I’ve just returned home to Brooklyn from an amazing weekend in Los Angeles for Fayaz and Nushin’s wedding.  An epic Indian wedding with events stretching over three days.  While I can’t help but feel a profound sadness for the end of an era (Fayaz and I have been off and on roommates, friends, and co-culinary adventurers for a decade now), I’m also profoundly joyed to see Fayaz enter a new phase in his life with truly one of the most amazing and accomplished women I have ever met.  (She’s cooked for the Park Slope apartment, and it’s a travesty those amazing meals are not represented here!)

Over  the next few days, I hope to post descriptions of the weekend’s events.  At every turn, at every meal (there were many), all stops were pulled-out.  More than once, I felt as if I had walked onto the set of a movie.  And, in between the wedding festivities, I was able to grab some California eats worthy of text here.

The three days of  the wedding and a final day to fly out seem much longer in the best possible way.  Event after event and meal after meal in a city unlike any I’ve experienced before.  Between the new city, two five hour flights in which I surveyed most of America, the experience of a wedding from a fairy tale, and seeing the marriage of one of my dearest friend, I feel a deep stirring in me.  The kind that beings blurry, creates restlessness, and ends in reevaluated life perspectives and goals.  (I’m sure reading Hunter S. Thompson along the trip is a bit of a factor as well.)  I’ll try to keep talk of all that to a relative minimum here and focus on the epic experiences of food, culture, and city.

Though, I have to note my realization that I’ve become a New Yorker.  LA felt like more of a foreign city more than it would have at any previous time in my life.  Cars, highways, malls, sprawl, miles of new buildings, and suburban like environments have all shifted well outside of normalcy for me.  At the same time, flying cross country, looking over vast swaths of open country has given me the itch to take the road and again explore the “back waters” of America.

But good food related posts to follow, I promise.

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