Angela Flournoy Does Not Take Good Mexican Food for Granted
Much of Angela Flournoy’s second novel, The Wilderness, recently longlisted for the National Book Award, was written at Little Dom’s, a tiny, beloved Italian restaurant in Los Angeles. For years, she and four other writer friends met up for regular work sessions, punctuating their writing spurts with meatballs and Italian tuna salad. “They were welcoming to us,” she says. “Maybe because, in a city full of screenwriters using Final Draft, it was charming to see a bunch of women working on regular old books, using regular old Microsoft Word. Or, in my case, often just a notebook.” She and her family have since moved back to New York, where she lived on and off in her 20s. She spent the past week decompressing from her recent book tour and frantically trying to catch up with friends before the holidays descend — over Halloween candy, homemade duck confit, and jollof at the Eric Adams–approved clubstaurant Lagos.
Wednesday, October 29
Every morning, I aspire to eat breakfast, and more often than not I don’t. I look up from whatever quick thing I thought I’d take care of after my 5-year-old is out the door and it’s invariably 10 a.m., at which point I’m like, Might as well start scheming on lunch. I do generally succeed in caffeinating because my daughter insists on helping me with my matcha latte. She does the whisking — marine collagen (I’m pescatarian) into the matcha powder. I pour in steamed oatmilk, and she is underwhelmed by whatever shape I claim to make with the foam (a “tree” today; she didn’t see the vision).
Around midmorning, I do a live call with Boston Public Radio for its Under the Radar book club, during which time I pray that the host, Callie Crossley, isn’t picking up any of my stomach rumblings. I like live interviews because they’re anti-perfectionist; you can’t retake anything, and when it’s done, it’s truly done.
A little after 11 a.m., I start scheming for lunch. Early lunch is my religion, and I am generally the queen of leftovers, which I make into an extravagant, if discordant, spread, but I just got back from a week of book events, so I am at the mercy of whatever my husband has going on in the fridge. I see tuna salad in there, and my husband confirms that he intends to make tuna sandwiches for lunch, that in fact he made a transcendent tuna sandwich for himself yesterday. But he’s more of a late-lunch person, so after dropping a few hungry hints, I accept that I’m on my own and eat the leftover shrimp wonton soup that I ordered from the Handpulled Noodle on my way from La Guardia the night before. There are about five wontons left, but there’s a lot of delicious broth — that thick, velvety kind that becomes a jelly when refrigerated — and I decide this will hold me over until I can get a transcendent tuna sandwich. I also eat something I’m calling a cookie ball: failed flourless oatmeal-walnut cookies that I made without a recipe and probably not enough egg, which is why they remained flat, but they tasted so delicious that I formed them into balls and let them live.
Of course, by the time my husband proposes the sandwich, close to 1 p.m., I’m no longer feeling like a sandwich, no matter how transcendent, so I demur, and around 4 p.m. I use some of his tuna to make a kale tuna-salad salad. This is a pretty frequent weekday lunch in my home, inspired by one of the best tuna-salad salads in the game, at Little Dom’s Los Feliz in Los Angeles. The Little Dom’s Italian tuna salad has no mayo but lots of herbs, as is the Italian way, and comes scooped on top of tender lettuces with a few hunks of avocado and tomato and a soft-boiled egg. Mine has all of the above, except on kale and with the addition of cucumber and a spoonful of Potbelly giardiniera, or “hot peppers,” as they call it. I buy a jar of this every time I go through La Guardia, and I put it on many things at lunchtime.
Afterward, I get dressed for the Words Without Borders dinner, where I’m set to be the “literary host” at a table. I cut back drastically on drinking over a year ago for health reasons, but I do still occasionally desire something to cut the social anxiety at events and to dampen my desire to indulge in an open bar. So I eat a teeny tiny square of Kiva THC chocolate, around 4 mg, on my way out the door.
The event is at the Edison Ballroom in Times Square. As soon as I step through the door, I have to do a video promoting the organization and recommending the last book in translation that I’ve read, which I said was Tokyo Ueno Station, by Yū Miri, and then immediately realized it was actually Beyond the Door of No Return, by David Diop. Blame the edible.
The vegetarian option for dinner is petite: a silver-dollar-size scoop of quinoa and a triangle of tofu the exact size of a Totino’s Pizza Roll. The meat eaters fare far better.
I skip dessert, thinking I have just enough time to make it to Sendo in Koreatown for its last omakase sitting. I like going there on off-hours by myself; I never encounter a line. I call and they say they can seat me if I get there within ten minutes, which might have worked had the R train been on my side, but when I get to the station the next train isn’t for six minutes so I come back aboveground and walk to Sugarfish instead. The midtown Sugarfish at 9 p.m. is full of business bros on dates and the women who tolerate them. I sit at the bar and order a Trust Me Lite. When I was in L.A., where Sugarfish has more locations, I’d order delivery from them often — my friends and I called them basic-bitch boxes, admiringly. On my way out, I spot a $100 bill just beyond the threshold of the restaurant and pocket it, thanking God for the bros I just slandered.
On my way uptown in a taxi, all the traffic lights on Fifth Avenue are green for a solid 30 blocks, which will never not be one of those New York City miracles to me.
Thursday, October 30
Another oatmilk matcha à la 5-year-old. Today was my daughter’s school’s costume party, so I wake her up early to transform her into Rumi from KPop Demon Hunters. I ordered her costume from a website I’d never heard of while I was on a flight to Chicago and paid extra for shipping. It arrived looking way less janky than I’d feared. I refused to shell out another 50 bucks for the necessary purple braided wig and instead bought a pack of purple Kanekalon braiding hair from a beauty supply. The “Rumi braid” tutorials I’d watched were useless, all intended for kids with straight hair versus curly, so I end up wrapping the hair around her own hair like some kind of purple plastic cocoon, tell her she looks beautiful, and hope it all holds together long enough for photos.
Self-conscious that the world may learn I’m bad with breakfast, I make myself a bowl of Greek yogurt with a tiny bit of apple butter from our school’s recent apple-picking excursion to Warwick Farms upstate, peanut butter, chia seeds, and the last of that trip’s apples. My husband and I both work at home unless one of us decides to venture out to the library or coffee shop, which means sometimes a meal will miraculously appear at my desk. Today, around ten, it’s a green smoothie, scrambled eggs, and avocado slices. I eat half of this, having actually eaten breakfast.
For the past several months, I have had mysterious lower-back pain, so I spend a good amount of time doing very specific exercises, and once or twice a week, depending on how long I’m in town, I go to physical therapy in Brooklyn Heights. I’m in Harlem, so it is not at all convenient to me, but I like my PT and don’t mind an excuse to read for an hour on the train. I take a full water bottle with me and sprinkle a packet of LMNT Watermelon Salt flavored electrolytes into it as I still feel slightly dehydrated from travel. I didn’t believe in electrolytes until I started doing hot yoga and discovered it’s the difference between crawling or walking home after class.
By 4 p.m., when my session ends, I am desperate for a snack, but I can’t think of an easy one, so I just try to get back uptown as quickly as possible (absolutely not in my control) and eat the last cookie ball upon arrival (still delicious).
Dinner is kale-sauce pasta based on a recipe by Tejal Rao that I started making once a week when our daughter was younger as it was the only way to ensure she ate green vegetables. It is still the only way. My husband roasts some asparagus to go with it, which my daughter avoids.
After her bedtime, there’s popcorn for the adults, made on the stove, drizzled with olive oil, and sprinkled with salt. In bed, I decide to donate the $100 I found outside Sugarfish to Another World, a Crown Heights mutual-aid collective that is stepping up its community food outreach given the suspension of SNAP benefits during the government shutdown.
Friday, October 31
It’s Halloween, which means I really need to make sure I have a solid food foundation to support all of the Reese’s peanut-butter cups I intend to steal from my daughter’s trick-or-treating haul. For breakfast, I eat a toasted and buttered English muffin that my child requested, then rejected, with one of the soft-boiled eggs I made for my tuna salad a few days ago, plus a few ripped-up pieces of basil and a lemon squeeze.
A few hours later, while I’m finishing a proofread of the U.K. version of my novel — why did America decide to make our quotation marks two lines? — a green smoothie arrives on my desk.
Around 2 p.m., my husband and I decide to go to lunch. This is sometimes the closest we get to a date in a week, depending on our various babysitters’ availability, and it’s also nice to leave the house for something other than an errand during the workday. We go to Ponty Bistro, and I get ginger juice, which is exceptionally spicy and delicious that day. Maybe it’s because I’ve been eating too much hotel food of late, but everything tastes more delicious. The seasoning on the Poisson Yassa is just right, the rice soft, and the pickled vegetables tangy.
On our favorite server’s recommendation, we stray from our typical Moules Frites Africana (a luxurious and fiery red sauce) and try the Moules Frites Provençal. I don’t think I’ve ever had olives alongside my mussels before, and I’m a fan. I generally try to limit my simple-carb intake, so when our server asks if we want bread with the last of our broth I say “no,” then “yes.”
Here is a New York opinion: If you live in a building with a stoop and do not hand out candy to trick-or-treaters, you are a monster. It’s your civic duty to hand out treats for everyone whose buildings make it logistically onerous to do so. Around 4 p.m., I start to see from my window the younger trick-or-treaters arrive on my block, and despite my daughter not being home yet, I put our candy in a bowl, put on my costume (my husband and I are Saja Boys — replete with long black trenches and black witch hats I’ve inverted to resemble Korean gats), grab our portable speaker, and head downstairs. Handing out candy is the rush of endorphins I didn’t even know I needed. I blast the KPop Demon Hunter soundtrack on our stoop, which makes me very cool in the eyes of the tweens. As soon as my kid gets home, I swipe a sour-apple Blow Pop from her, and as the night progresses, I have a few Reese’s.
When some classmates from school show up, I order a few pies from Fumo, the best pizza delivery in Harlem in my opinion (Sottocasa is best for in-person, but its dough is a little too wet for travel, and Dado’s is best for a slice). I eat several slices of mushroom pizza with arugula.
After all the classmates and their parents leave, after we’ve made two more runs to the store for trick-or-treat candy, after we’ve had a proper euphoric dance-party moment with a pack of older teens who requested we play “Your Idol” from the soundtrack, after we’ve survived a post-sugar-high bedtime, I eat the final boiled egg over the sink with a bit of tuna on top, a squirt of yellow mustard, and a sprinkle of paprika.
Saturday, November 1
Breakfast is the same old matcha and a glass of water mixed with Athletic Greens, a “superfood” vitamin powder I would never have purchased if my fanciest, busiest friend hadn’t suggested I take it to survive my book tour. It’s so expensive that I don’t generally drink it at home, but weekends are when I’m most likely to go without green vegetables, so I figured I should front-load the nutrition.
For lunch, we go to Cocina Consuelo, which has quickly become a “buzzy” uptown brunch spot. It’s run by a couple who have a very adorable toddler, and the food lives up to the hype. We get the Masa Pancake with strawberry compote (we’ve had it with peaches and blueberries before, it’s always good); the Tortilla con Huevo, which is just a very crispy corn tortilla with an over-medium egg atop a blistered sheath of hoja santa; Onion Tinga Quesadillas; and vegan fajitas. The fajitas are new to us and could use more heat, but the mushrooms have a nice crisp. I grew up eating Mexican food in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley, and one of the pleasures of living in New York on and off for the better part of two decades is witnessing the Mexican food scene in the city evolve and improve. (I remember when you had to go to Bushwick for tortillas.)
I’ve invited friends over for dinner, so around five I eat some leftover green pasta with the last of the leftover tuna salad on top to encourage my daughter to eat. It sort of works. I also drink about a half-cup of leftover green smoothie.
I am a pescatarian who eats duck. Ducks spend most of their lives in water! I will not be elaborating further, except to say that I’ve been pescatarian for 18 years but three years ago I decided on a whim that I deserved an occasional “duck holiday” and was encouraged by some food-loving friends to embark on said holiday. Since then, me and these friends have had Duck Bulgogi at Ariari downtown (top-five duck in the city) and duck at restaurants that no longer exist. These friends, Alex and Eddi, proposed to confit some duck legs at home and bring them uptown to us, so I make all the sides. Roasted butternut squash with cumin, paprika, and Trader Joe’s Shawarma Seasoning; puréed parsnips; and collard greens. The latter I braise with a bunch of onions and garlic and bay leaf and just a little bit of chicken broth. I also make a very quick dessert — poached apples and spiced Greek yogurt — when I realize we don’t have any dessert planned.
When Alex and Eddi arrive, I discover they’ve made a lemon tart, so we end up dessert rich. I also make gravy from their duck fat. My daughter, a pescatarian like myself, also loves the occasional duck holiday and comported herself well during dinner, eating an adult-size portion of duck leg before declaring she was ready for bed. The four adults stayed at the dinner table, drinking wine (them) and nibbling on THC chocolate (me), slowly demolishing the lemon tart (it beat my poached apples by a mile) until it was somehow 1:45 a.m. It’s been a long time since I’ve stayed up long enough to watch the hour on my phone repeat itself for daylight saving time.
Sunday, November 2
Another oat matcha, another skipped breakfast. We have to hustle downtown to meet some friends and their kid at a sing-along screening of KPop Demon Hunters at the Angelika in the East Village (I fully intended to get my money’s worth from that costume order). We stop at 125th and Fifth Avenue just long enough to see a bit of the marathon. The women leaders pass us. The fastest women in the world! I weep.
Due to staffing shortages, the concession stand at the movies is closed, so I run to a bodega on Second Avenue and get a variety of bagged popcorn flavors — original Skinny Pop for the kids, kettle corn and buttered “movie theater” for the adults — and a Hal’s Black-Cherry Seltzer for myself, which I hope will satisfy my lifelong need to indulge in a Cherry Coke, or even a Wild Cherry Pepsi, while eating popcorn at a movie.
At some point in my life, I dropped a pin on Báhn Anh Em, but as we walk toward it, I see that the line appears to be at least an hour wait. Without kids, I have very low interest in standing in long lines for a table at a restaurant, but being with kids drops my interest down to zero. They will simply revolt because they are smart and don’t care about hype. So we keep walking downtown to Rosie’s, a Mexican restaurant I used to frequent in my early 30s for its happy hour. I had low expectations (sometimes you really do it for the kids), but the starters surprise me: The Calabacita Rostizada put my prior night’s roasted squash to shame, the Fluke Aguachile Rojo has a proper kick, and the Tamal de Camaron makes me homesick. I don’t think I’ve ever had a seafood tamal I didn’t make at home, and this one so closely resembles the stewed-beef tamales I remember fondly from the holiday seasons of my childhood. I’m so pleasantly surprised that I indulge in what used to be my drink of choice: a spicy mezcal margarita. For mains, we mostly order tacos, plus a veggie enchilada. All of which is just okay!
After Rosie’s, I remember I have a book-club Zoom scheduled, so I dip into the Public Hotel while the rest of my group avail themselves of the playground across the way. I order a matcha and sit at a corner table with my headphones on. I’m not the only person in the Public’s lobby taking a work call at 3 p.m. on a Sunday, which makes me sad.
The thing about traveling a lot during one of New York’s greatest seasons is that I feel such a pressure when I’m back in town to catch up with people before the inevitable holiday scatter or before the seasonally depressed among us begin to shut themselves in. It was in this mind-set of pending social scarcity that I booked a dinner reservation at Lagos Times Square and cajoled some dear friends to join me.
Lagos is a resto-club, or a clubstaurant, depending on how you like your portmanteaus, and I am, historically, a big fan of “the club.” I lived in New York, Atlanta, and D.C. in the 2010s, the heyday of the millennial club and lounge, and always want to dip my toe back into that scene. Lagos had famously been paid a visit by Eric Adams, yes, but just because he was outside when he should have been inside, actually doing his mayoral duty, doesn’t mean the man had bad taste.
Lagos does not disappoint, with Amapiano and Afrobeat blasting, hookah available tableside, and enough women in bodycon dresses and heels for me to feel like I’d gone somewhere special. The food — described on the website as a “tantalizing West-African Fusion Experience” — is not unlike stuff you’d find at many African restaurants uptown, which is to say it was really good. Jollof with fried fish, Red Stew with fish, whole roasted branzino with plantain, and, the surprise star, “Lagos Pasta” with grilled salmon, which my friend Vinson accurately pegged as a classic Rasta pasta. The food, the music, the clientele, and the purple and Black décor reminded me of somewhere. “This is the people’s Tatiana!” I shouted. My friends agree, and we don’t think of this as a slight to this restaurant’s fancier cousin uptown. Just then a photographer comes up, asking whether we want our photo taken. Of course we do, and of course I pay to get the framed print.
We head home feeling that giddy tired that you feel post-club, despite it only being 11 p.m. I eat a tiny sliver of lemon tart before bed.