WELCOME TO TYPE 1!
it's gonna be all about eating out, cooking, drinking and traveling as a fun hot type 1 diabetic with stupid diet restrictions and stupider blood sugar issues!
this first post is about friendship, patience (or a lack thereof), and tradition!
If you’re reading this, hi! and thanks! I’m not a professional writer, I’m a huge bitch with an opinion! I wanted to start this substack as a way to share about one of my favorite things, food! So many things in our lives revolve around food (duh, its a basic need), but it also is one of the reasons I love living in NYC so much, it’s how I bond with people, etc! And as someone who loves eating out and cooking while also having some major dietary restrictions (pescatarian, dairy free, diabetic, who can never be sure), I have found my relationship with food evolving and changing over the past few years.
A past roommate and best friend once described living with me as living with “a human Yelp”, and I seem to be someone that people look to for restaurant recommendations. It’s something I pride myself on, and I keep things meticulously cataloged on google maps. I thought this was the best medium to share the various places I am enjoying (both old and new) as well as some things I am cooking up at home. I am in no ways a professional chef or restaurant critic, but I do hope I can give an honest, fun point of view.
So let’s get into it!
On friendship!
Every year my best friends from college and I have an annual friendsgiving. People have left NYC, gotten married, had kids, etc. but I absolutely love this tradition because we all make the effort to come meet wherever and rent a house and cook and drink and laze around. I’m so lucky to be surrounded by a group of friends with great taste in wine, and excellent cooking skills (they are nice, smart, supportive, and amazing too, but this is a food blog and frankly not the point).
This year Friendsgiving fell on Halloween weekend, and we rented what can only be described as a Scooby Doo house in the North Fork of Long Island for the weekend!
The house was incredible and nothing brings us more joy than a huge kitchen that we can all cook in together. As many of us live in big cities, this is a luxury none of us can afford, and it makes the weekend all the more special as we all hang around the kitchen and pour each other wine and chat and cook. For the first night, my friend Jack offered to cook linguine with clams. We picked up fresh clams from the seafood market and he got to work!
Linguini with clams is a perfect group dinner dish. Simple to make, easy to please everyone, delicious in every way, and a whole meal by itself IMO. Also, nothing screams friendship like sitting over a hot stove together and picking 200 clams out of broth!
The next day we explored the town and ate at an old school seafood place on a pier, which is really the only kind of place I want to be eating at in Long Island’s North Fork! I want it to feel vaguely republican in its brutal tradition and burly nature, but with the welcoming vibe that is…not that!
We got fried seafood, a fab clam chowder, and my friends got an unexpectedly god tier lobster mac and cheese! But the real standout was my friend’s prescient idea to order a MUDLSIDE! I did not have much, because if I had a whole mudslide I could only imagine my glucose monitor would shoot out of my arm at the same time I soil my pants like an ejector seat out of the ceiling of the restaurant. However, I took two Lactaids, sipped up some mudslide and lemme tell you, this mudslide ain’t your typical TGIFriday’s fare! I stuck with a “mermaid margarita”, skinny and purple like if Barney were on Ozempic! It was fab, I had 2 of them, and we all got sufficiently day drunk! The moral of the story though is always take the opportunity to be FUN and get the MUDSLIDE if you can!
Speaking of drinks, we drank no less than 17 bottles of wine a night and I have no sage advice or reviews except to say that drinking any sort of wine in a lighthouse turret at sunset will be beyond great! 10/10!
Lastly was our Friendsgiving meal which I sadly took almost no pictures of, but will give a bit of a breakdown:
We opted for traditional Thanksgiving food with non-traditional proteins, so all of the usual suspects, but with a Molly Baz roast chicken and miso cod (because SEAFOOD!)
For sides, there was a fabulous fennel salad that somehow took longer to make than everything else, gravy, cranberry sauce, garlic mashed potatoes with olive oil from the garlic confit, maple miso mustard brussels sprouts, garlic and ginger green beans (with a tahini drizzle I made with some leftover garlic confit olive oil!), and a roasted root veggie salad (for health!).
On patience!
We all have those places…the ones we are so eager to try but somehow there is no Resy slots available or the timing just never works out. For me, one of those main places was Superiority Burger in the East Village! This place also sparks a deep nostalgia in me as it was one my best friend’s favorite places to go when we had just graduated college. I loved going and picking up a $10 SUPREME QUALITY veggie burger and burnt broccoli salad and walking over to Tompkins Sq. Park with my friend to inhale it while the sound of skateboard wheels rang nearby. Good food and hot skater boys? It was dinner AND a show!
When I heard they were moving into the old Odessa space, the anticipation instantly hit and I was insistent upon getting updates about the opening. I was sad about Odessa’s closing as it was my preferred East Village pierogi spot (real ones KNOW, its better than Veselka, sorry!) so it filled me with joy to hear the space would be taken over by a fellow (albeit recent) East Village beloved spot. Time passed, Superiority opened, and again, the timing never worked out, until recently! But my time to shine came so here we are:
The Service -
I went with my three best friends from college, who have all not been together the four of us in at least 5 years, so this was a special occasion! We got there at 5:30, sat down immediately into a very cramped booth. Service was attentive and everyone was nice, but it was the kind of place where you ask what’s best between two dishes and the server says “they’re both good!” which is CARDINAL SIN!
The Drinks -
I got one martini. It was mediocre. Not much more to say! My friends got mezcal negronis. They were fine!
The food -
We started with some of the sides to share – classics like the burnt broccoli salad and the beets with jalapeno cream cheese and fried pretzels as well as a new roasted white sweet potato with labne that was delectable! Veggies shine here, and these dishes were no exception. The burnt broccoli immediately brought me back! The beets were my favorite! The eggplant was fire! Finito!
We all had the same burger, the classic, which is now 17 dollars! 17 AMERICAN DOLLARS! Sadly it only grew in price, not size and I could easily inhale at least two of these. I found this price criminal and I think it altered my taste buds a bit. While the burger was still good, I did not find myself loving it the same way.
Lastly, we saved room for dessert. This is a very un-TYPE 1 behavior. Usually if I am going to be a bad girl (live fast + die young, sing it with me!) I am going to blwo my blood sugar levels on savory fare – pastas, pizza, potatoes – my 3 P’s and holy trinity of sin. However, this was a special occasion and if I am being honest, the dessert menu was both extensive and extremely appealing. We got two desserts, both of which were DELICIOUS! A chocolate peanut butter-esque pie and a date shake. I was hesitant about the shake (as a lactose intolerant person, they are never on my mind) but my friend was insistent and I chose the pie flavor, hence my surrender. The date shake ROCKED my world (and my blood sugar). If I want to leave this world, just give me a few of those and let me shit my pants in the grave because this was so unbelievably good!
On tradition!
I am not going to do a solo Thanksgiving post for a multitude of reasons – mainly that any other food blogger/publication/chef/Instagrammer you know has PUMPED out the Thanksgiving content! I don’t have anything to bring to that table this go around, mainly because my family and I reverted to our normal but cooky pre-covid tradition of spending Thanksgiving in Mystic, Ct. The Mystic of Mystic Pizza fame starring queen of rom-coms, Dame Julia “Most Beautiful Human Maybe Ever” Roberts.
My family and I have no relationship to Mystic, no family, history, NOTHING! I swear to god my dad just closed his eyes and threw a dart at a map and it landed there, so there we went. Everyone has their own traditions and that is what makes it such an important holiday to everyone. We have stayed in the same hotel and gone to the same restaurant every year for the past 6 years (minus COVID in which my parents came to the city for Thanskgiving dinner at Pastis which was FAB, 10/10). The restaurant in Mystic is nothing to cry home about, but it still feels special getting to go to the same place.
However, Mystic itself is a VERY cute town with food that is really better than it needs to be! My boyfriend and I got a night out without the family and headed to Oyster Club for happy hour oysters and wine. We got a dozen oysters, white wine, martinis, and sourdough with an artichoke tapenade. We also sat at the raw bar so got to watch our oysters get shucked and watch the kitchen churn out dish after amazing looking dish! Service and ambience was a 10/10, and I will definitely be coming back here next Thanksgiving time!
Then finally, we need to talk about Nana’s. This place was my last meal in Mystic and it made me so sad because I suddenly regretted not getting to eat here at least once a day! Nana’s is an all day cafe/bakery that specializes in sourdough – bread, pastries, pizza, etc. and my god, I wish they had a location in NYC. I went absolutely crazy here and honestly, I wish I bought more!
First up was breakfast, where we ordered delicious coffee, a hash brown breakfast sandwich and a ricotta toast with mushrooms!
Breakfast was so good, we took lunch to go on the road and got two slices of pizza and a chocolate chip cookie! Needless to say my blood sugar was sky high and GOD was it worth it. I’m already looking forward to my new Thanksgiving tradition of going to Nana’s every year.
Anyways, if you have stuck around to the end of this first post, THANK YOU! <3
The next post will be a nice holiday treat, so please subscribe and stay tuned here for recaps of some of my favorite places, my favorite recipes, all while being sexy and diabetic!
now determined that I MUST have both a mudslide and a date shake in the next week or I will light myself on fire