This week, the spirit of a sandwich and a dish raised from the dead. We also welcome Guest Gulletier, Nora MacLeod to the table.
The Scuttlebutt
by Nora MacLeod1
Having moved to Los Angeles from New York over four years ago, I’ve done my best to maintain my friendships long-distance to varying degrees of success. There have been hundreds of phone calls, thousands of texts, dozens of postcards and care packages, visits via plane, train, and ferry. One friend in particular, a sister-tier friend, similarly left New York at the same time but for the South. We’d met in college where she was admiringly nicknamed, “Mom,” for having kept and cared for a dog, a vintage car, and all of us, her unofficial sorority who could barely manage to bathe ourselves. Among even her closest friends she has since been notoriously hard to pin down, months go by between text messages. And I’m guilty, too, I say I’ll call but then get tied up in my sunny life. All this is to say that I reached out to this friend via text to apologize for my most recent failure to dial, knowing that she would not respond until a mysterious future moment, but this time I had an excuse: I’d just initiated a brutal break up, mere days before finishing graduate school, I was reeling, I told her. I told her how thankful I was the last time I’d seen her in New York, that winter of 2020 before my move, before her move, before the world changed forever and then went back to being the same, for how she took us out to dinner after a previous brutal break up of mine, how she’d held me hard while we lay on her bed afterward. No response.
A week later I received a text that made me cry: it was simply a photo of The Scuttlebutt.
This fucking sandwich—it’s a sandwich, if you didn’t know—oh, God bless you if you never knew. Saltie, the nautical-lesbian sandwich shop where it was assembled and sold closed its doors in 2017.
Now, to some, this may seem brash, crass, callous, tactless, insensitive. As I mentioned, it’s a sandwich. But for us, this was utmost a direct form of communication, of love and understanding.
I have another friend to thank for introducing me to The Scuttlebutt in 2011, her studio was across the street from Saltie, under the BQE. She claimed it was so delicious that she ate it four times a week, but it took some convincing. I had a phobia of sandwiches, perhaps the residual trauma of being the youngest sibling of five, it was important that I could see exactly what I was eating. Sandwiches conceal their contents. I was skeptical, young, and naive. Trust me, she said.
Imagine: Springy, glossy focaccia flecked with salt, garnished with smoked paprika aioli, layered with sliced hard-boiled eggs, feta cheese, golden and pink pickled beets, capers, cured olives and a mix of fresh herbs dressed with olive oil. A painting between slices of bread. A numinous experience? Perhaps not quite, but it sated my hunger and made me hungry to live.
I ate that sandwich to dampen my drunk.
I ate that sandwich while I waited on friends.
I ate that sandwich at the Saltie-catered baby shower thrown on Halloween in a hip downtown gallery. I went dressed as my then boyfriend, and he as me.
I ate that sandwich with a small, beautiful, hedonistic trust fund PhD candidate and then ate it again after we split.
I had sat at the little bar in Saltie and eaten that sandwich throughout several relationships and friendships, and just as many heartbreaks. It is the greatest sandwich I’ve ever had. Every time, it reinstated itself.
What I hadn’t told my friend when I’d texted her about my break up was that I had stopped eating, almost altogether. She’d intuited this, or maybe she hadn’t thought about it at all. I can’t tell you what motivated her because she hasn’t responded to my texts since. But I love her. And I love that sandwich. And though it won’t be the same, it’s equally satisfying to try and make it for myself.
Name Drops: Saltie
Bucatini From Beyond
by Greg
Steph, her boyfriend Wes, and I had just returned home from a historical ghost tour in a neighboring town, and it was time to make dinner. For one night only, current residents with a passion for acting had volunteered to bring back deceased townsfolk in front of their respective graves. To put it mildly, it was a shit show. The actors didn’t know their lines and read from one-page scripts they had written themselves. They recited their biographies, sixth-grade book report style, to us and a group of grim-faced senior citizens. Costumes bought from Amazon, were fresh out of the package, hard creases and all. When the tour was over, we pulled out of the parking lot with sore ribs from trying to suppress deep, guttural laughter. Salt cracked the corners of my eyes from where tears had streamed during the Q&A session at the end of each actor’s monologue; one brash tour-goer demanded to know where each specter had lived in town. Not one of them knew their addresses or answers to any of the other question. At one point, a golf cart ripped through the cemetery, delivering pizza slices to feed the ghosts when they finished recounting their demise to a group. After tonight’s performances, I thought maybe it's best to let the dead stay at rest.
Back at home, Steph and Wes got to work in the kitchen. Dinner was a surprise, and I was forbidden from looking until it appeared in front of me on the table. I caught rolling waves of savory notes wafting in from the other room. Something familiar hit the olfactory receptors, but I couldn’t quite place it. When the dinner bell rang, I quickly filled my seat and was met with a piping hot bowl of bucatini with chicken confit. “It’s Faro’s recipe!” Steph beamed. I could feel more tears welling up, a different strain this time.
Faro was one of Steph and I’s favorite NYC restaurants, which had sadly closed that spring.
Back when we learned the dates for their last nights of service, Steph sent a red-alert text, and plans were made to make the journey deep into Bushwick that weekend. We had both enjoyed the chicken bucatini separately but never in each other’s presence. On the night of our dinner, we first sat through a terrible play where, thankfully, Parker Posey delivered an unhinged performance. Outside of Parker’s moments on stage, I could only think about the impending chicken, cooked in duck fat, nestled in pasta, and served with a heap of focaccia.
Faro was retrofitted into a cavernous warehouse, and the evening we were there, the persimmon hues of the sunset diffused through the giant windows and cast an ethereal glow over us and the other diners; the night already felt like a memory. When the dish arrived, we squawked, screamed, squealed over each bite. Two kids in a 90s toy commercial losing their minds on Christmas morning. The dish was a medley of chicken, white wine, sizzled in aromatics, blasted with basil and chili, and then served over fresh pasta, drowned in pecorino. If chicken soup took a more spicy and solid form, this would be it. The night unfolded and we said goodbye to the bucatini, pacing ourselves to savor its perfection.
Cut to this chilly autumn eve where the dish had been resurrected in full color, steaming on my dining room table. It was hard to believe. Steph revealed that Faro had recently been releasing their recipes online as a little farewell gift. Steph’s version wasn’t quite the same, but how could it be? It was its own unique and incredible creation made with love and the memories of its predecessor. Steph had conjured the essence of our beloved pasta and then some. We spent dinner cracking up over the hazards of the graveyard tour and once again trying as best we could to make the bucatini last. After we licked our plates clean, I paused for a moment. This spectacular meal had changed my mind. Some ghosts are worth resurrecting.
Name Drops: Faro
A special thank you to this week’s illustrator, Wesley Allsbrook2. See more of their work here.
Nora MacLeod is an acupuncturist and writer based in Los Angeles.
Wesley Allsbrook was born in Durham, North Carolina. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design. Wesley has been recognized by The Art Directors Club, The Society of Publication Designers, The Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, Communication Arts, Sundance Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Raindance Film Festival, the Television Academy and The Peabody Awards. She writes and draws.