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Zoe Dubno Enters a Fugue State When Eating Sauerkraut Soup
Illustration: Sarah Kilcoyne
At the center of Zoe Dubno’s novel Happiness and Love is the New York literary scene — a scene that she, having grown up in the city, has seen many sides of. She has lived in Dimes Square, around a now-notorious 20-something class of disaffected artists, but grew up on the Upper West Side, known for a certain kind of “zhlubby bookish person in L.L. Bean,” as she puts it. Now, though, she’s back on the Upper West Side, living in the same building as her brother and regularly running into the same neighbors she grew up around. “I think of my dad as the mayor of our little neighborhood, because he literally walks around with his dog, walking in every store he passes to say hi,” she says. “It really is like a weird shtetl.” She spent this last week revisiting old haunts, like the glamorous bistro Le Monde, and indulging in new obsessions, like sauerkraut fish soup, which she calls “God-tier food.”
Sunday, September 7
I wake up in upstate New York next to my friend Rachel. We’ve slept over at our friend David Fishkind’s house after a book event in Rhinebeck. I’d forgotten Rachel talks in her sleep, and I’m woken up by her muttering something to herself about puppies, so I go downstairs to find David has made French-press coffee. The coffee is strong and viscous. I fill half the mug with milk. I switched to tea almost exclusively a few years ago because coffee was making me feel anxious and tired, but I love it and never refuse a cup when it’s made for me.
David makes us non-dairy yogurt with sour-cherry granola that is baked in ghee and so crispy and light. The coconut yogurt is tangy and thinner than my usual Greek yogurt, so of course I spill some onto my shirt.
For lunch, we go to Club Sandwich in Tivoli. Rachel and I share the tuna Reuben and the chicken club. The fusion of a tuna melt and a Reuben is a stroke of genius — griddled on marble rye with Thousand Island dressing and tangy, crunchy sauerkraut. I make a mental note to put sauerkraut on tuna sandwiches at home. The club sandwich is also nice, with large chunks of skin-on chicken, but I always find the third slice of bread in a club to be cumbersome and feel vindicated when it inevitably falls out. David gets the Italian, but because he’s discovered he has celiac disease, orders it in a gluten-free wrap. I say I’m sorry he’s missing out on the bread, but he says capicola and oil and vinegar are good enough on their own.
For dessert, we cross the street and head to Fortunes Ice Cream, which is run by the same people as Club Sandwich. The labneh sour cherry is a perennial favorite, but I had to try the corn blueberry and the rocky road. The corn flavor is mellow but bright, with the subtlety of a fior di latte gelato, but I’m glad I followed my chocoholism to the rocky road, because the chocolate is so creamy and luscious that it has the mouth feel of Swiss Miss pudding. Who are these mad geniuses who have made the best sandwich and what I seriously posit is the world’s greatest ice cream?
On the drive back into the city, we stop at Montgomery Place Orchards. People upstate really are wearing those big hats, and I’m kind of into it. Shine on, you crazy diamonds. At the farm stand, I buy a green I’ve never seen before called Spigariello, which looks like Lacinato kale mixed with broccoli rabe, and an eggplant, some cherry tomatoes, a single sprig of minuscule red-currant tomatoes, and some of the “antique” apple varieties Montgomery Place is known for, like the Allington Pippin whose sign says that “although it is of good size and of good quality, it is not attractive enough in color to make it a promising commercial variety for New York.” And the Pitmaston Pineapple, whose sign says: “This apple dates back to 1780 England … Don’t let the size fool you. The flesh is juicy and sweet and DOES fill your thoughts with pineapples.” I save those for later and eat what I imagine, with sadness, will be my last perfect peach of the year.
Back at home in Morningside Heights, I watch the U.S. Open final with my boyfriend (technically, my fiancé, but I can’t say fiancé without feeling like that lady on Seinfeld who lost her fiancé) and then roast a trout I bought at the farmers’ market last Sunday when I seemed to have forgotten this past week was going to be the most busy and hectic of my life. When I take it out of the fridge, I worry that it’s spoiled — there’s some murky, bizarre-smelling liquid in the plastic bag, but I’m pretty sure it’s just the melted ice it was kept in — so I text my fisherman/forager friend Evan who says “your nose will tell you when something is off,” and that “sometimes fish are better with a touch of age.” I decide it’s probably fine and put it in the oven with some shallots. Then I sautée the last of last week’s farmers’-market rainbow chard with chili flakes and garlic. I also make a little salad from a head of scraggly lettuce dressed with cider vinegar, oil, a little fish sauce, and that amazing Pommery Meaux grainy mustard that comes in that big heavy crock. The fish is completely delicious and my worries recede into the pleasure of watching Carlos Alcaraz win.
Monday, September 8
Back to normal: My dark apartment, two soft-boiled eggs, and the horrors of the world piped in directly via Democracy Now! I also eat the red-currant tomatoes from the farm that are the opposite of what I’d expected them to be — paler in flavor than their full-size friends. I make a pot of Bellocq breakfast tea, which tastes kind of like a graham cracker — malty and slightly smoky, very nice with milk — and settle in to work on an essay.
Around 10, I go to Le Monde for an interview with an Italian journalist. Le Monde is a brasserie near my apartment that has been in the neighborhood for as long as I can remember and is decorated in that great vintage French style. I’m a sucker for a leather banquette and an old movie poster. I used to go there with my mom when I was younger and watch her drink a martini and feel very glamorous and Parisian. It’s so cozy, and it feels great to be a regular — my friend Peter and I have our weekly lunch here; we both get a BLT, which we call “el classico.” I just have a mint tea today because I’m kind of jacked up on caffeine from the full pot of tea.
Back at home, I enter my hyperfocus time warp and emerge at 2:30 when I realize I am starving hungry. My boyfriend always says “starving hungry” like “freezing cold,” and now I say it too. I sip the last of a chilled corn soup I made sometime the week before from a mug. The soup is a recipe I kind of made up in which you strip the raw corn from the cob, make a stock from the naked cobs, and then lightly simmer the kernels in the stock for only about five minutes with some shallots and garlic. Then you blitz it in the blender and put it in the fridge. It’s unfair to call it savory; it’s basically a dessert soup. Then I find half of an old Le Monde “el classico” in the fridge, which is soggy and wan, so I discard the old bread, wrapping the bacon and tomato in a fresh piece of lettuce.
In the afternoon, I go downtown to Tribeca to record a podcast. I read Mary Robison’s novel Subtraction on the train, and because of my absentmindedness, I manage to do basically everything that you can do wrong on the subway — miss a train by a hair, miss a transfer to the express, and then, most bewilderingly, get off the train two stops early. I panic and take a Citi Bike ten blocks to “save time,” the docking and undocking of which probably takes longer than just walking.
I go back uptown to meet my boyfriend for dinner at Nai Brother Sauerkraut Fish. I would like to issue my formal thanks to the international students of Columbia University for their unofficial role in turning my neighborhood into a low-key second Chinatown full of the most delicious restaurants and boba tea establishments. I always get the signature sauerkraut fish soup. I have had the other stews, but the classic is something that, since Nai Brother opened this winter, I have extreme weekly cravings for. We order the “double occupancy,” which comes in a bowl the size of a school-bus steering wheel. The stew’s base is sauerkraut made from pickled mustard greens that has nothing to do with what you’d think of as sauerkraut, mixed with some kind of hot savory broth. It’s loaded with cabbage, glass noodles, little textured pieces of tofu, and fluffy sole fish, with floating Sichuan peppercorns, chilies, and grated garlic enriching the extremely tangy yet richly savory soup. I load my spoon with rice, then dip the rice in the broth and enter a kind of fugue state of shoveling fish and rice into my gob.
Tuesday, September 9
I wake up not hungry at all, but discover my boyfriend has bought me my favorite muffin from Silver Moon, the beloved bakery in our neighborhood that closed earlier this year to much furor due apparently to the desire of all uptown landlords to turn this neighborhood into a ghost town of empty storefronts and banks. Luckily, Silver Moon has just reopened a few blocks further south, which has robbed me of a raisin-scented walk to the subway but is better than nothing. I’ve been trying to stop eating sugary breakfasts that make me crash and then need a nap in the afternoon, but I can’t resist the Morning Glory muffin, which is a profoundly wet and dense carrot cake full of raisins and walnuts and still-crunchy strips of carrot with a caramelized top.
I also make a pot of tea from the best tea shop on the planet, London’s Postcard Teas, which we stockpile whenever we go to England to visit my boyfriend’s family. We go to Postcard so often that we’ve befriended the owner, Tim D’Offay, and now sometimes he gifts us new kinds of tea to taste or oolong he says is “too old” to sell but is still fresher than basically anything you’d get anywhere else. Tim is a true obsessive who has personally met most of the tea growers he carries, and he is often deep in the Chinese or Taiwanese countryside with tea masters. Usually, I drink his London Lapsang, or the green Nokcha, or the Gianfranco’s Earl Grey, but today I’m having Fiori e Sapori, the black tea Postcard made for Loewe. It’s a fittingly leather-scented Assam tea, flavored with bergamot, lemon verbena, rosebuds, and chamomile. It’s a special edition, and I’m sad it’s not a permanent tea, because it’s so unbelievably good and leaves gorgeous rehydrated roses floating in the pot.
Teddy, my little brother, who lives in my building, texts me asking if I want to go for a walk, and I jump at the opportunity, because even on a gorgeous sunny day, my apartment is pitch-dark due to some Mr. Burns–esque real-estate developer who decided to put a brick-wall high-rise directly next to my window. I’m so happy my brother moved into my building, not just because he buys toilet paper and seltzer for me at Costco, but also because we both work from home and can just hang out randomly throughout the day. He wants to stop at Cool Fresh Juice Bar, the tiny perfect kiosk on Broadway, so to add some nutrients to my diet, I get the Essential Green, which is kale, spinach, celery, cucumber, and ginger. It tastes like delicious, delicious dirt. Teddy gets what he calls “the one for kids” that is carrot and apple and orange.
I emerge from my writing time warp again at 3 and decide to get a bánh mì from Saiguette, a tiny takeout-only place, and eat in the park to photosynthesize a bit. I get my usual, the “juicy lemongrass chicken thigh” bánh mì and the homemade sparkling lemonade soda. I’ve been obsessed with Vietnamese lemonade soda ever since I had one for the first time as a child at Kelley and Ping in Soho, which became my favorite restaurant entirely due to the soda; I don’t remember what else they had there. I sit on a rock in Central Park and eat my sandwich — so sweet from the pickled carrots and radishes, but deeply savory from the sambal chicken; it’s almost like the chocolate-covered pretzel of sandwiches. It’s one of those foods I feel almost sad while eating because I know it’s going to be over soon.
The air has that autumnal crispness and I see so many people engaging in fall activities (old man cycling with a scarf on, teenage boys running in a pack, bird-watchers collectively pointing at an owl) that it feels like I’m inside of a Sempé cartoon. I then go to the library and drink a Hal’s Seltzer, which I hate due to the enormous bubble size. I fall fast asleep in an armchair reading a short story by Simone de Beauvoir about a woman who, fittingly, writes a diary that makes herself seem more urbane and literary than she really is.
When I wake up, I go to the German restaurant and bar Heidelberg on Second Avenue to meet my friend, a carpenter actually named Bolt. We get a table outside and share a hot pretzel with mustard. Bolt says it’s the best pretzel he’s ever had. Perhaps I am inured to its greatness because I get it all the time and consider it all that a pretzel must be, but I do admit it hits the spot. Bolt gets an enormous pilsner that is shockingly only the medium size, the large being the size of a toddler. I order a radler, which is like a German shandy and translates literally to “bicyclist,” so named because you don’t get too drunk to cycle home. As such, I Citi Bike back to my apartment.
Wednesday, September 10
For once, I wake up on time to go to yoga. I skip breakfast, because balancing on your head with eggs in your stomach is something I’ve done once and would never like to do again.
After class, I run into my friend Arabella on the street and we chitchat about the new store she’s opening, and then moments later, I run into my best friend, Natasha. Uptown is having a renaissance, folks, due to the cheap apartments. After I drop Natasha off at her appointment near Lincoln Center, it starts to rain torrentially, so I go into a bodega to hide and order a coffee with milk. I have a theory that there are two kinds of coffee: 1.0, which is weaker stuff like bodega coffee, and 2.0, like the jet fuel you get at a third-wave coffee shop. I can stomach coffee 1.0, but I find it’s getting increasingly hard to find, and even places that should have coffee 1.0, like a crappy bagel place, have switched to 2.0. I am grateful for this coffee 1.0.
I then walk up to Zabar’s to buy some salt-and-vinegar chips and a kombucha. There are few places in New York where I feel more like I live in a shtetl than Zabar’s, not least because of the heimish comestibles, but also because the Zabars are my lifelong family friends, which, to people on the Upper West Side, is like mentioning you summer at Balmoral with the queen. Unfortunately, this does not mean I get to skip the fish line, and all I get for this in store is the honor of being lightly bullied by Aaron Zabar, who is usually stationed at the front. Today, however, he tells me I should put a couple of copies of my book in the window, which is thrilling. The pineapple kombucha is quite thrilling as well.
On the walk home, I also stop in the bizarre store that is Nuts Factory — why is there an inflatable wavy-arm man outside? — and get myself a bagful of Dubai Chocolate Almonds out of sheer curiosity. I’ve never had Dubai Chocolate, so I have no frame of reference for what the deal is with these things. This texture is sinister … What are these crunchy flakes? … I kind of hate it, but I eat the whole bag.
Back home, I realize I need to get some roughage in, so I fry the Spigarello greens and two eggs, and eat it with the cherry tomatoes and an avocado. The Spigarello tastes like regular kale but is unbelievably fibrous; chewing this stuff makes me feel like a cow chewing cud. I probably undercooked it.
After some writing, I go downtown to my friend Emily’s Fashion Week event. When I get there, Emily says she’s having a “writing emergency,” which is one of the only emergencies I feel equipped to respond to. I sit in the corner editing the text for her show while the real fashion people look at the beautiful clothes. She gives me a mini Japanese red-bean cake and a Pellegrino. I eat the cake while pining for her cashmere jacket.
I walk down Fifth Avenue and pick up my boyfriend from a lecture near Washington Square Park. We’re both wearing suits, so we decide to make an evening of it. We first stop at the Belgian bar Vol de Nuit because he loves the “thick” Belgian beers and I like the dry cider they have on tap. Literally every conversation we overhear is about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I won’t reproduce them here because my boyfriend needs a U.S. visa.
My friend, the cookbook author/evil genius Ella Quittner, texts me that she’s made me cookies as a publication present. You write a book and then suddenly everyone is nice to you. We pick them up from her apartment and walk across the West Village to Tartine, which, because it’s BYOB and pretty affordable, was the first restaurant I ever went to to feel fancy and adult. Plus, that corner of the West Village really gives that “my life a movie” feel, as evinced by And Just Like That … using it as the backdrop for Carrie and Aidan’s breakup. We share exceptionally garlicky escargot, and I get an avocado tuna tartare that’s a bit like if guacamole had pieces of raw tuna mixed in — delicious.
At home we eat Ella’s cookies. She’s made the “chewy malted chocolate shortbread” and then these kind of sinister raw-cookie-dough bars. The shortbread is unique … deliciously salty and buttery and tastes like dulce de leche, but the raw-cookie-dough bars are the real hit. I literally catch myself going “nom, nom, nom” involuntarily as I eat them. Humiliating. Having your friends make you cookies this good is the best reason I’ve found, so far, to write a second book.
Thursday, September 11
I wake up, too late for yoga as usual, and decide to walk to the farmers’ market by Columbia. As I leave, I run into my brother in the elevator and derail his simple mission to buy milk and make him come with me. I remember I’m going to California tomorrow, so I just get a pre-bottled Vitamin Smoothie from Lani’s Farm. Kale, cucumber, celery, ginger, apple, shishito peppers, and lemon in kind of a slushy consistency.
I then see Lani’s has young ginger, which is an ingredient I’ve never been able to find for this soup I’m addicted to, Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Chicken Ginger soup with lots of herbs and pickled chilies and garlic. I still have the pickled chilies and garlic from the last time I made the soup, so I just get some chicken and herbs at H-Mart near my house to make it for lunch. I’m feeling anxious about my book event at Barnes & Nobles later; I did my official book launch at McNally Jackson downtown and it was lovely, but it was mostly attended by literary types. There’s something about the Upper West Side Barnes & Nobles, two blocks from where I grew up and where my school did our fourth-grade poetry readings, that’s making me feel like I’m preparing for my bat mitzvah. That, and my mom has decided to do a “cake and wine” reception afterward in the building I grew up in, which has been called “the vertical shtetl.” The soup soothes me; the broth is so bright and fresh, and the young ginger is like light, less peppery ginger that you can eat whole. I sluice the spicy, garlicky pickling vinegar liberally into the broth. My God, it’s good.
In the evening, I Citi Bike the 20 blocks down rather than walking because it’s hotter than I thought it would be. I dock the bike and change into heels and my suit in the bathroom of French Roast, a bathroom in which I once made out with my crush when I was 17; I also had my first hot chocolate here as a kid. Suddenly, everything seems extremely wistful. Entering the Barnes & Noble, seeing my book completely occupying the front entrance, then seeing … a room packed with no less than 200 people, ranging from my preschool teachers, to my yoga friends, to my neighbors, to my cousins, to … people who actually came because they liked the book. This isn’t my bat mitzvah; it feels like some Scrooge-style pre-death funeral.
At my parents’ building, in their friend Cindy’s apartment, everyone eats cheese and meats and grapes. My mom presents the enormous cake she got — a “face cake” of my book cover, blurbs and all, surrounded by chocolate icing. My grandma takes many photos of this with her iPad. The cake is chocolate with a layer of pudding in the center. I’ve honestly never had cake this good, and I think the reason is that I always wish cake was just pudding. It turns out she got it at Wegmans.
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