Nostalgia Soup

I can go anywhere I want, just not home.

Hi friends!

Happy first week of the new year to all who celebrate. But really, with the winter holiday and subsequent snow days, this feels like the first real work week.  I am slowly but surely getting back to it.

There is something inherently nostalgic about one year ending and another beginning, something that thrusts the past into sharp relief. The near-present is quickly turned into a Google Photos-generated highlight reel set to sentimental music. But indulge that impulse even slightly, I have discovered, and you’ll soon find yourself swimming in nostalgia soup. 

I felt this acutely last weekend when my husband, Bert, took the girls out and sent me to get the pedicure he’d given me for Christmas. There is a ramen place I like across the street so I popped in afterward and took a seat at the bar in the back and ordered the classic shio. (Or as my youngest daughter, June, likes to call it, “bacon soup.”) 

As I felt the steam on my face and prepared to indulge, I was transported, as only olfactory memory can do, to the little dive on West 3rd Street where my best friend Kate and I would meet for ramen on the coldest New York days. It was a tiny place, tucked behind a stately brick facade. It had distinct soup nazi vibes, as in, there was a certain level of reverence for the chef required. You did not, for example, ask them to hold the egg or the seaweed or anything for that matter. You ordered it as-is and consumed every last drop. Or else. Kate and I always giggled like we were about to get in trouble (“I dare you to ask for a fork…”), and I am surprised, as small and quiet as it was, that it’s one place we were never asked to leave. 

But sitting alone over shio in Nashville, it hit me. The old ramen place is gone, Kate is gone, and just the idea of tucking into one of those tiny tables across from her, eyes bright, blonde bob peeking out from beneath a cashmere beanie, took my breath. What a sheer embarrassment of riches that was. Did I know that, then? I think I did. 

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The word Nostalgia is from the Greek nostos, which means “return home” or “homecoming,” and algos, which translates to “pain.” As Rilke wrote, “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.” Nostalgia, that one word, that one feeling, contains it all. The beauty of loving something so much it feels like home. The terror of losing it forever. 

So this must be what I felt at the ramen place and also when I opened my Christmas gift from my sister which just so happened to be a framed sketch of another dive Kate and I frequented, the stale beer smell of which I can still summon on cue. I am talking about The Corner Bistro, a hallowed burger joint that is so integral to my New York experience that a friend texted me the photo of his burger the other day and I identified it in less than three seconds. Tucked at the intersection of Jane Street and West 4th, I lived in close proximity for most of my time in New York and just steps away for six years. 

The Corner Bistro as rendered by the artist John Donahue, available at alltherestaurants.com

It’s where I took a friend from Charleston who had come to see how I was doing when I first moved to the city. Sitting in a booth near the bar with flies swirling, that day-after frat party stench heavy in the air, she concluded things were not great. But I loved it.

It’s where Bert and I met late night long before we started dating and where he told me that when he had children he would read every book along with them so he could talk to them about school. It’s where I once made the mistake of accepting a date with some Ivy League guy who showed up on my doorstep on St. Patrick’s Day looking like a deranged leprechaun. (Never trust a man with green plaid pants at the ready.)

It’s where I learned to relish eating alone, saddling up to the bar with my journal or sitting in the window watching the world float by. It’s where Kate and I often slid into a booth in the back for two bistro burgers and two McSorley’s Lights (so named for the tint of the beer and certainly not a reduced calorie situation), and where a group of friends gathered after Kate’s memorial, a plaster board covered with photos of her propped up in the window. Morbid or hilarious, we couldn’t say for sure. 

All of this came rushing to the surface as I opened my sister’s gift. The familiar sign revealed itself from beneath the wrapping paper and before I knew it, I burst into tears. An odd response to a thoughtful gift, to be sure. So I said in a playful tone, “See, I love Nashville! I don’t miss New York at all!” 

The first part is true, I do love Nashville. The second part, not so much. Of course I miss New York. 

But this particular new year, 2025, means that it has been five years since we left. Five years since the pandemic upended life as we knew it. Five years feels like a long time. Long enough to maybe not burst into tears at a framed sketch of my favorite burger joint. And yet.  

In the words of the patron saint of nostalgia herself, Taylor Swift, from a song my oldest daughter, Izzy, and I have been listening to on repeat, “I can go anywhere I want…just not home.” 

New York. Kate. New York with Kate in it. All certain homes I cannot go back to. 

When I knew that I wanted to write about nostalgia, I kept thinking about a line from the novel turned television series written by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is In Trouble. It’s brilliant and if you haven’t read and/or watched it, you should. There’s a scene featuring a character named Libby, a woman in her early forties who lived in New York when she was young but has since left for the suburbs. And not enthusiastically. Finding herself in the city alone, she emerges from the subway station on Waverly Place to the voice over, “Left to my own devices, I always return to the museum of my youth, trying to find the last place I’d seen myself.”

Oof. If there is a more nostalgic string of words than “the museum of my youth,” I haven’t heard it. 

And maybe those words hit particularly hard because, for me, New York is not just the museum of my youth, but also the place where I finally grew up. It’s where I fashioned a self on my own terms. It’s where I met Kate. It’s where Bert and I fell in love and got married, on an unseasonably warm September day, and where we had our daughters. It’s where I spent the blissful days of new motherhood in a fourth-floor walk up in the West Village, with creaky floors and milk drunk babies, the city bustling below. After Izzy was born, in the dead of winter, I wrapped her in a ridiculous number of layers and snapped her into a bjorn every single day. I walked the same streets that I had stumbled down in my twenties, both literally and metaphorically, with the childlike wonder of a new mother. Now, when I am there, I feel more like the Ghost of Christmas Past, glimpsing my old life from a distance.

Outside The Corner Bistro with my girls circa 2018

Joan Didion once wrote, “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”  

For me, that place will always be New York. I will always claim those moments, in my place, with my people, and do my best to render it all as brilliantly as it was lived.

Maybe, through stories, we can go home after all.

This is Never Happier and I’m glad you’re here. 

xx,

Liz

p.s. In the spirit of nostalgia, I leave you with a post I wrote about The Corner Bistro on the blog I had in the 2010’s…some of you (Hi, Mom!) may remember the Little Black Dress Girl. Anyway, her thoughts on How To Eat A Bistro Burger Like A Lady still apply:

1.  Always sit at the bar or in one of the seats in the window overlooking West 4th Street.  Both are lovely options.  Avoid the dingy booths by the kitchen or your facial will be ruined by all of that signature grease in the air.

2.  If it is wintertime, it is polite to hang your coat on the hooks provided.  It is never acceptable, however, to drink too much and hang your blouse there.

3.  If you go alone, be sure to bring a book or your journal along as to avoid unwelcome social contact with strangers.  Conversely, if you would like to get to know a stranger, leave your journal on the bar.  Exit slowly. (Or just ignore Rule #2.)

4.  A lady learns the bartenders’ names.  To ensure that they don’t forget you between visits, it is appropriate to wave or wink through the window as you walk by.  Best not to blow kisses.  They may get the wrong idea.

5.  Always order a Bistro Burger.  Medium.  No tweaks, no exceptions.  And please, never the chili, which must be served with the superfluous spoon.

6.  The secret to eating said burger delicately is this: Grasp with both hands and squeeze, tilting it slightly so that the animal juices fall onto the fine paper plate, and not your manicure.  Now, hold on for dear life and do not, under any circumstances, let go.  This is very important, so I will repeat it.  Do not put it down.  If you take this rule lightly, your plate will look as if a cow was just slaughtered right there and memorialized with a gratuitous pickle.  And, as a general rule that extends far beyond the confines of The Corner Bistro, a lady never eats a cow that was just slaughtered right in front of her.

7.  If you happen to bring a gentleman who starts a fight or causes any trouble, it is customary to gift the bartender a bag of his favorite cookies, which, I happen to know, are Pepperidge Farms Brussels. It is appropriate to do this within one week of the offending incident.

8.  Last, but certainly not least, the only acceptable beverage order is a McSorley’s light.  Never dark.  Remember, ladies, this choice is a reflection of your true nature.