Tuesday12:30 PM
■ Whitefish Croquettes: smoked whitefish, potato, tar tar sauce
■ Pickled Herring Trio: canapes of pickled herring on pumpernickel
■ Lower Sunny Side: eggs, sunnyside up; Gaspe nova smoked salmon, potato latkes
■ Challah bread pudding: dried apricots, caramel sauce; Halvah ice cream: halvah, sesame, salted caramel
■ Cream soda: vanilla bean–infused demerara sugar; Concord grape soda: jasmine, timut pepper, lemon
MAKING my way up Delancey Street, a few blocks from the sublet apartment where I laid my head during my first month in New York City—fresh out of an MFA program, little money, no prospects—I’m having difficulty matching the glass-encased condominium complex and the fancy Regal multiplex with my memory of the boarded-up storefronts and dirty brick facades of the Lower East Side in the late 1990s. But I don’t have a lot of time for nostalgia because I’m on my way to Russ & Daughters Cafe to meet Emily Forland, and she gave me explicit instructions to not be late. My punctuality has long been a point of pride, but I understand her urgency; the restaurant, which opened in 2014, on the hundredth anniversary of the original Russ & Daughters appetizing store, located two blocks away, on Houston Street, doesn’t (Schocken, 2013), and whose daughter and nephew opened the restaurant to which I am headed posthaste.
