This is a goodbye to this series — for now. Wild Cravings could come back one day. I’ll never stop craving after all. Some updates: I never heard back from my cousin about the beachside breakfast shack. I never reached out to this friend or that friend either. I found the watercress soup at least, but you already knew that.
Before I go, I wanted to leave you with some cravings.
I’m craving chicken salad. A — you guessed it — specific chicken salad. It’s from a regional grocery store that no longer exists in my hometown. You can still get this chicken salad at Publix and Kroger and the other big-chain grocery stores that took over. The chicken salad lived beyond the store itself. And for a good reason. It’s the best chicken salad I’ve ever had. I’ve tried to recreate it. The list of ingredients is right there on the back of its plastic tub. But it’s never that simple, is it? You can never really know how a person’s hands touch this or that as they’re adding, mixing, chopping, how the exact arch of a back over a kitchen counter may somehow be significant. Recipes are about more than just the ingredients and the steps. And I know this chicken salad isn’t made by a little old grandma somewhere, at least not anymore. But it was someone’s recipe once. And now it lives on and on and on. When I think of this chicken salad, I think of hot peppers. My mother has always had a green thumb, keeping multiple gardens around the house I grew up in and now tending to dozens of houseplants in their new place in the city. My father grows one thing. Peppers. Short, round ones that turn orange, long, thin green ones. Some mild, some that pack so much heat you can only use one in an entire stew. The long, skinny green ones were my father’s and my favorite. Once, we sat down for dinner, and he pulled a handful from his pocket, silently handing some to me. He did it like it was the most normal thing in the world to carry around chili peppers all day. I started calling them pocket peppers. That regional grocery store that no longer exists is still known for its rolls — soft and white and delicious. The chicken salad on one of those rolls? Heaven! Ecstasy! Simply the best! But the thing that takes this snack to the next level is my father’s pocket peppers. You don’t slice them and add them on top. You simply leave them whole on the plate, alternating between a bite of chicken salad roll and a bite of pepper. It tastes like eating something straight out of a secret garden — fresh and bitey.
***
I’m craving shrimp. Specifically, the shrimp in Norway. They’re little juicy guys full of flavor, meant to be eaten cold — either on their own with a squeeze of lemon and sprinkle of fresh dill or on a piece of white bread with mayonnaise (the Norwegian kind, which is thick and rich and yellowy). The last time I was in Norway, I went to a park with my sister and her best friends. Before, we tried to buy fresh shrimp brought in by the fishermen in Bergen. But we got to the market too late. All the fresh ones were gone. So we settled for frozen — still good but a little more work. We defrosted three kilos of shrimp, laying them out flat while we dressed for our picnic. We hauled the shrimp to the park with a loaf of bread, tubes of the good mayo, lemons, dill sprigs, strawberries, cookies, wine, plastic cups, and paper plates. We spread out a blanket, piled on, and got to work. It takes time to shell the shrimp. Making one open-faced sandwich easily takes over five minutes if you do it right. To do it right is to stack layers of shrimp so high on the piece of bread that it’s difficult to get your mouth around it. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a shrimp with a fat, orange bulge of roe to suck out, little bursts of salty sea. We sat there in the grass, shelling our shrimp, the sun beating down on our backs and our cupfuls of wine. It was early summer, a time of year over there when the sun did set but barely, dipping low late at night but never fully disappearing, leaving a little glow behind before coming back up. When we finished our sandwiches, one of my sister’s friends stripped down to her underwear and jumped off a rock into the cold fjord, so deep the water looked black. She tried to coax the rest of us in, but I was scared. I used to be scared of unknown waters. Now, I can’t pass a lake or bay or stretch of ocean without an immediate urge to swim in it. There was someone else there — at the fish market, at the picnic, in the water — but I’ve written her out. I like the story better this way. Does that make me a bad person? A manipulative writer? It’s better this way, I promise. In this version of the story, all that matters is the shrimp and the sun and the squeeze of lemon over everything we touched.
***
I’m craving the assorted vegetable and dough drop soup ($12.95) from Le Sia in the East Village. Its rich tomato broth. Its hearty greens. Its swirls of egg ribbons and little drops of freeform dumplings. One day in January 2019, I got bad news. I can’t remember what the bad news was. I only know I got bad news because I tweeted about getting bad news. I do remember it was a bad day and that I hadn’t eaten much. I’ve always been of the belief that soup can fix most things. So when I got off work at the end of the day, I needed soup. I couldn’t decide between two restaurants: Le Sia or Little Tong Noodle Shop. (The former has survived the pandemic, and the latter did not.) Why not both? I called in my orders. Dough drop soup from Le Sia. The grandma chicken mixian from Little Tong, a brothy mix of rice noodles, juicy chicken, black sesame garlic oil, gai lan, pickled daikon, and fermented chili, a perfect tea egg swimming on top. It is — was — the best chicken noodle soup in the world. I took the subway from the Financial District to the East Village. My fingers were freezing, my body felt hollow. I picked up both soups, but I didn’t know what to do next. It was a strange time in my life; I’d developed a sudden and inconsistent fear of being underground. I’d already taken the subway twice that day, but the journey from the East Village back to Crown Heights seemed daunting. It seemed impossible. I was certain I’d have a panic attack, and then not even soup could help. I spent too much money on a Lyft, and then there I was, sitting in the back of a car going over the Manhattan Bridge, blasting Sleater-Kinney in my ears, two soups in tow, their heat making their plastic to-go containers soft and pliable, warming my fingers, already working their magic.
Wild Cravings is a biweekly series by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya about food and memory.
I’m craving the cheeseburger deluxe from Golden Apple on Lincoln Ave. in Chicago.
I was living with a couple, two of my best friends, in their living room on a futon whose removable block arms I’d place on the floor at night so I could unfold what was, during the day, the couch on which we watched Netflix marathons and turn it into my bed.
I owe so much of my writing career to those two friends who let me crash with them for over half a year while I applied to jobs and wrote and wrote and wrote. They were like family to me. Even when I saved enough money and built out my freelance career, we still ended up living together, moving into an apartment in Ravenswood where I had my own room.
But in that living room in Lakeview, they let me figure out my shit. In the mornings, they left for their jobs, and I was alone. I drank at least two French presses of coffee and haunted their home in the same outfit I wore every day: wool socks, a mock neck undershirt, a flannel or sweater, fleece-lined leggings. In Chicago, even inside is cold. I wrote, and I applied to jobs, and I picked up as many freelance assignments as I could. In the afternoon, I ordered a cheeseburger deluxe from Golden Apple on Lincoln Ave. I got fries, sometimes with cheese. Not every day, of course. But those were my favorite days. The ones where I left my little writing cave, booted up, and walked to Golden Apple.
Sometimes, my friends and I ate there in person. Open 24 hours, its large sign stayed lit up all night long on the wide corner of Lincoln and Wellington. It’s a quintessential Midwestern diner. It’s got a display case for pies, obviously. The menu has a million options. It operates on diner time, which is to say your food comes out either freaky fast or real, real slow. We ended up there at 3 a.m. after the New Year’s party we hosted, and one of my friends fell asleep sitting up while waiting for his burger.
The best part of the day was when the friends I lived with came home from work. Before that, I’d make a list on my phone and walk to the grocery store across the street so I could get ingredients for our three-person dinner. In lieu of rent, I made them home-cooked vegetarian dinners whenever I could. It was nice. I was deeply unhappy. Mostly because I was lonely.
There were some constants during my alone time: the chill, the cheeseburgers, the stained French press. And her. The friend from college I talked to throughout it all. We weren’t friends in college, just acquaintances, in each other’s orbits but never really colliding. Until after graduation when we finally became friends. Despite distance—we lived in different cities—we were very suddenly very close. We texted every day, all day. We emailed sometimes, too, like our conversations were too big for texts. They were Texts. Tomes. Things to be studied and decoded. There were times I should have been writing but instead wrote a thousand words to her. Who hasn’t been there?
I was newly out as a lesbian but also, confusingly, fresh off of a dramatic breakup with a boy. All the time, I was lonely and confused, lonely and confused. My intense friendship with her helped and also didn’t.
When I told her she should watch a movie I’d just seen, she did the very next day. She asked if she could FaceTime me about it so we could discuss. The movie is about two best friends: a lesbian and a straight woman. They love each other very much, but they’re just friends, whatever that means. Maybe you know what movie I’m talking about, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s not very good. I watched it three times in the same weekend, and I told her she had to watch it. When she called to tell me what she thought, she said the characters should have ended up together. I agreed.
I had my morning routine. I listened to my friends ready for work in the kitchen from my couch-bed in the living room. I thought it would feel more awkward to be that up-close-and-personal with a couple, but it never was. I liked hearing their morning banter, the sounds of them trudging out the door and down the staircase of their walkup they’d so graciously opened up to me. I bent the bed back into a couch. I drank loads of coffee and pulled on many layers of clothes. But it started to feel like the day didn’t really start until I heard from her. I hinged so much on those exchanges. I felt pulled away somewhere else.
We were friends, just friends, always friends, really fucking good friends. She liked burgers and fries and Cokes like I did. And sure, who the fuck doesn’t like burgers and fries and Cokes, but I convinced myself it was further evidence of our deep, deep connection. We liked all the same things. Why hadn’t we figured this out sooner—when we’d lived in the same place? Would she come visit soon? I was certain we’d have a great time together, just us, just friends, at Golden Apple.
I had friends in Chicago, lots of them. I have happy memories with them. We had a lot of fun—a lot of it in the late-late hours of night. We like to reminisce about those nights now during the Zoom catchups I wish were more frequent. The best nights back then ended at a diner. Not always Golden Apple but someplace like it. Chicago is crawling with brightly lit, buzzing diners open all hours. Everyone has a favorite, and Golden Apple will always be mine. Even on those days when I traveled there and back alone, when I ate the burger and fries on the couch that bent into my bed, that cheeseburger deluxe was a comfort. It’s easy now to look back at that time and know I was depressed. At the time, I just thought I was lonely. I just thought I was cold. I just thought that here, in this time and this place, I was a ghost and my real self was somewhere else, in a different city.
I felt an ease with her, but I also felt a restlessness. Like I might burst any second. Listen, this isn’t a metaphor. I’m not saying our friendship was a cheeseburger deluxe!!!! That’s not the point. I just. When I think of that time and place, those seven months in a Lakeview walkup, I think of those cheeseburgers, and I think of that friendship. I guess the thing they do have in common is that they’re not really in my life anymore.
It’s not as dramatic as it sounds. By the time I moved to her city five years ago, we just weren’t talking much. I can’t remember if it was a fade out or a smash cut to be honest. And then she moved to a different city entirely. Right before, we met up for brunch. I got a burger. It wasn’t as good as the cheeseburger deluxe from Golden Apple, but of course it wasn’t.
Wild Cravings is a biweekly series by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya about food and memory.
I found it. For over two years, I’ve been searching for soup. A specific soup. A watercress soup I ate maybe a handful of times spread out over a handful of weeks in the spring of 2015. I’d just moved to New York to be with a woman who would break my heart. Those words sound too soft for what she did. It was more like grating my heart against a mandoline, slow, fine slices. But before that, there was this soup at this restaurant she managed in the West Village. A restaurant I’d eat at over a hundred times before the slicing. Dozens more times during the slicing even. In fact, the restaurant is a main character in our story, especially its ending.
Anyway, the soup! THE SOUP. The goddamn watercress soup. It wasn’t the best thing I ate there, and it wasn’t the worst. It was a lovely swirl of colors. It was different. It was good. It was good and then it was gone.
If I’d known the watercress soup would be leaving the menu, maybe I’d have ordered it more. That was the thing about that restaurant—The Restaurant, as I called it for years and sometimes still do—the menu was constantly changing. On that New American seasonal shit, you know? But if I remember correctly—and that’s a big if, because the biggest obstacle in this quest for the watercress soup is that I keep doubting my own memories—this time the dish’s disappearance was because of a change of hands in the kitchen. The head chef was replaced with someone new, and the menu was wiped clean and reconfigured. The watercress soup went away. Later, I went away, too. I left The Restaurant one day and never went back, and I couldn’t have known for sure it’d be my last time ever, but it did feel like a farewell. The Restaurant had become a haunted place for me, and I’m always the one jokingly yelling @ horror movie characters on screen to JUST LEAVE the haunted house. I needed to take my own advice.
There are so many dishes I miss, but most of them I remember in detail, could reconstruct them easily. The cocktails, too, like a bright red spicy beet margarita I drank a million of, staining my insides. I could definitely make that shit at home. But the watercress soup is my weird white whale, seared in my memory but also elusive. Do I even remember how it tastes? It sits in my gut, but I’ve forgotten some of its parts. To be completely honest with you, I can’t even say for sure whether it was served hot or chilled. I know—there’s a big difference. My memories are mucked up. Sliced maybe.
I remember the color, a summery green. I remember a crunch factor. Some sort of nut perhaps? I remember a touch of sweetness. I remember the special treat in its center, a small brick of humboldt fog, forever one of my favorite cheeses, and the first time I had it, it was in this soup. My love of this mold-ripened goat milk cheese with a strip of edible white ash down its middle isn’t enough to explain why the watercress soup has stuck with me. It’s probably a combination of reasons, a soup of them if you will, like maybe because of that specific transitional time in my life or because nothing bad had happened yet or because I was only just starting to get to know The Restaurant. The Restaurant and I were in our honeymoon phase. But I also keep coming back to this: It was good and then it was gone. It’s as simple as that. A quiet, insignificant, easy ending—no drama. The opposite of my ending with The Restaurant.
I started searching for the soup though, because I started to doubt its existence. This was long after I left The Restaurant one day and never went back. I googled “RESTAURANT NAME” + “watercress soup” to no avail. I googled “RESTAURANT NAME” + “humboldt fog” which inexplicably brings up porn? It’s hard to stop me when I get going like this, when I want to find something, and when I want to find something related to food in particular. So I took drastic measures. I pulled up The Restaurant’s menu—in constant flux, remember? So not particularly useful to figure out something from 2015. I ran it through the Wayback Machine, an internet archiving resource that can no doubt be used for more urgent matters. I could pull up old menus for the months around the approximate time the watercress soup would have been served, but that specific chunk of the Watercress Soup Era had no stored data.
I texted a friend: did you ever eat the watercress soup at The Restaurant? She hadn’t. On Instagram, I still follow a couple people who worked at The Restaurant, maybe even still do, but they feel like strangers now, and I’m desperate to find the soup but not to go back in time. This isn’t so much about reminiscing on the soup so much as proving to myself it existed in the first place. Do you know that feeling? Of knowing something is real but also having no proof?
You already know the ending, because I told you: I found it. I gave up for a year and then returned to my quest and did what maybe should have obvious. I went to the food archive itself, which is to say I went to Instagram. I checked The Restaurant’s tagged photos and scrolled back to the spring of 2015. There it was. In a post with 25 likes.
Only one person ever posted a photo of the watercress soup, and it’s a slightly out-of-focus, jarringly lit one. The soup looks pretty ugly, but I like ugly food pics, especially on Instagram. The caption includes the main ingredients: watercress, truffle, honey, edible flowers, toasted walnuts, and humboldt fog. That’s more than enough info for me to recreate the soup, but that was never really the point. I just wanted some shred of evidence that the soup existed outside of my memories.
A stranger’s social media post isn’t exactly something I can hold in my hands. It still feels distant and slippery. But it’s proof, isn’t it? That at one point there was a watercress soup at a restaurant on a corner of a neighborhood I wandered around so often. That it was something other people ate, too. It’s hard to know what was real from back then. What friendships, what relationships, what words, what feelings. The watercress soup though. That was real.
Wild Cravings is a biweekly series by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya about food and memory.
On Saturday mornings, we go to Leo’s. Sometimes Sundays, too. It’s the place where hangovers are cured, where we talk too loud and order too much. We get sodas — sorry, I mean pops — and ice water in thick red plastic cups. We feast after a night on undergrad chaos. There was the pregame at ours and then the party somewhere else and then the postgame another place. We trade stories as we inhale finger food and each other’s sticky morning (it’s well after noon) breath. We peel off our layers when we arrive, line the backs of our chairs with scarves, sweaters, puffy coats with their pockets stuffed with gloves or mittens. Midwest winters are a constant cycle of layers, of sheathing and unsheathing. I miss it sometimes. The tucking away into something warm and soft and the tingly rush of emerging from it.
The others have memories of their specific Leo’s Coney Islands in their respective corners of the state, but not me. They tell me tales of the 24-hours Leo’s, the one in Dearborn, the one in Birmingham, which I’ll eventually get to experience late at night after a music festival. I grew up with clam boats at Friendly’s. I grew up only experiencing the messy wonder of a meat-and-onion-slopped coney dog once a year during my family’s July trip to upstate Michigan where my mother and her siblings grew up on cold, quiet lakes. There, we always made at least one trip to Lud’s, where I always got the fish and chips but always made sure to snag some bites of someone else’s coney.
At Leo’s, I don’t order the staple namesake item either, but I never turn down an offer to take a bite of another’s coney dog. I’m drawn to something else on the menu, something so simple yet genius. The chicken fingers pita. Like a gyro… but… with! chicken! fingers! Rubbery Swiss and American cheese slices flank crispy chicken, lettuce, tomato, with tzatziki sauce topping it all off. I add an innovation of my own, taking my side of fries and smashing some of them into the pita. It’s the same way I like to modify a mcchicken.
The Leo’s group changes from visit to visit. It all depends who’s up in time, who’s ready to go, who’s the right amount of hungover (hungover enough to crave greasy, salty food but not so hungover as to not be able to handle fluorescent light). It all depends how many people with cars you can wrangle together. I’m always Leo’s-ready. And so is W., who’s one of those coveted few with a car to help shuttle. I ride shotgun with him and our crew of bleary-eyed, hungry friends.
We work at the college paper, me and W. We’ve become incredible close, and we like to share food. Sometimes when one of us gets too busy in the newsroom, we’ll get food for each other. We don’t keep track of who owes who money for snack runs. We’re perpetually lending each other the same fifty cents over and over for the coke machine downstairs. Like the coke machine, Leo’s feels like a ritual. W. and I don’t get to leave the bubble of the newsroom very often, and we leave the bubble of campus even less. A little over six miles away, Leo’s feels like a trek. It might as well be on the other side of the world.
I’m not out at this point in time, but W. is. Sometimes we joke about how much of a lesbian I am. He edits a gushy column I write about Claire Danes’ performances through the years and he writes GAY in capital letters at the top of it. I like when we joke about it. It doesn’t feel mean. It doesn’t feel like a knife, which is sometimes how that word lesbian feels. When he and I talk about it, it’s the closest I come to meaning it for real. It’s safe to joke about it, a way to touch something just a little bit and then pull away. These jokes between us, our journeys to Leo’s, it’s all ritual. It’s all complex but uncomplicated friendship.
On a night before a trip to Leo’s, we’re at a party. W. says he’s going to get another drink inside, and he leaves me in the yard with A., another person I’ve grown very close to at the paper. We don’t share food — mainly because she’s vegan. But we share so much. More than either of us know.
I have something to tell A. It’s a secret. No, it’s something I’ve been afraid to tell her. And I don’t know why. This should be easy. It’s coney island diner talk. It doesn’t need some big preamble. And yet, I delay. I trip over my words. I place my hand on her shoulder and squeeze, and it’s such a bizarre father-son gesture, but that’s kind of normal for us, our friendship constantly looking like other types of relationships. I finally just say it, the words coming out too fast and staccato. I tell her I’m hooking up with our friend. He’s one of her best guy friends. It doesn’t go over well. She keeps saying everything will change, and I keep asking her to be more specific, but she keeps just saying everything. I don’t understand, but I also feel the same way, like something seismic has occurred, something not unlike betrayal. This shouldn’t have been so hard. She has a boyfriend. I’m single. Just messing around with a guy from the paper. We’re all friends. We’re all very good friends.
A. and I are getting louder. We’re fighting, I realize. And then W. interrupts, and A. walks away, and W. asks me if we just broke up, and I laugh, but when I look at him, I realize it might not be one of his jokes. He might be asking if there’s something more here. It would be so easy to open up to him here. But I don’t know what to say. And later, at Leo’s, it’s like it never happened at all.
Now, I live over thirteen hundred miles from the nearest Leo’s Coney Island. Nothing tastes exactly the same as the chicken fingers pita at Leo’s, I’m sure. The chicken tenders sub at Publix comes close, another brilliant vehicle for breaded chicken. But it’s its own thing entirely. Other places do fried chicken gyros. It’s not like Leo’s has proprietary ownership of the stuff. But I’ve still yet to taste that exact taste ever since I left Michigan, my own nostalgia and associations indelibly flavoring my mouth memories.
As I’m writing this, I learn Lud’s closed years ago. As I’m writing this, I keep checking the Leo’s Coney Island official website, making sure I remember the chicken fingers pita correctly, making sure the location I frequented with friends in undergrad is still open (it is). As I’m writing this, I start making a plan to recreate the chicken fingers pita. It wouldn’t be hard.
But those exact tastes aren’t what I’m chasing at all. A recreation wouldn’t satisfy my hunger. Not even the real thing would. It’s much easier to think about a chicken fingers pita, to long for it, to reconstruct it in my mind than to ask the questions I’m really after. Like what really happened with W.? Why did our friendship unravel so suddenly? Was it even sudden? Is that just the way I remember it now? We didn’t have some big fight, but maybe that’s part of the problem. Maybe we should have talked more through shit. Maybe we should have given each other more space to shift. Or maybe we were always going to pull apart and I should stop chasing down alternative endings. I just miss the goddamn chicken fingers pita. Which is really just another way of saying I miss him.
As I’m writing this, Co-Star has the nerve to send me a notification that simply reads reach out to them. It would be logistically easier to reach out to W. than to get my hands on a Leo’s chicken fingers pita from all the way in Florida. Emotionally harder though, of course. I can’t order friendship reconnection off a menu.
A. and I did find our way back to each other, the time and place unexpected and unplanned. And for a burst of time, it was like we’d stepped into a time machine. I was in my chicken fingers pita era again. But nostalgia is tricky. Or, more accurately, it’s a trick. We were trying to remake the friendship we used to have, but it didn’t fit us anymore. So the friendship changed and then changed again, and that wasn’t bad. It was good. It was better than nothing at all. And all that was new to me, that willingness to shift the shape of a friendship, to sheath and unsheathe. It shouldn’t always feel like a chicken fingers pita. Unchanging. The same ingredients in the same order. We aren’t fixed individuals, and our friendships shouldn’t be fixed either.
It wasn’t the consistency of the Leo’s food that thrilled us; it was the wildness we brought through the door. The specific conversations about specific college shenanigans. The loud chats about our latest passions, heartbreaks, dramas, full of interruptions and questions and laughter between bites of fries. The stuff that’s harder to remember than the food, impossible to recreate.
Wild Cravings is a biweekly series by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya about food and memory.
If I had a time machine, I’d use it to go back to a breakfast: stacks of buttered pancakes taller than my fist, sausage and bacon, eggs, french fries, onion rings, mayo and ketchup mixed on paper plates for dipping. Everything’s greasy and cheap and perfect. It’s salty, too, and so is the air, sand and ocean mere steps away from where we feast. There’s so much food. The onion rings seem especially like an extravagance, not a breakfast food by any means, but my mother has encouraged us to order it all, everything, no rules. We’re all sun-drained and hungry.
I rarely have broad, achievable food cravings. I crave wildly. It’s never today I feel like pizza. It’s more like today I feel like that pizza I had in Trondheim, Norway called kebabpizza, topped with thin gyro meat, mushrooms, onions, whole deli peppers, lettuce, and garlicky white sauce. Even just writing that out, it’s hard to now think of anything else.
My memories of specific meals are soaked in nostalgia, seared in my brain. I don’t always get the peripheral details right, the where, the why, the who. I remember the taste. I remember whether the bacon was crispy or chewy (I controversially prefer the latter), how the rivulets of butter dripped down the pancakes stacks and pooled. When I think of events and experiences from my past, I think of the food. I always wish I could go back to specific meals, in specific times and places, with specific people.
These are my wild cravings. The ones that can never really be satisfied or, at least, not easily so.
The Chaotic Beachside Breakfast, as I’ve come to call it, is a wild craving. And, okay, it isn’t so chaotic. There’s nothing inherently anarchic about ordering onion rings for breakfast. The spread sounds like a pretty normal brunch order. But I was young, and brunch wasn’t a concept for me yet, and I was used to being told not to put too much on my plate. Having this monster breakfast in front of me while I could hear waves slap the beach felt like the most extravagant thing in the whole world. If I had a time machine, I’d go back.
The problem: I don’t know where or when I ate this breakfast.
When I first sit down to write this essay, I know this much: I was in California. I was on the beach. My mother and sister were there. And someone else. I can’t remember yet if it was my father, a picky eater who probably wouldn’t have eaten much other than the pancakes and would have preferred them to be studded with chocolate chips. Or maybe it was my cousin, who was then like a second sister. I’m pretty sure it was more of a snack shack than a restaurant. I recall a letterboard menu — maybe. Cokes with crushed ice. A boardwalk or a pier.
I narrow it down to Santa Monica or San Diego or Oceanside. Maybe Venice Beach. Yes, I know these are all very disparate places, but at the time of the memory, I was just a girl from Virginia, and the nuances of the California coast eluded me, so I’ve smashed places and my memories of them into a mess of a map.
Anytime I visited California as a kid, it was for the same thing: the National Alopecia Areata Foundation’s annual conference. It was our family’s summer trip every year, the one time when my sister could be surrounded by other kids without hair. We went to so many, they’ve started to blur. I know one was in San Francisco, but that’s too far north. I think one was in Los Angeles? One in San Diego? I take my investigation online, searching for a consolidated timeline of all of NAAF’s conferences and their locations, but it proves difficult.
I begin to fear I’ve made the breakfast up entirely. Or memory-mixed to the point of this being an impossible quest. Does it really matter where or when I had this breakfast? What am I looking for?
My hunger for answers becomes as urgent as my hunger for a perfect replication of the breakfast. I try a new strategy: I call my sister. She remembers the breakfast. She confirms it was in California. She’s hazy on the specifics, too. But she’s certain our cousin was there, not my father, which narrows it down a bit. Our cousin only came with us to NAAF one year, my mother taking the three of us on an extended road trip around Southern California in the week following the conference.
Just text her, my sister tells me over FaceTime from her car. She thinks my cousin will remember the parts I cannot.
I write and rewrite a text to my cousin while making red sauce for meatball subs I’ll eat later with my girlfriend, who I’ve jokingly told I’m doing detective work. The text I finally send: this is soooo random, but I have this memory of eating a massive breakfast at like a beachside shack place with pancakes and onion rings and other things lol. Do you remember if that was the you came with us to California?
She says yes right away. She remembers the breakfast, and she’s pretty sure we also had chocolate-covered frozen bananas after, though she isn’t sure if it was at the same place or another nearby. That rings a bell. Like me, she remembers the food, but unlike me, she remembers much more. She says the first place names that come to mind are Newport Beach and Balboa Island. She thinks she might have a postcard somewhere with more clues, and I remember how my mother bought postcards for each of us at every place we stopped and encouraged us to write journal entries about the trip on them. My cousin says she’ll look for the postcard. Now we’re co-detectives on the case.
My sister wants updates on the investigation, and I text her what we know. I should make a group chat so we can better pool our resources and memories, but I don’t.
I still don’t know exactly what it is I’m hoping to find. There’s a good chance the place we ate at doesn’t even exist anymore. Restaurants close all the time, especially beachside shacks, especially in the past year-and-a-half. I send her pictures of Ruby’s Diner on the Balboa Pier. It looks close but not quite right. I wonder if the place we went to would even have a website, if it still exists at all. There’s a good chance it was cash only, nondescript.
The case goes cold. Finding the exact place won’t make the memory any more or less real. Maybe not knowing is better, the chase better than the catch.
There’s a reason I couldn’t initially recall if my cousin was there. Even though as soon as my sister says it, there she is in the scenes replaying in my mind, sitting across from me with a pancake stack of her own.
My sister and I talk every day, but we don’t really talk to my cousin anymore. For reasons that don’t feel like our own so much as ones we’ve inherited. And if that sounds like an abstraction, I’m sorry I can’t provide something more satisfying. I don’t really want to say more, can’t fit it here. And I have a feeling every installment of this Wild Cravings series might leave you hungry.
It makes me sad we don’t really talk in the present, my text about a massive breakfast at a beachside shack the first in our iMessage thread, which means it has been at least a year since my last, probably much longer. I don’t even want to do the math for when the three of us were together in person last. That kind of detective work is too bleak. It makes me even sadder to think the distance between us is starting to affect the memories, warping the years when we were sister-close, erasing details that matter. I want to preserve those years exactly as they were. If I had a time machine, I’d go back. I’d eat a big breakfast by the beach with my sister and my cousin. And this time, I wouldn’t forget any of it.
Wild Cravings is a biweekly series by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya about food and memory.