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New York Times

I've Dreamed of This Salad for Over a Decade. Now, It's Yours.

Roman's opened in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 2009, a little over a year into my daughter's life. I was still just emerging from the fevered seclusion of early motherhood, and when I stepped outside, the world seemed unnaturally bright. I was hungry all the time. Recipe: Melon Salad With Nectarines, Tomatoes and Basil My husband and I would walk the four blocks from our apartment to the restaurant. We'd arrive at 5 p.m., right when it opened, with our daughter in my arms, feeling like fugitives, ready to eat and run before the proper customers showed up. Often we were the first through the door. We always had the same table, the last four-top across from the marble bar, angled against the wall like a diamond. A server would slip a shim of cardboard under an unsteady leg so it wouldn't rock. The menu was printed on graph paper and changed daily — completely, with almost no repeats. What you loved, you loved once and might never see again. (Pete Wells, then The Times's restaurant critic, wrote that raving about such dishes 'borders on sadism.') Sometimes I had no idea how to order; but whatever came turned out to be exactly what I wanted. Over time, patterns emerged. Suddenly fennel was a significant part of my diet. Likewise cardoons, an obstinate vegetable — technically, a thistle — I had never heard of. The writer Scarlett Lindeman, who was a cook there, told me they required up to six blanchings to be coaxed into tenderness. 'Those bitter puny vegetables,' she recalls now, adding: 'Best kitchen I ever worked in.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.