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\u201cI have a no-bad-meals policy,\u201d says comedian and Middlebrow co-host Dan Rosen. \u201cIf I\u2019ve had a bad meal, it haunts me for the rest of the day. It\u2019s a very dumb and expensive rule, but it\u2019s something to look forward to. Maybe the only thing to look forward to.\u201d 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 \u2014 he grew up in Yorkville and went to high school with Zohran Mamdani <\/a>\u2014 Rosen now eats most of his meals downtown, whether it\u2019s 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\u2019Or, Al Badawi takeout with his parents, and late-night chocolate cake at Caf\u00e9 Sabarsky.<\/p>\n Wednesday, August 13<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n After a few hours of writing in my apartment, we head to lunch at Poulet Sans T\u00eate<\/a>, 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\u2019s what happens when you grow up with four ravenous brothers. I have a Diet Coke, too.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s no problem \u2014 I can drink a dozen a day. No other seltzer even comes close. If you close your eyes, it\u2019s almost like drinking soda.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s quite chic, so it\u2019s fitting that we end up at Le Veau d\u2019Or<\/a>, which I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s great to catch up with Michael. We spend a good chunk of the meal dissecting what went wrong with And Just Like That \u2026, although we also talk about less important things.<\/p>\n While the prix-fixe price tag still seems absurd to me, Le Veau d\u2019Or 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\u2019t understand it. For dessert, there\u2019s a chocolate ganache as well as some complimentary little beignet-type things.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s totally deserted; you\u2019re flying, in your own little movie, blasting Jamie XX.<\/p>\n Thursday, August 14<\/strong> We head to Dimes <\/a>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\u2019t just a fast-casual, laptop-job slop bowl. I get the summer salad with grilled chicken. I think Dimes is really nice. It\u2019s unfair that they\u2019ve become a symbol of something way beyond them, with the H&M shirt <\/a>and all that \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s a lot of weight for a salad place.<\/p>\n I loved to work at Gem Home <\/a>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 \u2014 we ruined it. It didn\u2019t last long, but I still go from time to time. They\u2019ve got a nice curation of berries that cost $2,000 a pint and very lovely silverware. I get a coffee and a raspberry tart.<\/p>\n Because I host a culture podcast, I\u2019m always loading up my calendar so I have stuff to talk about. Tonight, I\u2019m going with a group of friends (including Brian Park, my co-host) to a Mets-Braves game. I\u2019ve been a beaten-down Mets fan my whole life, and at this point, I\u2019m equally excited by the pregame dim sum in Flushing.<\/p>\n 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\u2019m 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<\/a>, 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\u2019t speak enough English for me to explain. I survive.<\/p>\n The Mets game is fun, although, because I ate, I don\u2019t 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\u2019s Mister Softee in a novelty-cup soft serve. She is displeased. The Mets lose.<\/p>\n Friday, August 15<\/strong> It\u2019s hot. Our next stop on our absurd tour of New York coffee shops is La Colombe<\/a> 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\u2019s something deeply embarrassing about working on your screenplay in public. In L.A., it\u2019s ubiquitous, but in New York, people have more shame.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t have a permanent space yet, so we hop around; today, we\u2019re recording in the Audo design showroom<\/a>. There\u2019s light construction going on in the front, and I\u2019m 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\u2019re always recording in a different design showroom. Our guests are always like, \u201cWhat is this place? Where the hell am I?\u201d<\/p>\n Brian drops me off at the Comedy Cellar, where I have a spot. I\u2019ve been passed here \u2014 meaning I have a regular spot \u2014 for a year and a half, and it\u2019s 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 \u2014 I got there at 7:13 \u2014 and then they said, \u201cOkay, you\u2019re on in two minutes.\u201d The booker shepherded me downstairs. She\u2019s watching, and I\u2019m insanely nervous. I did my five minutes, came off. She brought me upstairs and said, \u201cOkay, we\u2019re gonna give it a shot.\u201d That was it. I looked at my watch: 7:23. The whole thing took 13 minutes.<\/p>\n I\u2019m a bit early today, which is good because I can work out this new bit and try to remember my act since I haven\u2019t 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\u2019m pretty nervous. Friday is also the night Estee, the booker, is there, so there\u2019s always a chance she watches you, which just adds to the pressure. The set goes great. The original MacDougal room has some ineffable magic.<\/p>\n My wife meets me at the restaurant above the Cellar, the Olive Tree Cafe<\/a>, 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 \u2014 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\u2019t have helmets and my wife is a responsible person, so we take the subway.<\/p>\n Saturday, August 16<\/strong> We\u2019ve been trying to do Saturday-morning shabbagels with friends. It\u2019s hard to be regular about it, but we invite people; make a lot of coffee; bring bagels, tomatoes, lox, all of that. I\u2019m very conscious about hosting \u2014 usually there\u2019s 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<\/a>, but we used to get them from Absolute, the best place in the neighborhood, and Zohran Mamdani\u2019s favorite, but that closed. I actually went to high school with Zohran \u2014 I\u2019m two years older. We had Art Appreciation together. It\u2019s weird to see him on MSNBC now that he\u2019s become an international celebrity. Meanwhile, I\u2019m performing for drunk Danish tourists.<\/p>\n I am extra-aware of how shitty my apartment is when we have guests over. The bathroom light doesn\u2019t work \u2014 you have to bang the medicine cabinet to turn it on. You can\u2019t 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\u2019s almost too dark to see \u2014\u00a0but sexy.<\/p>\n Later on, we bring Al Badawi <\/a>takeout to my parents\u2019 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\u2019ve always had more stuff than space, just moving piles from room to room. My mom is an amazing cook, but when she cooks, she\u2019s 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 \u2014 chicken, lamb, steak \u2014 and some tabbouleh.<\/p>\n My wife and I walk home and pass Caf\u00e9 Sabarsky<\/a>. If you stop in late at night when it\u2019s not crowded, you can get in for dessert. It\u2019s 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\u2019re immediately transported to 1900s Vienna. Sometimes, it\u2019s ruined by tourists in mint-green shorts, but still \u2014 magical.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s way hornier than I expected, and it makes me sad nobody goes to the Catskills to have sex with Patrick Swayze anymore.<\/p>\n
I usually start my day with a large iced cold brew at Birch<\/a> by my apartment. In the winter, I make my own coffee, but I don\u2019t do well with hot beverages, so for now I spend $6 twice a day. I don\u2019t 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\u2019m working out, I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> in Two Bridges, which has a millennial-brutalist aesthetic I\u2019m ambivalent about. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The script continues. Today we meet at Fairfax<\/a> 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\u2019s what inspired me to do the same. I have an iced coffee and some cheesy-barley-zucchini-porridge-egg thing.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s too easy and also if it\u2019s too hard \u2014 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.<\/p>\n