20 years ago today I moved to New York City, which (to paraphrase Joan) was a big deal for a boy from Idaho. I flew into LGA with a suitcase and a chest with wheels, the latter an insistence of my mom’s because she argued that it could double as a coffee table. No GPS, so it took a while to get to the apartment @ftmckinley had found for us in Greenpiont. Upon arrival Dave took me straight to Pete’s Candy Store, and they didn’t card us. And within a matter of weeks @joedoechef hired me as a prep cook at the Blue Grotto, and I was studying English with many incredible professors at Hunter College, and overall there’s just something to be said about going into a new situation with zero expectations because that way, every single thing is a thrilling new adventure that doesn’t disappoint. 
 My first formative food memory from the city was the toasted corn muffin, which is how I’m commemorating today. You cut it in half through the crown and griddle it in butter. Ingenious, especially as a way to revive a day-old muffin. I encountered it at Neil’s Diner up by Hunter, which is also the first place I ever established a standing order. I’m sure I’ve posted about this before. I also remember the daily special — I think it was called “tea at 2,” with discounted treats and coffee/tea — at @amysbread, truly the most incredible baked goods I’d ever had. I don’t really have any pictures of that time because my sense is we didn’t do that then without the smartphones, and I’ve never been good at documenting. But picture me lanky and wide-eyed, decked out in Banana Republic, with a mop of hair that the east coast humidity transformed into an Annie Warbucks-style pile of ringlets, trembling with the palpable, wide-eyed eagerness for experience that only the newly arrived can maintain for any length of game. I won’t live here another 20 years, but I’ll forever appreciate how NYC really does have the most beautiful people (inside & out) and that its center-of-the-universe bone fides are, for better or worse, totally legit. Half my entire life — and the entirety of my adult life — has happened here. I’m so extremely lucky about that.