Longing

That’s the thing about this city—there are enough places to eat that you’ll never be able to get through them. Never. And trust me, I’ve tried.

There’s this great breakfast spot, corner of Lovejoy and 17^th, killer burritos. I mean, the kind that make you want to bend a knee to the old gods and the new. When I first put that piping hot tortilla, stuffed with homestyle hashbrowns, salsa verde, black beans made by a woman who has made them since utero, I moaned so loudly the table next to me gave me a side-eye.

But I didn’t care. 

I didn’t care because there’s something about food that let’s me know, it’s going to be okay. When my boss is being a total asshole or my mother keeps asking when I’m going to have children or my friends children imprison them, I can walk a few blocks and order shiitake mushroom ramen, or sushi rolls that don’t quite look like sushi rolls, or biscuits and gravy that make me want to cry.

One summer I met a guy named Renault who was on a quest to find the best huevos rancheros in the city. He’d already been to thirty-two different restaurants and had a few contenders, but he knew that some hole in the wall restaurant, one that you couldn’t find on Yelp, would offer the holy grail he’d been searching for.

We met up regularly to try new restaurants during my favorite meal of the day: brunch. He was able to try all the huevos rancheros he wanted, but me? I got to try everything else. Breakfast enchiladas, eggs oliver, frittatas, eggs Benedict, omelettes so large I felt them in my stomach for the rest of the day.

He had a particular way of eating. Like the Europeans, he ate each meal with a fork and knife that he handled as if they were extensions of his appendages. Renault would spear each ingredient onto his fork, then smear the top with sour cream. The piece-de-la-resistance, or “cherry on top” as he called it, was a dollop of Tapatio. Not only did he eat as if he were making love, but he ate as if the eating itself were some kind of artistry, a practice, a way to connect to some ethereal goddess. The goddess of cuisine and erotica. Erotical cuisine.

Renault and I would text throughout the week, mostly snippets from reviews we found online or links to the underground food network with hints on where to find the best anything in our city. This underground food network was like the restaurant black market. Secret menus, off-menu items, ingredients restaurants had on hand but didn’t advertise. And everything was code. You had to have been on the site long enough, or been to enough of the restaurants to understand the jargon. If you weren’t willing to do the work, you weren’t able to reap the reward.

I wasn’t some Black Hawk restaurant agent and couldn’t decipher the acronyms or code words. It felt like being in some secret club or high-level governmental agency. These people took their food seriously. And I had gotten an invitation just by knowing one of them.

But Renault wouldn’t offer up all of his secrets. He was selective.

“What is RRBG?” I asked him at breakfast.

He shot me a look. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” When he said this he cocked his head to the side and twirled the knife between his fingers.

“You know on—“ But he stopped me mid sentence by raising his palm aggressively in front of me.

“Don’t you dare!” He said.

If he was joking, it wasn’t obvious. The incident slipped by and we returned to our plates. His rancheros were sub-par, but he ate them anyway. I, on the other hand, indulged in one of the best plates of biscuits and gravy to have ever graced my palette. The gravy was rich and spicy and left a film on my tongue. The biscuits were doughy like a pastry and ballooned up on the plate as if they were still rising before being set in the oven. They were served with a side of country-fried-chicken and I thought: I wouldn’t mind this being my last meal. Of course, I was always lusting for more and better. Where Renault’s mission was to find the perfect blend of flavor and texture and crunch, I only wanted to discover the greasiest, heaviest, and tastiest our city had to offer. And my God, these biscuits had to be close to the epitome.

Late in the summer Renault and I ventured to the outskirts of the city to a part of town on the cusp of gentrification. Cranes hovered over the skeletons of apartment buildings that were all concrete and sharp lines. These new buildings cast shadows over derelict homes, the kind my father used to drive by and say, “This is what drugs will do, kids.” I learned, after moving from the suburbs to the city, that it wasn’t drugs, but institutionalized racism and systems that prevented folks from buying houses or negotiating raises or having access to healthy food. My father, a very white man who still believed in “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps,” couldn’t understand. 

“If you work harder, Ali, your circumstances improve,” he told me. I became so frustrated I left the house and went for a ten-mile walk and contemplated never going back.

Families are strange.

And so I thought about my dad and tried not to think about my dad as we drove by homes with peeling paint and brown, reedy vegetation with kids bikes like fallen soldiers on the front lawn. We turned down a narrow side street and drove slowly between cars parked on either side. His car moved abruptly over potholes and Renault had no choice but to drive over a small, lone shoe in the middle of the road.

At the corner, we found the small grocery store with it’s door at a 45-degree angle. Tables with checkered picnic clothes were scattered along the exterior walls with chairs like my grandmother kept in her garden. The interior was small and items were shoved onto shelves like a hoarders closet. A young man sat on a barstool behind the counter reading a manga book in Spanish. He looked up at us and his shoulders sagged before offering us a small, insincere smile.

Renault walked up to the counter. “I hear you make the best huevos rancheros in the city.”

The boy stood up in his chair and pressed his palms into the countertop. “Two?”

Renault looked back at me and I shrugged my shoulders in agreement.

The boy opened the industrial door behind him and yelled into the small green space behind the store. “Mamá! Dos huevos rancheros por favor!”

A woman yelled back in indecipherable Spanish. The boy turned back to us and said, “She’s almost finished with the washing and then she’ll get started on it.” 

We ordered two cups of coffee and waited at the tables on the sidewalk. It was sunny and warm, the kind of day that made us both love living in this city. Renault grabbed his phone and started scrolling and I leaned my face back into the sun.

“What if this is it?” I asked.

He smiled. “Then it’ll be disappointing to keep eating huevos rancheros to verify.”

I laughed at his adamance.

“I won’t know if it’s the best until I’ve tried them all. That’s the problem. Even after I’ve had the best the city can offer, I still need to keep eating because I won’t know for absolute certain.”

“Okay, but when does it end? Like, at some point restaurants are going to keep opening and inevitably serving huevos rancheros. Then what? You eat them until the day you die?”

Renault looked up from his phone and at the houses surrounding the little grocery store restaurant. “I don’t know,” he said, which unsettled me.

We sat in silence for a few more minutes and watched cars navigate the road in need of repairs. We saw kids walking together in close huddles and an elderly woman move slowly, her wrinkled hand curled over the top of a cane.

Out from behind the counter the boy looked taller with broader shoulders. He carried two plates piled high with food and placed the yellow plate in front of me and the red in front of Renault. I could tell from the immediate scent that it was going to be incredible.

Renault looked up at me, his eyes shining. “Holy shit,” he said, “this might be it.”

He clasped his hands in front of his chest then spread them wide over his plate as if preparing the eggs for ceremony. With a deep breath he cut into the food and speared each layer with his fork, then smeared the top with sour cream. I handed him the Tapatio, and he applied one single dot.

I watched and waited as Renault put the forkful of food in his mouth. He closed his lips around the fork and made eye contact with me. Then, all at once, his face went through an orgasmic metamorphosis. His eyes rolled, his jaw hung slack, his shoulders fell down his back. I’d had enough of watching so I dug into my own dish and shoved the food in my face.

How can I describe it? At first, there was salt from the corn tortilla, then the acid of the pico. When I bit in, I felt the light crunch of the tortilla then the softness and warmth of the beans. And when the flavor fully erupted in my mouth I thought I might die and go to Heaven (or wherever it is that heathens with a good track record like me go). Cumin and salt and pepper and garlic and onion and red pepper and lemon and tomato and avocado. I couldn’t keep all the flavors straight. It was like being on an adventure, but the adventure was in my mouth.

I looked over to Renault who was now crying into his dish of huevos.

“Incredible,” I said as I shoved another bite into my mouth.

“It’s perfect,” he said.

Our eyes met and I reached over to cover his hand with mine. I knew this moment meant something deeper for Renault. All his months of searching, his patience, eating literally so many bad eggs.

We continued to eat, one silent bite at a time.

When our plates were entirely devoid of food, the young man came out to take our plates. “It was good?” He asked.

Renault was still in a state of shock. “It was the best huevos rancheros I’ve ever had. Thank you.”

He nodded and gave a shy smile and took the plates inside.

“Are you going to be okay?” I asked.

Renault looked forlorn. His hands had remained in his lap since he finished his food. He hadn’t checked his phone or moved much, if it all, since his last bite.

He lifted his hands to his head and ran his fingers through his short black hair, then leaned back and rapped his fingers on the edge of the tabletop. “What now?”

I crossed my arms and put them on the table and leaned forward. “Biscuits and gravy?”

His fingers dropped into his lap. “Are you insane? I’m so full.”

“No,” I said, “Try to find the best biscuits and gravy in town.”

Renault thought about this. “I need to think about it,” he said.

I stood up from my chair and walked over to Renault. I shoved my hand between his arm and torso and hefted him out of his chair then pointed him in the direction of the car.

“You’ve got time,” I said.

He grabbed my hand. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess I do.”