Meditations on mango 🥭

Plus a cup of coffee, Thai Diner, and more.

Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we find solace in sliced fruit. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.

Sliced mangoes at home

From the street fruit carts.

Recently I have started buying mangoes from the fruit carts that are everywhere on the streets of Manhattan. If you are lucky, you can buy the big red and green mangoes for a little more than a dollar each. I eat a mango for breakfast every day, and sometimes I eat one at night, too. What I like about mangoes is not just that they are delicious (they are), that they seem like a special treat when I don’t have much to look forward to in the morning (they are), but that you have to sit down to peel and slice them methodically. You cannot lose focus when you are slicing a mango, because you might slip your grip and slice open your hand instead. On weekdays, late at night, during that empty, hollow nocturnal gap between midnight at 3AM, when I don’t know whom (one of the two people who I know will always be awake at this hour?) or what (another beer? A sleeping pill?) to reach for, I reach for a mango. I perch on a bar stool next to my kitchen cart, and lay down a small plastic cutting board, a vegetable peeler, and a chef’s knife. I unravel the mango’s skin in colorful strokes, cleave the fruit in two, as tightly as possible to the pit on each side, and then slice the flesh into neat strips. It always fills me with disappointment when I cut the fruit in the wrong direction, my knife hitting the pit with a thunk instead of slicing cleanly, but I never look up how to tell what direction to slice a mango in online or even look carefully at the fruit beforehand. It feels more realistic this way, to be disappointed occasionally even by this small, simple task. And if I am lucky, I wake up in the morning to neatly sliced mango from last night.

Iced green tea at Cafe Beit 

158 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Of all the things I’ve missed about the Before the most, it’s not the hugs and kisses. If I may be so bold to admit, it’s not even really the friends (save a precious few whom I love dearly) and it’s definitely not the parties. It’s the freedom of movement, the ability to slip in and out of anywhere at any time, the ability to just simply wander around on a sunny Sunday afternoon and plop down with a good book and order an iced tea. Which is exactly what I did at Cafe Beit, one year and one and a half months after the beginning of it all, where I am sitting in silent peaceful solitude in the “tea house” on the patio with a paper mache lamb’s head and a book of Frank O’Hara poems I borrowed from the counter and an iced green tea. 

Hario One Cup Coffee Maker (OCM-1) at Zabar’s

2245 Broadway, New York, NY 10024, second floor; also available from Food52.

You might know Zabar’s for their lox or babka (both of which are thoroughly enjoyable), but the real gem is the second floor of the store, where all the household items are. On a quiet afternoon, you can find me upstairs, happily absorbing all the different varieties of coffee gadgets. I went in for a mini French press, but walked out with this neat little one cup coffee maker from Hario, because I simply cannot resist anything designed by Hario. To be fair, this is essentially the same principle as a French press; you pour boiling water into the mesh filter, and let it steep, covered (similar to making a cup of tea). The resulting cup is strong but a little muddy (as steeping methods always are), so I won’t be switching out my standard Melitta pour over method anytime soon, but it is a very neat (and portable!) little piece of design.

Roasted sweet potato at H Mart

In the prepared hot foods section, at H Marts everywhere.

On the one hand, is it really necessary to spend five dollars on a roasted sweet potato at H Mart? On the other hand, it is absolutely necessary to spend five dollars on a roasted sweet potato at H Mart; you are tired, I am tired, every dish begets more dishes to wash, and I can’t even open the oven door all the way without hitting the kitchen cart. Plus, this ain’t no ordinary roasted sweet potato; it has soft but dense yellow flesh, a perfectly charred exterior and crispy skin. You deserve, at the very least, to have this one treat in your life.

Roti kaeng fak tong (roti with kabocha red curry) at Thai diner

186 Mott St, New York, NY 10012

My biggest NYC restaurant regret is that I never got to eat at the famed Uncle Boon’s Kitchen (for the dumbest of reasons). The only time there was an open table without a three-plus hour wait was about three years ago, when I was on an unfortunate first date with someone who incorrectly told me it was a terrible choice. And then the plague happened and Uncle Boon’s shuttered for good and I never got my chance. Out of its ashes rose Thai Diner, which is, to be fair, really nothing like Uncle Boon’s except for a few overlapping menu items. But it is wonderful in its own way. The most magical part about Thai Diner is that it actually feels like a diner. You know, a place that you want to go to both in the morning and late at night, and probably not at any other time. (I love diners, but that is another newsletter in itself.) The waitstaff is a little too busy, the booths are crowded, and I can order a sweet drink and a snack for a second dinner. The roti with kabocha curry (which I used to order at Uncle Boon’s Sister, the takeout shop I *think* has also shut down during COVID but I am not positive, pls confirm) is probably my favorite late night snack in the whole city.

Till next time,
Soph

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