, Creme Fraiche, and Daikon. My friends were sober but let me partake in the wine tasting that night, after I joined them for the N/A pairing the night before at Oriole. The n/a pairing challenged my palate, I was most elated by something called “Violet” paired with finely cut Beets in a sake sauce, but it never elevated dishes in the way that wine does. Perhaps this is my inner demon willing its way out as ever, but Next was a superior experience to Oriole for me.

The playing field was never level, Next had the advantage not just of alcohol, but of memories, both shared with me and silent within.

At Next, to my surprise, the dish that hit hardest was a chilled tomato soup, with “brioche micro croutons”. Every spoonful was airy, fresh, textured— like a childhood summer day walking over twigs in the woods behind my house—every crouton crunch brought me deeper within myself. Or maybe three wine pairings had already taken hold of me.

To my delight, David’s mother Joan joined us at dinner, and I told her how I had seen my classmate Jongwon earlier that year and had shown him what I could of our country. I remembered the trip she took David and I on, Senior year of High School – a tour of London, Paris, and Normandy. Her itinerary was all museums and sightseeing, David and I stole away as often as possible to try every pub we could.

I remembered my hangover in the Churchill War Rooms, how dusty and dim it felt, how grateful I was not to live in those times, how Churchill might have respected my plight. More than the War Rooms, I was taken by the first room of the Natural History Museum, the shaft of light shining through the ceiling, falling, sacred onto Darwin’s marble figure. Back then, the photo I took felt profound; perhaps it still does.

I try to recount my year and end up in 2010. My history bubbles out of me, unbidden. At times, I think of all our former selves as nested within us, like Matryoshka dolls or layers of paint, each one enclosing the next. Other times, I see them as a single coiled thread, spiraling around a fundamental self. Sometimes we orbit closer to one part of our history, sometimes to another—but nothing is ever truly gone. You are your every meal, your every self, your every memory.