Food sports

After six weeks of kitchen renovation, I had revisited most of the North Country restaurants in easy commuting distance, and was heartily sick of dining out. Not that you can’t get good food in the North Country, it’s just that most of the really top-end cuisine comes out of personal kitchens. Especially since fast food chains have ground down the heights formerly, if erratically, reached by the mom and pop establishments that used to abound. You can still transcend the merely nutritional in places like Donnelly’s, the seasonal ice cream stand near Saranac Lake that gives me an excuse to visit the Adirondacks as soon as Memorial Day rolls around, or the pie palace of Keene Valley--the Noon Mark Diner. And there are bright spots still throughout the region. But the average is—pretty average.

While I’m sure that Boston (where I spent the weekend) also has its share of average food, the good stuff is pursued with religious zeal. Tracking down the best little spots is the urban substitute for bloodsports—long walks, long waits, high overhead: nothing deters the enthusiast. And everyone has their own secrets, the way a fly fisherman knows the river, or an elderly uncle hides the spot where he always bags his buck. But the rewards! Divine chicken-potato curry consumed beneath a benignly beaming portrait of the Dalai Lama. Top cooks from a hundred nations appear to have washed ashore in the harbor. For Mother’s Day brunch we took a long ride on the T and waited over an hour for a table in Zaftig’s, a Coolidge Corners deli. The line outside was so impressive, I thought it was a bus stop. You could build a shrine to the crunchy and creamy potato pancakes, the melt-in-the-mouth pastrami. I could go on, but I would want to be alone with my memories. Now that I’m home, I’m thrown back on my own devices, albeit with a much classier kitchen. And now that I have been to the mountaintop, as it were, it’s harder to please myself, like picking out a tune on the guitar after listening to a Django Reinhardt CD. I know how it is supposed to be.