Ceviche at Gotham Bar & Grill (Brad A Johnson)

I was in New York for a brief visit, with only enough time for one great lunch. “Where would you like to eat,” I ask a friend who lives in Harlem. “Let's go to Gotham,” he says.

To be honest, Gotham Bar & Grill wouldn’t have been my first choice. Not that I don’t like Alfred Portale's legendary Greenwich Village restaurant, but because so many new places have opened this year. The options are dizzying. 

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Where?” I actually heard him, but I thought maybe this would give him a chance to throw out an alternative.

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I’ve just finished watching a the sunrise from the beach in Playa del Carmen. The coastline at dawn here is always eerily silent, the quietest it will be all day. For a few hours at most, no one is stirring. The dozens of bars and restaurants that line the shore appear abandoned, like a ghost town. My lounge chair is wedged into the sugary white sand just out of reach of the crashing turquoise waves. The sky is an infinity of blue, and the sun’s rays merely lukewarm, like an oven that’s just been turned on but which hasn’t yet had begun to warm up. A seagull circles overhead, effortlessly floating in the breeze like a kite, and I wonder if he, too, is merely half awake.

A small wooden fishing boat powered by a small outboard engine sputters across the horizon then turns toward the shore and heads straight for where I’m lounging.

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