saved by Sweden

One of the dilemmas New Yorkers experience is a high standard for food and service. We know it is possible, and expect it as some sort of birth rite. This is one reason New York is what it is - the salty, lightning service, and exquisite food from every corner of the universe at your fingertips. We know we are spoiled, and overpay for the fancy stuff on certain days, languishing in the budget masterpieces on a daily basis. If there was ever a person with a soul that could be saved by a well-made bacon, egg and cheese sandwich it is a New Yorker.

Take us out of New York and we are insufferable. “That crap food for that price? They should be sent to prison!” or “you call that coffee? I would not wash my socks in that swill.”

Unfortunately, we cannot unlearn our legacy. This is a handicap we bear, a stone around our neck no matter where we end up.

Living in Tbilisi is magical, but the food scene has backslid to tourist food for years and years - even local specialties, cooked by natives can make you sick, or swear under your breath to never come back to a place. As for the “foreign” food - it tends to be a YouTube idea of a dish, an airport food court take on a taco, at best. Everyone has their favorites, and I do not mean to judge them. De gustibus non est disputandum and all that. If that pasta or those dumplings make you happy, that is all that matters. My opinion is not yours. That said - when I do find a place that speaks to me, it is like the sky opened up and angels found their way to earth.

I passed a place a few times, understanding it was a Swedish cafe and just assumed it was a crappy homage to their cooking, and kept walking. It was too random to be true, so it must be false. We New Yorkers are capable of very faulty logic, it is a great weakness. I lose a lot of arguments these days, when the facts are there to be found on a smartphone, proving me dead wrong.

It turns out the cafe is run by a daughter and mother from Malmo, Sweden. The counter is crammed with cinnamon rolls, berry crumbles, carrot cake, all as gently spiced as the next, barely sweet, fresh and tender, without a single mis-step. I took a selection home the first time I stepped inside the place, and we cut the pastries into pieces, sharing them after dinner and polishing all of them off, a resounding approval.

The next day, I dragged N and V there, and we had a late lunch. The menu is tiny, past the pastries - two kinds of sandwiches and a plate of Swedish meatballs, nothing more. I ordered the meatballs and waited patiently for them to arrive. The walls are painted with great red horses, the chairs are random and comfortable. You are meant to feel like you are eating in someone’s house here. Fika is a fascinating term - literally meaning a coffee break, but in other loose interpretations, it is about coming together, in comfort and familiarity, enjoying a break in time to savor the simple things, to sit with an old friend or a new one. So, we had our Fika, as Spring filled the air on a lazy Saturday afternoon and then those meatballs arrived. V made some jokes about shopping at Ikea and if these tasted like the ones in the steam tables she remembered so well. In all of my trips to Ikea, and those mountains of shelves and cabinets and bricabrac I have bought there, I never ate those meatballs, so I could not compare them.

They came with a handful of homemade pickles, a generous spoonful of intense lingonberry preserves, a few mounds of tender mashed potatoes, a little forest of meatballs and an ocean of that brown sauce we all know so well. Everything was salted just enough, but not more. Nothing aggressive, all gentle and balanced. Creamy, but not cloying, toothsome, but not tough. It is far too easy to call this “home cooking.” That is misleading. There was something unfussy, and humble about that plate of meatballs, but you already know that. The main thing, is that it did not just nourish me, it did not just fill my belly, it made me feel good - not just about the place around the corner from us, but about the world, about the universe. This is the underestimated power of great cooking - it literally changes you, and it does not need to do this with fireworks and instragrammable pictures of some oozy eggs, it can pull off this miracle with the simplest ingredients in the right hands. It is alchemy. It is what gives me faith, and I found it in the oddest place, by an accident of my own making. Fortunately, I fixed the mistake and stuck my head in the door.

I wanted to eat them again the next day.