What I had for lunch today

If you’ve been here before you’re surely aware that this is not a “what I had for lunch today” kind of blog. But the combination of things I did have for lunch today and the questions they made me ask have led me to write this.

At about ten minutes to noon, my boss, an orthodox Jew, came by my desk and dropped off a disk-like object wrapped in aluminum foil, announcing, “A Friday latke.” He had brought latkes back for the whole group from his favorite midtown kosher place. For some reason he was in a latke-giving mood.

The latke was pretty good, albeit quite greasy. It was biggish, but not big enough to constitute an entire lunch by my standards. So a little later I decided to call John’s Shanghai, on West 46th, to order some takeout crabmeat and pork soup dumplings (xiaolongbao or shao lon bao). I headed over to the restaurant and they were ready shortly after I arrived. When I got back to the office and opened the container I was disturbed to see my dumplings sitting in a little pool of soup. Apparently the soup had leaked out of the dumplings in transit. To make matters worse, the skins had become mushy from sitting in the liquid, even if only for a short while. I had never done xiaolonbao as takeout before, and it appears that they just don’t travel well.

But dumpling quality aside, the crux of the matter is: why did I order them at all? I started to think about this. I had never eaten latkes and xiaolongbao for the same meal before today. Was there a significance to what I had ordered at this particular time? Had I, a Jewish atheist, perhaps ordered an item that contained both pork and shellfish, two kinds of treyf, as a hostile reaction to my boss’s latke offering? Was it a slap in the face of religious orthodoxy? Was it an “up yours” to management? Or maybe even both?

These, I’m afraid, are questions that cannot be answered.