Red In Love, Foodily

I fell in love, last weekend.

He was a chief, but now a writer, and travels a lot. He writes about food, so to some extent, he is not doing anything that we call serious work.

We have so much in common, that I believe we are born to be soul mate, or bite buddies.

Good food leads to good sex, the common belief we share. And I like people, but especially man, who truly appreiciate the food they eat. And I can not date vegetarian, their food appreication range, thus sensuality potential, is too limited to me. I am judgemental and a snob.

The hottest sex and best food I have had together was at ESCA, when D and I were deeply in love, in longing, and in enjoying the raw fish melting on our tougne, he said: you taste so good.

Those moments of good food, burning love, longing, every piece of our flesh feeling the pleasure of being alive and in love and happy, fleetingly, happy.

To have a great food and wine that leads to no sex is like a play with no ending. After a pasta and wine pairing tasting dinner at Babbo, after the need to take a moment after taking the first bite of the desert of the night, like at a moment of organism, we all need a moments of silence to fully enjoy it, climbing to the top. I wanted sex badly, with a man that I love. I think it suck so much that I could not have D right then and there, why? I ask my friend, why we can't be seeing each other again, why I lost him totally, because. Love leaves no room for sex only friends. But I don't want to be sex only friends with him. I miss him. I wanted no other man, so I took a cigarette instead. I felt being punished and with deserve. The sounds of my heart shattering was almost too subtle for anyone to hear. I did.

So I digressed. Let me get back to my stream of thought here about my recent crush, this new guy and me, we shall always have great food and great sex, because of that belief, because we know the causal effect. And it will work everytime.

Eat, drink, man, woman, Confucious said thousand years ago, that life can be summed up in these four words.

What does he mean? Confucious lived, he went to jail and married his teacher's daughter. He knew his way.

I say it again- he means, good food leads to good sex, sinner’s recipe, or food and sex works the sames way for a human being, existential pleasures. Have you seen Like Chocolate, like water?

And yes, another common thing, for me and this new guy is our crazed love with Hot Pot.

He said in his book: Hot pot is like a bad girlfriend, you know it is bad for you but you keep on going back. Oh, he really knows me, and hot pot, Sichuan style, red, spicy, painfully alluring, deperately unhealthy, to die for.

If fine food and wine and Martini leads to hot sex, which is true for warm chocoloate cake, fish dinner at ESCA after a chapter of Kafka on the Shore, pasta and wine pairing tasting at Babbo, hot pot with strong liquor or icy beer, leads , always, to another hot pot.

I mean, since during the process of hot pot, it consumes you with its pain and ecastasy, you would have no room for further acitons. You are done, consumed, used up, except when you had to get up several times at night and take care of the aftermath. So no hot sex is recommeded afte hot pot, you never know what will happen during the manuvers of your used up body or over worked digesting system.

Hot pot and bad girls, yes, they give you after math. They give you smell of indulge, they give you the perpefual coma smile and slowness of mind, but they keep you hooked.

He loves Yakitari Totoo, that Japanese restaurant on 55th and 8th ave, the place D and I enjoyed so immensely as a place of our own, secret place, one block from me. The one I had chicken sashimi when the bird flu was high in Asia. I am brave when it comes to food, so is he, the guy I got to know last week.

This new guy and me, we are also both pretty good looking, enjoying food in countries that we have not been before and cooked by people we don't know until the food is served.

I don’t cook at all, that means we are going to be very compatible. I will admire him endlessly.

He is so witty and passionate, his writing makes me laugh and teary, and he had my heart when I read “The Dive”.

The dive reminds me of a Felini movie, the color, the sun, the tension, the despair and actions, restlessness.

"I have known love…At that moment, I don’t give a damn”. And he jumped. I know how that felt. We were both heart broken. I still am. We both have known love.

I felt like jumping for long, not in a bad way. Hop Pot and cheap beer anyone?

I love his feelings, his words, his honesty, and wit, I don't even need to know his food to love him.

I was holding a book he wrote in front of my chest on subway one day, from the train window, I saw myelf, a girl holding her precious to her heart.

That image reminds me of a red guard during cultural revolution, like this one above, innocent girl with zeal and untainted love, holding the little red book. Only mine is of a different man's image.

The image of myself makes me laugh.

He is 6 foot 4, I am 5 foot 2. So there will be lot of climbing issue involved in getting intimate business done here. A little work from both sides is required, nothing that we food lovers can not overcome after some good wine or genuine beers from the dive bar of Irish style.

The only thing remains is how do we meet, the predestined historical date.

And by now, I hope you know whom I am referring to here, the crush of Red, Antony Boudain and his ever enjoable Natsty Bits.

I am dating him every Monday evening on Travel channel, when I can get my Cable to work, and I keep the hope high that we may run into each other on the street corner of New York one of this days. I will take him to Flushing for the lates Chinese food stall or just mid town east for some real hot pot. Or on second thought, let's not have Hot Pot on our first date.

I wrote up this on a business trip at San Francisco, a surreal sunny city that seems so strange, so new, so promising, so far away, compared to where I am from, so rainy, cold, foggy, so New York, so painfully beautiful and so alluring, bad and dangerous, but it keeps you hooked. I am missing it, and all it had given me, then I also needed to escape.

New York is the city of love and perpetual longing, for me. This is also the city Antony Boudain always come back to after each and every of his trip, I am sure I fall in love with him for that very reason as well, his beloved restaurants are also mine-- although I could not claim that for MASA, too expensive for a working girl like me.

There are long list of places to go for good food here, and the play and the opera, which I had no time to enjoy because of work. I had been to about 14 of those restaurants on this list, some with D, those time when I was being my true self and truly happy.

I have known love and my love of this city. I have loved it for so long, and it me. I really don't give a damn what so ever anymore, leaving or staying, this love, is in me and there it shall stay.

PS, warning, Hot pot may not be right for you, but try at least once.

A good place for Sichuan Hot Pot is Wuliang Ye, on Lexington, between 39 and 40th street. Available from Oct to May.