The first apartment my wife and I shared together was on the ground floor of a large brownstone. It was on a very pretty street right on the dividing line between an OK neighborhood and a not-so-OK neighborhood. We only lived there for a year because our landlords were total morons (the nice, and therefore more dangerous kind) and also because of a number of other issues, chief among them a lack of space. It was actually a very large apartment, but had been renovated in such a way as to make storage or meaningful furniture arrangement nearly impossible. The walls were painted a deep and sensual shade of yellow, with rather dramatically stated gold finishing on the moldings. This color scheme, when accented with my wife's purple sofa, gave the apartment an exotic and vaguely Persian feel and earned it a special nickname: "Saddam's Palace".
For all the problems we encountered during the one year we lived in Saddam's Palace, there is one thing that I desperately miss about the place, and that is its kitchen. Occupying a full half of the living space, this kitchen had more than twenty overhead cabinets, an enormous chef's block/island in its center, a recessed marble cutting board, enough counterspace to land an airplane on, and various other accoutrements that seemed extravagantly garish to us when we first signed the lease, but which we eventually fell deeply in love with. Did I mention that this kitchen had two sinks? Remember that Monty Python sketch about Arthur 'Two Sheds' Jackson? That was us, only we had sinks, not sheds. Living in Saddam's Palace wasn't all bad because nothing is all bad when you have two sinks.
Obviously, we cooked up a storm while living there. We even imagined ourselves as the hosts of some late-night Food Network cooking show, mainly because there was more than enough room in our kitchen for a camera crew, even during our most athletic culinary endeavors.
It was the best kitchen we ever had, and probably ever will have, even if we end up moving to a big house in the country someday. Although we now live in what is overall a much better apartment, I'm haunted by kitchen-themed memories of Saddam's Palace. Those heavily varnished wooden cabinets and the satisfying -click- they made when opened or closed... the chef's block which could absorb up to a week's worth of junk mail and still provide enough open space to carve up a freshly roasted brontosaurus. Details like that are almost enough to make me look past less glamorous aspects like the broken dishwasher, the piece-of-shit stove our landlords had installed, or the 1980s refrigerator with an impenetrable grease shmear on the door. And therein lies one of the true perils of being cooking obsessed but not owning your own place: Outside of whatever you can scrape together at Ikea, there's not a lot you can do to fully streamline your kitchen to the specs that you think it ought to meet.
And that, my friends, is what makes me sometimes feel like we should move out of the city. It's not the lure of open spaces or a slower pace of life. It's not the looming necessity of a decent school system in which to enroll our little bundle of terror. And it's certainly not the grim ecoomic realities that NYC is presently staring down the barrel of.
I just feel like I need a kitchen that's big enough to park a Scud missile in the center of. It is Saddam's Palace that calls to me in the night.
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