lasted for several days and nights, which I relied upon repeatedly—that three-day ticket keeping me sheltered and moving, because it killed two birds with one stone: the cost of travel and the cost of shelter—and so I would find my seat and remain in it, not even peeing or smoking or stepping out onto the platform for a leg stretch for the entire journey from Paris to Athens, from Mahabalipurum to Varanasi, from Bangkok to Chang Mai, from Istanbul to Ankara. And on those journeys, those crossings, I came to know extraordinary and particular hunger.
As my initial twelve hundred dollars in traveler’s checks dwindled down uncomfortably, I stared out the window of that bus or train in three-day increments in a glassy, light-headed state wondering about those women in the fields in the bright headscarves, the acres and acres of lopsided sunflowers all draping over in the same direction as the sun shines, the small stone huts out in the fields, the gray-green dry trees with silvery leaves. Flattened out by the heavy fear of how I would make it with just a few hundred remaining dollars, I did what I always do when I am afraid and went quite still, with a total slackening of will or need, and I thought all of my thoughts, sifted through all of my old nostalgias, while couples fell asleep on each other’s shoulders, bus drivers honked friendly hellos at each other through those panoramic windshields of their buses, little brush fires burned at night on the sides of the road, and solitary figures rode bikes shakily on the shoulder of the highway.
I starved. And I starved so many times on this repeated three-day bus ride or train journey from somewhere to somewhere else that I came to know every contour of my hunger in precise detail. When I came to be actually holding the keys to my new restaurant, wondering what credentials I possibly possessed for owning and operating such a place, I counted knowing hunger and appetite as one of them. It became such a recurring experience during this period when I was twenty—to be starving and afraid of running out of money—as I wandered from Brussels to Burma and everywhere in between for months on end, that I later came to see it as a part of my training as a cook. I came to see hunger as being as important a part of a stage as knife skills. Because so much starving on that trip led to such an enormous amount of time fantasizing about food, each craving became fanatically particular. Hunger was not general, ever, for just something, anything, to eat. My hunger grew so specific I could name every corner and fold of it. Salty, warm, brothy, starchy, fatty, sweet, clean and crunchy, crisp and watery, and so on.
This kind of travel, so distinctly prior to ATMs, debit cards, cash advance credit cards, cell phones, Facebook, and international SIM cards is probably not even possible now. And it isn’t right to romanticize it; you, with a feathery mind and a too light body, sitting on your heavy pack without a penny of local currency, down to your last two hundred sixty dollars in traveler’s checks, with not one person on earth able to locate you on a map in any more than the most general terms, and the local American Express office closed until Tuesday because of some local holiday or labor strike.
To be picked up and fed, often by strangers, when you are in that state of fear and hunger, became the single most important and convincing food experience I came back to over and over, that sunny afternoon humming around my apartment, wondering how I might translate such an experience into the restaurant I was now sure I was about to open down the block. I so completely understood hospitality and care from a bedraggled recipient’s point of view, that even before I came to understand how garbage removal is billed on square yardage of waste and that a commercial storefront should have a separate water meter from the building’s, I knew I had to somehow get that kind of hospitality into this minor little thirty-seater in the as-yet-ungentrified and still heavily graffitied East Village.
MELISSA HAD GIVEN ME the address and phone number of a man in Athens before I’d left home with my backpack. And at one of those unromantic points, alone in a new country, wasted on the youth hostel experience, down to