24 Hours of Eating in NYC

Day 3: rings of bread and silver

The elephant in the room

If you’ve found your way here following today’s instagram reel, then you’ll already know that Paul and I got married. If you didn’t know: we got married today. But we’ll get to that shortly.

Wednesday night

After our Katz’ deli feast, we were stuffed, so shuffled back to the hotel to take a nap. We used the grubby old subway for once; we usually walk everywhere on Manhattan, but the pastrami meat sweats were kicking in and we just needed to be horizontal. We slept like puppies, tangled on the bed, dreaming of that salted, smoked brisket, and woke a little later to a boundless panorama of glittering skyscrapers through the window. Hungry for pizza, we darted downtown.

When we arrived in the West Village, where the shorter buildings, in comparison to the towers uptown, seem to have never hit puberty - you can actually see the night sky - we made our way to L’industrie on Christopher Street. What started in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as a simple pizzeria, is now a sought-after Manhattan joint. The owner, Massimo Laveglia, opened this second pizzeria in autumn 2023, and people still happily queue for ages to get a slice or two of the pizza pie. When they are eventually served, they eat slices off baking sheets lined with branded parchment. I’m usually skeptical of hype - not that I don’t believe the product will live up to it, but I fear for the day when it falls out of favour and is no longer flavour of the month. That intense explosion of interest followed by an inevitable (for most) fading, saddens me. But this was one of the greatest pizzas I’ve eaten. It’s everything you need a pizza to be, sometimes contradictorily so: it’s thick and pillowy, yet it’s impossibly thin; it’s chewy yet the base is perfectly crisp. Two slices were a generous portion, even for Paul and me, but I think we both could have inhaled another round each.

Afterwards, we wandered just a couple doors down to Janie’s Life Changing Baked Goods - so-called because the founder, Janie, struggled with addiction and homelessness, and it was baking and her commitment to honing the craft that saved her from the depths of hell. The bakes were special - yes because of the story, but even if they had been thrown together by a spoiled, preppy, trust-fund kid, it would have been impossible to deny their perfection. The apple pie crust cookie was a little dot of heaven - a pastry base, topped with a mound of cooked apples and a chewy, brown sugar crumble. Then we moved onto the bigger cookies: s’mores (which pulled apart with strings of marshmallow like molten mozzarella) and a florentine-cookie hybrid jam packed with toffee, orange, cranberries and oats (I think!). Both were perfect - more cookie-like than the hyped-up Levain bakery cookies going through an identity crisis (don’t get me wrong, I loved those, but I’m still not sure they were ‘cookies’).

We walked the mile or so back to our hotel, slumped on the bed, and snuggled as we have done for 16 years, nervous and excited for the day to come.

Thursday

Yesterday Jake Cohen told us about 'the best bagels in New York’. He told us that they are made so fresh it’s impossible to get one that isn’t warm. So back downtown, to Popup Bagels, we trotted. On the way, we stumbled across a florist on 5th Avenue, Ariston Flowers and Cafe, and decided, last-minute, to order button holes for our wedding. As soon as we walked in we clocked the ranunculi, waiting for us with their tightly packed, crepe-y petals - an origami omen. They’re a flower that Paul and I have loved since long before we met. He opted for white, and I, ever witchy and contrary, went for black.