The Last Honest Meal

The most honest meal I ever ate was a bowl of plain pasta at one in the morning in a kitchen that was not mine, with the lights off because I did not want to fully admit I was awake. There was no garlic, no oil worth naming, no second person to perform for. It was the meal you eat when the negotiating is over and you have stopped pretending you wanted the salad.

Restaurants sell us the opposite: the meal as argument, every plate making a case for the kind of person who would order it. I love that argument. I also know it is an argument. Honesty lives in the kitchen after midnight, when the only critic is the refrigerator light and it has already seen everything.

I have started keeping track of these meals — not the good ones, the true ones. They are almost never the same, and that, I think, is the point. You cannot plan an honest meal. You can only be caught having one.