ILLUSTRATION BY STEFANIE HADIWIDJAJA
Editor’s note: Our food critic Brandon Wuske passed away last month, shortly after submitting this column. Brandon was responsible for our Best Restaurants research and coverage as well as the restaurant reviews in our Dine section for the last three years. He will be sorely missed.
Confession time: I’ve always hated chicken noodle soup. Oh, I’m familiar with its well-documented medicinal qualities, its undeniable association with parental love, and the best-selling inspirational books threatening to pump the stuff straight into the soul (into every type of soul, it turns out). But I’ve always found it to be a weak, flavorless, liquid milquetoast. Plus, I’ve got this idiosyncratic and, frankly, unpardonable aversion to hot liquids that also extends to coffee and tea.
Suffice to say, I’m more apt to chug a pint of Robitussin than I am to open a can of Campbell’s. And yet, here I sit, in my kitchen, sicker than I’ve ever been, straight-up savoring a bowl of Marketside chicken and noodle soup. How the hell did I get here?
I can’t say exactly when this all started, but I can tell you when it came to a head. After weeks of struggling to keep down steadily decreasing quantities of food (a burger, a taco, an English muffin), I found myself at a café on Paris’s Left Bank, picking at a plate of monkfish nicoise over ratatouille. My normal eating habits—save when I’m forced to slow myself down for a food review—can best be described as “Garfieldian,” lasagna or no. So when I’m choking down a superbly cooked fish in one of the world’s greatest food cities, something is seriously wrong.
That “something,” I would later find out, was stomach cancer. A slowly growing mass at the junction of my stomach and esophagus has forced my favorite foods to line up in my throat, as if waiting to be ushered through customs. They rarely wait patiently.
And yes, I still kept up the food writing gig until, well, let’s say right now. In some ways, this disease has made me a better food critic. It’s forced me to take my time with each bite, the way I’ve always been told I’m supposed to. It’s also made me savor each morsel, knowing that they’re extremely finite. I’m convinced I wouldn’t have appreciated The Aperture’s sublime chicken liver mousse or Alara’s palate-bending Cloud Creamsicle as deeply just a few months ago.
But of course, a food writer is more than just a tongue, nose, brain, and rapidly scrawling hand. And the pleasures of eating aren’t limited to momentary bursts of flavor, despite what judges on competitive cooking shows would have you believe.
It’s not just food’s job to spark our senses, but to fill us. Every meal should hold the promise of satiety—that feeling of contented fullness that culminates the best meals and can almost redeem the worst. My favorite meals, conversely, make me hungrier with each bite, as anyone who’s ever devoured a perfectly smoked rack of ribs or well-buttered corn on the cob can attest to. Divorced from these feelings, eating becomes too detached and cerebral, much like spitting out a mouthful of wine after a quick swish around the palate (a practice I’ve always found borderline blasphemous). Plus, I’m just not that hungry anymore.
This last symptom has been the most disconcerting, because I so badly want to be hungry. Food is literally everyone’s life, whether they’re a self-described foodie or an Olive Garden–variety eater. But food—specifically restaurant and street food—has always been the core of my identity. I’ve been the go-to guy for restaurant recommendations, long before I started writing them. When asking about any friend’s dinner date, “What did you have?” always precedes “How did it go?” And if I drive by a promising strip mall and see what looks like a new restaurant going in, I turn around and circle the lot to get a glimpse.
Like cancer, this might be largely hereditary; I have an uncle who once drove from Ft. Wayne to Philadelphia just for a cheesesteak. While I’ve never gone to that particular extreme, I completely understand it.
I’ve been lucky to cover this city’s incredible food scene these last few years, to see it gain national attention and grow more diverse and delicious. I still maintain an interest in that food scene—the way an ex-ball player would for the game—but these days it’s all too academic. Sure, I dream that, on the other side of all this, I’ll gobble up an entire coop’s worth of harissa-rubbed chicken thighs at Mita’s, obliterate a medianoche at the next hot Cuban spot, or Joey Chestnut my way through a bowl of Xi’an cold noodles at Great Tang, but for now, it’s time to pass the fork.
Or rather, trade it in for a soup spoon. Because soup, especially one so bland and sparse as chicken noodle, can slip past the gastric gatekeeper unnoticed. A sip of warm broth, small chunk of chicken, cube of carrot, and stray noodle delivers the widow’s mite of nutrients I so desperately need right now. My dinners, at last, have been distilled to their essential purpose: to nourish and sustain. For that reason, I’ve come to appreciate the gray chicken and rubbery carrots in a “love the one you’re with” sort of way.
Speaking of love, I’ve not forgotten the “soup as an act of love” angle to all of this. But that love has been shown in so many other ways: in messages from friends and family, in the flexibility of coworkers and editors (especially at this magazine), after-hours phone calls from doctors, shopping trips with my parents as I slide through pant sizes, and a fiancée who doggedly sticks by me. These are the people I slurp soup for.
It’s possible—and I hope I’m not getting too Freudian here—that my aversion to chicken noodle soup stems from a fear of mortality. After all, has any more blatant symbol of weakness ever been dribbled onto a pair of old pajamas? But to eat it is to accept that weakness and begin recovery. To take the offered bowl is to accept love, with all its legendary restorative powers.
I make no excuses for coming to this childhood chickenpox realization at 40; I’ve always been a late bloomer. This particular realization might seem to have come entirely too late, but I beg to differ. At worst, it came just in time.
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