The Single Most Satisfying Thing of 2023
It's not books or articles. Certainly it's not my personal life, which continues to be a mess.
It’s now the season when accomplishments are counted and recounted in the waning days of the year. Less trumpeted, perhaps, but no less recollected, are shortcomings. My cup runneth over on both counts.
In the past month, a few projects on which I worked and of which I am very proud have come out. They include a big juicy Wall Street Journal cover story on the New Rules for Fine Dining. (It’s mostly about the move away from a hard division between front- and back-of-house.) Esquire’s truly massive Best New Restaurant list, which now numbers 50 and has taken the entire year of near endless travel for the team — me, Kevin Sintumuang, Jeff Gordinier and Omar Manoon — to compile. It’s the third year I’ve done the list. It is both exhausting and inspiring. There are just so many wonderful restaurants opening, chefs taking risks, mindblowing food being made. Finally, Artisan announced the release of my newest cookbook: Jang: The Soul of Korean Cooking, a book I co-wrote with Mingoo Kang and Nadia Cho. Mingoo is the chef of Mingles, a two-star Michelin restaurant in Seoul. He’s been on a Jang journey for years and I’m so happy that I could join him for this phase of it. (Jangs are, btw, a trio of fermented soy bean products. There are gochujang, doenjang and ganjang.) The book comes out in March but is available for pre-order now.
But when I think about what has given me the biggest sense of accomplishment this year it actually isn’t any of the above. It has to do with Cellino & Barnes. As any New Yorker will tell you, Ross Cellino and Steve Barnes were omnipresent fixtures of New York City’s flat surfaces for years. Personal injury lawyers, the pair — Cellino, bespectacled; Barnes, bald — became as well-known as Dr. Jonathan Zizmor, as coupled in public imagination as Hall & Oates or Ulysses and Diomedes. But no partnership lasts forever. In 2020, the friends contentiously split and in October of that year, Barnes died in a plane crash, along with his niece.
When I heard the news, I was biking down Prospect Park West, past a bus stop with a tattered Cellino and Barnes poster someone had forgot to remove. It was all just too sad and I wrote a song about it called Cellino & Barnes (Desolation Blues).
Cellino and Barnes were together for many a year.
They decided to go their separate ways September of last year.
Then Barnes died in a plane crash took the life of his neice too.
Desolation, desolation, desolations blues.Nothing lasts forever but some things remain:
An old poster crinkling up in the December rain
Left in a bus shelter someone forgot to remove.
Desoliation, desolation, desolation blues.They were friends and colleagues;
They became enemies.
But I can’t even believe how Cellino felt
When he heard the news…
Desolation. desolations blues.
I aksed my friend Kyle Forester, with whom I’ve been making music for the past twenty years, to record the song, which he did with the help of Paul Jenkins on bass and Hampus Ohman-Froelund on drums. In January 2021, we put it up on Bandcamp where it, like all of our other masterwork, went mostly ignored.
Then last month, Kyle got in touch. (I mean, I see him all the time. We’re in a short story book club, which I highly recommend, plus he spends every Wednesday at my house, which is the best because it’s a guaranteed hang.) Anyway, Kyle told me we had just received a $100 payment from….Ross Cellino. THE Ross Cellino.
What this means is that Ross Cellino, of Cellino & Barnes, had somehow found our song — Bandcamp is not exactly an SEO bonanza — listened to it, enjoyed it, and, instead of paying the suggested $2, paid us $100. I found this chain of events both extremely unlikely and deeply gratifying. Why was I so moved and why does this one, as we recount our accomplishments, find its way to the top?
I am lucky that I spend most of my time doing what I love to do. I eat food I love, talk to interesting people, use pretentious adjectives. But even within that, let’s face it, the vast majority of my creative output doesn’t come from my heart. Orif it does, it is a passion modulated by the market. The balance of a jobbing writer is to find what one can write that satisfies and that makes enough money to support a family. That is, it’s creative and capital all at once.
But this song, this song was just weird pure expression. The few people who heard it when it “came out” liked it, in a sort of kitschy ironic way. Hilarious, they said. But hilarious it wasn’t. But by that point, Cellino & Barnes had become such an instition, such a billboard of itself, that any song about them — albeit one about a genuine tragedy — was read as novelty. And I took the praise, for beggars can’t be choosers and certainly not narcissistic ones, but was inwardly abashed. I had no intended to be funny. There was, really, only one person in the world for whom the song could possibly resonate as deeply and with as much humanity as it was meant to, one person who knew, first-hand, that this wasn’t ironic or comedic: Ross Cellino. And he found it. He fucking found it. And he liked it. Two years after the fact, the strange little feeling I had, a tiny faint flashing signal, found an answer in the dark, flashing back across time. And to me, that subtle delayed lightning, was the highlight of the year.
This is beautiful and really profound, such a perfect little illustration about how the universe *does* sometimes conspire to lift us up when we least expect it. Thank you for the beam of light in a weird, dark time.
Lovely anecdote ✨