Tom Junod’s Grub Street Diet

When magazine writer Tom Junod was growing up, he looked forward to his father Lou’s famous spaghetti and clam sauce. “He was famous for it,” Junod says. “It was, ‘Oh my god, Dad’s gonna make his spaghetti and clam sauce. Have you ever tasted Dad’s spaghetti and clam sauce?’” It wasn’t until later, though, that he realized it was actually “made” by tossing two cans of Progresso clam sauce into spaghetti. When Junod was finally able to say, “Hey Dad, this is just canned clam sauce,” his father responded without missing a beat: “Better than homemade.” It’s that kind of gangster-movie-inspired charisma that made Junod want to write about him. “He had a way of dressing, had a way of talking, had a way of eating, had a way of everything that was his own,” Junod says. In his reported memoir, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, which came out earlier this week, he details his relationship to his late father, who was beloved but complicated, to say the least. While in the city on his press tour, his friends convinced him to meet at the type of steakhouse that Lou likely frequented back when 52nd Street was full of jazz clubs. He overindulged in steak and drinks, in a way that felt fitting for the process of understanding his father: “Utterly delicious, but sort of nauseating.”

Monday, March 2
Let’s start in the town where I grew up: Wantagh, Long Island. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten anything all day and it’s near noon. I’m with a reporter and we’re supposed to go to a diner and talk. But I tell him to pull over when we get to the corner of Wantagh and Jerusalem Avenues. A bagel place has been in the tiny shopping center since I’ve been alive. When I was in high school and college, I used to go there in the wee hours, when the owners were using paddles to push the bagels around a big pot. I was always stoned, and they were always open.

I order what I always have: poppy, butter, toasted. Poppy seeds are always just a decoration, except here. Here, they coat the bagel like coconut and turn the gushes of melted butter black.

We hit the diner anyway. There are two diners in Wantagh, two indeed on Sunrise Highway, on opposing corners. Such is the nature of hometown allegiance that I have only been to the Landmark, which I have never called the Landmark—only the “Wantagh Diner.” We go now to the other one instead, the Sunrise. I order the fresh-squeezed orange juice and the quinoa scramble. Some notes: first, the OJ is unaccountably luscious and luxurious. Second: when did quinoa come to Wantagh? There should be a plaque on Wantagh Ave, right next to the sign that calls Wantagh “the Gateway to Jones Beach.” The scramble is pretty good, though. It’s a basic Greek scramble with feta cheese and grape tomatoes, heavy on the quinoa the way the bagel place was heavy on the poppy seeds.

I have no plans to eat anything else today. But on my way back to the city my ride stops in Ridgewood, Queens, and I have to use the bathroom. It’s cold and dark and there’s nothing vaguely promising as a public possibility, so I begin looking for a private option. Right in front of me is the Ridgewood Taco Factory. What can a taco cost, five bucks? Sounds good, because I gotta go. I buy two, carnitas and al pastor, and for ten dollars, I get to use the bathroom. This is an especially good deal because the tacos are excellent, right down to the radishes.

Okay, now I’m done eating. I’m going to go back to the hotel and get some work done. But a friend from my Esquire days, Ryan D’Agostino, calls me. He’s at Gallagher’s with another member of the old team, the menschy John Kenney. “Gallagher’s?” I say. “Isn’t that a chain?  Like TGI Gallagher’s, or something?”

“Come on, man. It’s Gallagher’s, on 52nd Street. Your Dad probably went there.”

I go, and I have to admit, the great hanging slabs of beef gathering mold in the locker at the entrance are impressive. Ryan and John are at the bar. I order a Maker’s Mark on the rocks and the Shining-adjacent bartender in the vaguely surgical white jacket says, “That’s my second favorite drink to make. You know what’s my favorite?  Maker’s neat.”

Okay, so we’re in an old-school Manhattan steakhouse, and if I don’t know it from the repartee, I know it from John’s order. He opts for the sliced steak on toast points, as an appetizer for all three of us. There are probably a dozen slices on the platter, with a dish of tomato sauce on the side. They are uniformly medium rare, and look like a selection of tongues on display for a mouth that’s gone shopping.  They taste of fire and grease—they’re tallowy, without being charred. And they’re not just tender, they’re soft, like organ meat. The grease gets in the toast points and the toast points are your friend—the only thing preventing you from getting what my old man would have called “stinko.”

But I get stinko anyway.  It’s John Kenney’s fault.  He doesn’t push the drinks, but he orders another platter of the sliced steak and the sliced steak pushes the drinks. It’s such a bad idea, but my Dad really did probably go to Gallagher’s and his lurking ghost tells me that there’s nothing to do but finish. Then, we all order a nightcap—a Stinger, of all things, cognac and creme de menthe in 3-to-1 ratio.  Aren’t nightcaps supposed to settle the stomach? This one finishes me.

Tuesday, March 3
I wake up hungover for the first time in many years. Worse, the steak I ate is still terribly present, not so different from the way it was on the bar. It doesn’t go away, and I keep emitting awful silent beef burps.

I decide to fast, but then the fasting itself becomes a source of queasiness, especially on the taxi ride to the airport. The first thing I do after clearing TSA: go to the little everything shop on the way to the gate and buy a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. But there, I encounter my culinary enemy: artificial sweetener, in this case, sucralose. I can’t abide it, and that shit is everywhere, even in shocking-pink belly juice.  So now, I really have to break my fast and buy something called a “Hippie Shake” at the Protein Bar at LGA. Oatmeal, banana, and peanut butter, through a straw. It’s really not bad, and should advertise itself as a hangover cure. Then someone recognizes me: it’s Lucas Wittmann, the director of literary events at the 92nd Street Y, where I’m going to be talking with Taffy Akner later in the month. It’s nice being recognized, and nicer still to be recognized at the precise moment you know you’re not going to puke after all.

I don’t fast when I come home to my wife Janet and my dog Jacques in Marietta, GA.  But I do decide to eat how I usually do, which is as a near fruititarian. I am willing to bet that no one in the history of the Grub Street Diet eats quite as much fruit as I do. I eat probably a dozen pieces a day and distrust any diet that says you can’t. I believe it’s what we humans are supposed to eat, and so I ingest it with an almost religious conviction—as a taste of lost paradise. You go to a house without fruit and you get the same feeling you get in a house without books. You wonder: how do they live? 

As soon as I get home, I knock off a couple of navels and a couple of mandarins, drink a cup of lemon-ginger tea, then set about slicing up a watermelon that my wife Janet bought at Costco. I don’t think I’m trying to finish off the hangover once for all. But, come to think of it, it is impossible to eat a watermelon hungover, and impossible to have a hangover eating a watermelon. I’m cured.

Wednesday, March 4
Banana, to start. Navel. Mandarin. Then, a small bowl of Cabot whole milk yogurt with pink salt and a big splash of olive oil. Two discoveries here: first, Cabot whole milk yogurt is rich enough to make you forget that yogurt represents a supposed austerity. Second, I used to eat yogurt exclusively with fruit, which is to say as a sour excuse for a sweet payoff. But the Cabot was so good, I started messing around with it, and ended with yogurt salted and splashed as my nearly daily savory breakfast.

I have no idea what I’m going to eat next. But I have to do a podcast near the Georgia Tech campus in Midtown Atlanta, and feel the gravitational pull of Xi’an Gourmet House on 10th Street. I don’t eat out very much; I cook for my wife and myself and my daughter when she’s home from school. My general policy is only go out for something you can’t cook yourself. And I can’t cook real Sichuan—though I make a pretty good Ma Po Tofu—or Xi’an cuisine. The heat’s easy enough, especially now that you can get just about any ingredient on Amazon. But the other stuff? The sourness, the smokiness, the dark bones of even the slippery hand-pulled noodles? That doesn’t belong to me, so as soon as I’m done with the pod, I head by foot for a bowl of cumin lamb in spicy broth, along with a cucumber salad. I used to hate cucumbers, the cold slice of blandness that resists the embrace of the bleu cheese dressing in a bad house salad. But this cucumber is chopped up and drenched in hot oil. You can’t change the basic fact of cucumbers, which is that they come cold. But I applaud any chef that can make this most intransigent vegetable do his will.

For dinner, Janet and I eat some pork dumplings I brought home from Xi’an Gourmet and what’s left of the cumin lamb soup. Then, it’s a fruit fest.  A navel, a couple of mandarins. I bought a papaya at Trader’s Joe’s before I left for my trip and now that I’m home, it’s finally ripe. It’s too bad about papayas. They’re always in competition with mangoes, which never let you down. Papayas are spotty and expensive. And cutting them is like filleting a fish, with the seeds spilling out of the core like a sac of roe. A long time ago, when I was spending time with the great Wylie Dufresne at his experimental restaurant wd~50, he wanted to do something with papaya seeds on a dare. But papaya seeds will always be papaya seeds, a slimy gray abundance. This papaya is pretty good, that soft taste always slipping in and out of focus. I grant that it’s more complex than the mango, and knock off about half of it.

Thursday, March 5
First, a banana. Can I tell you that I have beef with bananas? I eat a lot of them, of course—who doesn’t? The banana, of all fruits, comes closest to food. The beef is that there is no such thing as a good banana, just as there is no such thing as a bad one. You can’t buy a good peach or a good plum in a supermarket. But you can find good peaches and good plums at farm stands and such, in defiance of the monoculture. No such luck with a banana. You can’t buy, like, a local banana, and the variation between them is not good or bad, only ripe or unripe. I lean green, in the matter of bananas. But I do wonder why they’re pretty much all the same, why they’ve always been pretty much the same. Do I blame the banana itself, or the United Fruit Company?

I make eggs in the morning. I’m addicted to fried eggs. Always have been. But since variation is the theme of the day, I make my eggs scrambled—they’re the unhappy families of breakfast, each scrambled in its own way. Of course, the question of whether you can cook rests on the question of whether you can scramble eggs. I can, I think. I beat the eggs with salt and pepper, hot pan, warm pan, don’t baby them too much, let them set and stay wet.

I generally cook for Janet before I go away. But this time, she’s going away for a weekend with friends, so I just grab what’s left of a chicken I roasted before my trip and turn it into chicken salad. Chopped chicken, chopped celery, salt, Duke’s mayonnaise, a ridiculous amount of black pepper. We open a bottle of wine with it, a cheap French Bordeaux from Trader Joe’s.

Watermelon again before bed, the rest of the papaya too.

Friday, March 6
I change up my coffee in the morning. Normally, I could drink Peet’s the rest of my life and be good with it. Peet’s is the fulfillment of what I think coffee should taste like. But the last time I was at the Dekalb Farmers Market outside Decatur, my nose led me to a coffee roaster and I came away with a pound and a half of Kenyan. I’m giving it a try this morning, with Janet away. It’s not Peet’s; it lacks a certain agile murkiness. But it’s oddly refreshing, oddly juicy. Sorta fresh-squeezed.

Now that the house is empty except for me and Jacques, it hits me. I’m writing this diary in advance of my book being published next week. I’m writing down what I eat.  But you can’t tell me that I’m the only writer who’s so nervous about publication day that I don’t want to eat, can’t eat, don’t want to add food to a belly already crowded with butterflies. And so it is today: I have a few pieces of fruit, two of them apples, and I dip my spoon into the Smucker’s peanut butter jar, one spoonful for me, one for Jacques.  And then it’s just a demitasse bowl of yogurt with olive oil and salt.

I have a few more dumplings for dinner, then some hand-pulled noodles I brought home from Xi’an Gourmet.  Before bed I have some frozen mango.

That’s about it for the day. That’s about all I can stomach.

Saturday, March 7
I fry some eggs in the morning. I ate them over easy all my life. Then, two years ago, I decided I liked them sunny-side up. I remember hearing that term as a kid—it was as optimistic as cartoons. But I was afraid of the glop, so I asked my mom or my dad, whoever might be cooking them, to flip them. I think I finally decided to eat them sunny-side up because I still remembered that cartoon image of the beautiful yellow yolks smiling. I cook them in butter until the edges get all crispy and brown, and I don’t have to worry about the glop.

I head into town to sign some books at A Cappella Books, in the neighborhood of Little Five Points.  When I’m done, I walk with the owner, Frank Reiss, to a little beer bar called the Porter.   Suddenly I’m ravenous, and kind of bummed we’re in a beer bar. The Porter has always been charming, a narrow joint that offers a long bar and stools and not much else. But I’m always skeptical about the food at beer bars—an unconsidered position, but still.

We order some beer, Edmund Oast Pilsner from South Carolina. Each glass comes from the tap with a tall shuddering head, which the barman calls “a sweet drinkable foam.” And so it is. Frank then orders the big bowl of salt and vinegar popcorn. I order the house-made sauerkraut and roast pork sandwich “by way of Philadelphia.” That means it has cheese, I guess. But then the food comes out, first the popcorn, then the red-cabbage sauerkraut, and then the sandwich, which turns out to be slathered in spicy-hot greens. A few years ago, I decided to eat less, which has made me less certain about my culinary judgements. Everything tastes good when you’re hungry. Could this food be as good as I think it is? It’s all salty, in a good way, salt that surprises like spice, and a kick of fermentation balanced in the sauerkraut with the softness of butter, lots of butter. It all goes great with beer.

I eat an orange when I get home, and then an apple, and then an orange, and then an apple.

Sunday, March 8
Janet’s coming home today, so instead of cooking in the kitchen, I clean. My brother Michael comes over and gets the last of the chicken salad; I eat the last of the roasted pork sandwich by way of Philadelphia, the greens spicier on the second day, quite a trick; Janet the last of the hand-pulled noodles.

Monday, March 9
I have to hit the dentist this morning, so no food until about noon, and when noon rolls around there’s no place to go but Waffle House. I have lived in the South for over 40 years now. I missed diners at first. But now, when I’m in the North, I miss the Waffle House. Diners do many things competently enough. Waffle Houses do one thing, to perfection—it is the hedgehog to the diner’s fox. I expounded on scrambled eggs here a couple of days ago. But there are very few things on any menu anywhere in the U.S. as good as Waffle House cheese eggs, and that’s because instead of trying to be cheesy, they just try to be the best scrambled eggs you’ve ever tasted. Today, because of my hunger, they very nearly succeed. I have them with raisin toast, grits and a side of tomatoes.

In the national press, the Waffle House is a 3am refuge where Kid Rock gets into fights with guys who look like Kid Rock. At the Waffle House near my home, the servers are unfailingly solicitous and kind, and today I talk at great length with the counterman about a brand of tire-shine. It’s called Black Satin, it comes in a big can, it costs five bucks, and it makes the rubber on all your cars gleam for a month. The next time I’m looking for a can of tire-shine, I’ll make it Black Satin.

I buy a bag of oranges and mandarins on the way home. Trader Joe’s, of course. Not long ago, I did the same thing and the checkout clerk looked at me funny. “Do you have a medical condition,” he asked, “or do you just really like oranges?” Today, the oranges are perfect, which is to say small and hard.  People who don’t really love fruit buy it big and soft, because that’s how the supermarkets sell it. A giant orange is a dried-out orange; a small one has a chance at sublimity. I eat five of them, cut in quarters, before I head out to dinner.  Do I have a medical condition or do I just really like oranges? It’s hard to say.