Feast in New York City

A restaurant chef knows how to squeeze a personal gathering into the precious off-hours — and how to nourish family and friends.

'You arrive for your Saturday 8 o’clock reservation. It’s a good restaurant, on the best night.

You love the dress you picked and the way your ankle looks in the heel. You love the brief pageant of being escorted through the packed and thrumming dining room to your waiting table.

You love the captain in his white jacket, the wine cradled confidently in the somm’s arm as she crosses the crowded room to present and pour, the exhilarating maracas sound of the ice cubes in the cocktail shaker at the service end of the bar, the lavish gesture of the 14-inch clean charger plates in front of you, removed when you take your seat and used for nothing again the rest of the evening. You are thrilled by the language of the menu, the six pieces of polished silverware, the soundtrack. Even the coat-check girl in her crimson lipstick and razor-sharp bangs gets you juiced. You have organized the perfect condition of your appetite — neither desperate nor indifferent. This is how to celebrate.

It’s: your birthday with a boisterous group of friends. It’s: the second date with the guy you’re starting to think you might really like and who suggested the very same place you had been thinking of. It’s: the day you defend your dissertation, the last week before you move. It’s: you in your black turtleneck and heavy coat, in the packed elevator down the 24 floors to the lobby and through the revolving door and there, unmistakable, the first distant whiff of mud thaw, the faintest, thrilling promise of spring. Reason enough.

Home meals have their significant pleasures; your mom’s lopsided birthday cupcakes nestled in wax paper in a shoe box have immeasurable charm. But sometimes there is just nothing like patisserie, like a restaurant on a Saturday night at 8 o’clock.

I couldn’t agree more, but the glitch is that I work in a restaurant. That Saturday-night festivity at 8 o’clock in a good restaurant is a view chefs will only ever glimpse from the kitchen. Your evenings, your weekends, your birthdays, your holidays — we are working.

But a cook’s treats are plenty, and we are hardly to be pitied. My children have never sat down to a proper Thanksgiving dinner in my household, but we have an annual tradition of restaurant leftovers — capon, mash, gravy and pie — at the kitchen counter, with real silverware and long tapered candles, the day after. I find nothing dearer. . .

The Recipes'>>>

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/22/magazine/gabrielle-hamilton-feast-in-new-york-city.html?