“I have a no-bad-meals policy,” says comedian and Middlebrow co-host Dan Rosen. “If I’ve had a bad meal, it haunts me for the rest of the day. It’s a very dumb and expensive rule, but it’s something to look forward to. Maybe the only thing to look forward to.” This summer, Rosen is splitting his time between co-writing a rom-com with his brother (and slowly destroying their relationship in the process), recording his culture podcast in borrowed design showrooms, and running between stand-up sets at the Comedy Cellar. A lifelong uptowner — he grew up in Yorkville and went to high school with Zohran Mamdani — Rosen now eats most of his meals downtown, whether it’s at Dimes (which he insists is unfairly maligned) or S&P. Still, he managed to sneak in some special meals outside the congestion-pricing zone: dinner at Le Veau d’Or, Al Badawi takeout with his parents, and late-night chocolate cake at Café Sabarsky.
Wednesday, August 13
I usually start my day with a large iced cold brew at Birch by my apartment. In the winter, I make my own coffee, but I don’t do well with hot beverages, so for now I spend $6 twice a day. I don’t really eat anything before noon, probably because of some half-thought-out attempt at intermittent fasting I tried a few years ago and never grew out of. If I’m working out, I’ll grab a banana or half an avocado. I get biweekly deliveries of avocados from Da Avocado Guy, which sounds like something that should send me to the gulag but ends up being less expensive than the grocery store. These are the most buttery, platonic-ideal avocados; they never seem to turn.
My brother and I are working on a script, which is going much slower than either of us anticipated. Part of the reason it has taken so long is that we yell at each other over insignificant grammatical details and end up preoccupied with what to eat and which coffee shop we should walk to for our next burst. If we end up at a Sweetgreen, the day is truly a failure.
After a few hours of writing in my apartment, we head to lunch at Poulet Sans Tête, one of the few decent restaurants on the Upper West Side. They have a great combo special: the juiciest rotisserie chicken with veggie sides. We fastidiously split our collective four sides, to the point of counting the number of Brussels sprouts each of us receives. This is psychotic and embarrassing behavior, but it’s what happens when you grow up with four ravenous brothers. I have a Diet Coke, too.
Back home, I answer some emails and snack on berries and a Spindrift. I forgot to cancel my Spindrift subscription when I was away working on a movie in July, so our household has an immense backlog. It’s no problem — I can drink a dozen a day. No other seltzer even comes close. If you close your eyes, it’s almost like drinking soda.
It starts to pour, but the rain stops just in time for me to bike through Central Park to the Upper East Side for a late dinner with my friend and antiques extraordinaire Michael Diaz-Griffith. He’s quite chic, so it’s fitting that we end up at Le Veau d’Or, which I’d been trying and failing to get into since it opened. With the clientele mostly in the Hamptons or wherever during the summer, we had better luck.
It’s great to catch up with Michael. We spend a good chunk of the meal dissecting what went wrong with And Just Like That …, although we also talk about less important things.
While the prix-fixe price tag still seems absurd to me, Le Veau d’Or lives up to my expectations. We share a pickled-artichoke dish and a tomato salad. Michael is gluten-free, so I graciously eat all the croutons. For the main courses, I have a delicious buttery white-wine chicken with chanterelle mushrooms, followed by a green salad, which I know is traditional, but I still don’t understand it. For dessert, there’s a chocolate ganache as well as some complimentary little beignet-type things.
I ride a Citi Bike home through Central Park. Biking late at night through the park with music blasting is among the top New York feelings. It’s totally deserted; you’re flying, in your own little movie, blasting Jamie XX.
Thursday, August 14
My brother came uptown yesterday, so today I have to go meet him downtown as we continue to hack away at our script. We meet at the very vibe-y Mandarin in Two Bridges, which has a millennial-brutalist aesthetic I’m ambivalent about. It’s hard to find a coffee shop that (a) allows laptops, (b) is pleasant to sit and work in, and (c) has decent coffee. Today, we sit by a full-grown adult drawing with crayons and a woman taking a very loud Zoom meeting. But the coffee is good.
We head to Dimes for lunch; we end up here at least once a week. New York is not lacking for many things, but one thing L.A. does have is the ability to eat a healthy-ish lunch that feels fresh and isn’t just a fast-casual, laptop-job slop bowl. I get the summer salad with grilled chicken. I think Dimes is really nice. It’s unfair that they’ve become a symbol of something way beyond them, with the H&M shirt and all that — it’s a lot of weight for a salad place.
I loved to work at Gem Home back when it first opened. It had this nice Copenhagen vibe with long tables in the back. But then people treated it like WeWork, and the owner got sick of it and made it table service. Too much of a good thing — we ruined it. It didn’t last long, but I still go from time to time. They’ve got a nice curation of berries that cost $2,000 a pint and very lovely silverware. I get a coffee and a raspberry tart.
Because I host a culture podcast, I’m always loading up my calendar so I have stuff to talk about. Tonight, I’m going with a group of friends (including Brian Park, my co-host) to a Mets-Braves game. I’ve been a beaten-down Mets fan my whole life, and at this point, I’m equally excited by the pregame dim sum in Flushing.
Going from Dimes to Flushing in the same day reminds me how wide the spectrum of eating in New York can be. Every time I go to Flushing, I’m reminded that even though I was born and raised here, I know only an infinitesimal part of this city and its distinct neighborhoods. We meet at Asian Jewels, an enormous banquet hall with solid food and a monstrously large curved screen in the back that cycles through AI images of fantastical landscapes that are meant to be calming but to me are a tad dystopian. I have a shrimp allergy of uncertain severity; I carry an EpiPen just in case. This adds a little excitement and danger to every meal, particularly when the staff doesn’t speak enough English for me to explain. I survive.
The Mets game is fun, although, because I ate, I don’t get to wander the stadium for an hour deciding which junk food I deserve for going all the way to Flushing to have my heart broken. I still end up getting a box of Cracker Jack and a Coke Zero and take some aggressively large bites out of my wife’s Mister Softee in a novelty-cup soft serve. She is displeased. The Mets lose.
Friday, August 15
The script continues. Today we meet at Fairfax in the West Village, which is pretty empty all morning so we can sit at the bar and write without being bothered. I once saw Malcolm Gladwell working at the bar here during the day, and maybe that’s what inspired me to do the same. I have an iced coffee and some cheesy-barley-zucchini-porridge-egg thing.
It’s hot. Our next stop on our absurd tour of New York coffee shops is La Colombe in Hudson Square. This neighborhood has spawned an impressive array of soulless corporate restaurants, and this La Colombe feels like an airport lounge, but there is AC. I think I went on a first date here with my ex. Growing up in New York means being haunted by your dating history at every turn. There’s something deeply embarrassing about working on your screenplay in public. In L.A., it’s ubiquitous, but in New York, people have more shame.
I head to Tribeca to record the podcast with Brian. This is our anniversary, and I think Brian has finally forgiven me for asking him to start a podcast. We don’t have a permanent space yet, so we hop around; today, we’re recording in the Audo design showroom. There’s light construction going on in the front, and I’m too ashamed to try to explain in broken Spanish to the construction worker that we are trying to record a podcast, so we just wait until he is done. We’re always recording in a different design showroom. Our guests are always like, “What is this place? Where the hell am I?”
Brian drops me off at the Comedy Cellar, where I have a spot. I’ve been passed here — meaning I have a regular spot — for a year and a half, and it’s still fairly surreal that I get to do the thing that was my life goal for ten years. Getting passed at the Cellar was one of the craziest days ever. I was told to be there at 7:15 — I got there at 7:13 — and then they said, “Okay, you’re on in two minutes.” The booker shepherded me downstairs. She’s watching, and I’m insanely nervous. I did my five minutes, came off. She brought me upstairs and said, “Okay, we’re gonna give it a shot.” That was it. I looked at my watch: 7:23. The whole thing took 13 minutes.
I’m a bit early today, which is good because I can work out this new bit and try to remember my act since I haven’t performed in over a month. In stand-up, not performing for a few days feels like starting from scratch, so with a month off, I’m pretty nervous. Friday is also the night Estee, the booker, is there, so there’s always a chance she watches you, which just adds to the pressure. The set goes great. The original MacDougal room has some ineffable magic.
My wife meets me at the restaurant above the Cellar, the Olive Tree Cafe, where the food is way better than it should be. I used to watch how they made the food at the Comic Strip in L.A., and it was pretty gnarly — think cheese nachos with canned olives. The food at the Cellar is truly terrific by comparison. My wife and I split a Greek salad and the chicken kebab platter, which is what I get every time. I want to bike back up the West Side Highway, but we don’t have helmets and my wife is a responsible person, so we take the subway.
Saturday, August 16
My wife and I have a tradition: When I get the weekend paper, we sit with the magazine and do the crossword every Saturday morning. We finish it together. We get annoyed if it’s too easy and also if it’s too hard — it has to be that perfect Goldilocks sweet spot. Usually, it takes about a half-hour. I drink a Birch iced coffee while we do it.
We’ve been trying to do Saturday-morning shabbagels with friends. It’s hard to be regular about it, but we invite people; make a lot of coffee; bring bagels, tomatoes, lox, all of that. I’m very conscious about hosting — usually there’s never enough food or options, and I hate that. I never want to feel like I took the last piece of lox or onion. We now order from Pop-Up bagels, but we used to get them from Absolute, the best place in the neighborhood, and Zohran Mamdani’s favorite, but that closed. I actually went to high school with Zohran — I’m two years older. We had Art Appreciation together. It’s weird to see him on MSNBC now that he’s become an international celebrity. Meanwhile, I’m performing for drunk Danish tourists.
I am extra-aware of how shitty my apartment is when we have guests over. The bathroom light doesn’t work — you have to bang the medicine cabinet to turn it on. You can’t tell your guests that. So I put a Louis Poulsen portable lamp in there. It makes the bathroom look elegant; a classy solution to a shitty problem. It’s almost too dark to see — but sexy.
Later on, we bring Al Badawi takeout to my parents’ house for dinner. My parents have lived in the same one-bedroom apartment for 50 years. All six of us shared it. We had bunk beds in the living room. They only moved into the bedroom when I left for college, but they’ve always had more stuff than space, just moving piles from room to room. My mom is an amazing cook, but when she cooks, she’s in the kitchen 90 percent of the time, so we tell her not to. Despite our insistence, she still made salad and baba ghannouj from scratch. She always orders way more food than we need, but my dad is happy with the leftovers. We get mixed-grill kebabs — chicken, lamb, steak — and some tabbouleh.
My wife and I walk home and pass Café Sabarsky. If you stop in late at night when it’s not crowded, you can get in for dessert. It’s one of the most beautiful dining rooms in New York. The wood paneling, the ornamentation. We have coffee, chocolate cake with cherries, and a hazelnut tart. You’re immediately transported to 1900s Vienna. Sometimes, it’s ruined by tourists in mint-green shorts, but still — magical.
The one thing I always cook is homemade popcorn: a bunch of smashed garlic cloves, maybe bay leaves or rosemary to flavor the oil, then kernels and salt. We watch Dirty Dancing for the first time. It’s way hornier than I expected, and it makes me sad nobody goes to the Catskills to have sex with Patrick Swayze anymore.
Sunday, August 17
I meet my wife at S&P for brunch, one of the few places I’ll wait on line for. It’s just the right amount of tacky, run-down décor, and the food is undeniable. When they do the throwback thing, they actually care — they make it a little more special without messing with a good, basic thing. They’re not adding truffles. I keep saying I’ll try something new, but I always get either a pastrami Reuben for lunch or the Lil’ Shonda for breakfast, which is a pastrami, egg, and cheese on rye with pickled tomatoes that give it the perfect tang. Love their crappy little plastic mugs, and unlike most diners, their coffee doesn’t taste like dishwater.
Later on, I grab a coffee and a canelé at La Cabra, before working on a script with my friend Dana. I just got cast in my first feature film. I’ve done commercials and sketches, but this is different. I’m anxious. Dana is a really talented actress and acting coach, so I asked her to help me run lines and think about the character. I only have three scenes, but I just want to feel comfortable and not embarrass myself.
That night, I get caught in the rain on my way the my monthly show I produce with Noa Osheroff — a mix of stand-up and short films. I was anxious about turnout since it was August and pouring. Every time I have a show, I think, Why am I doing this? No one’s gonna come. It’s gonna be bad. I have nothing to say when I host. I hate promoting. But the show is always fun. It’s a variety show, a nice break from a normal comedy show. Very chill. I don’t have to do much besides make the poster and post it, and people come out. For some reason, I decided the posters should be parodies of famous movie posters. It was fun for one or two. Now, every month, I’m figuring out how to replicate the Exorcist font.
We do the show at Brooklyn Art Haus. It’s a great space — mixed use with a good screen, perfect for multimedia stuff. It’s right under the BQE. I’ve spent years taking the subway home at 1 a.m. from Brooklyn shows, watching each venue move further east. Lately, I just Citi Bike. It’s longer, but it feels civilized. I see parts of New York I never would otherwise. I love the Queensboro Bridge, riding through Greenpoint at night, coming down into the park. Way better than waiting for the train at East Broadway at 2 a.m., wondering why I’m still doing this.
EAT LIKE THE EXPERTS.
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