Today I decided to have lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, A Mano, an upscale Neapolitan pizza place in Ridgewood, NJ. I got there around 2pm, in the midst of a typhoon (nice day to start our Friday summer hours: 50 degrees and pouring). I opened the door, and saw there wasn’t a single customer inside. A waitress stepped out from the back office. I asked, “You open?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Come on in.”
I sat down at a table, ordered my favorite pizza (the A Mano: bufula mozzarella, prosciutto di Parma, arugula, cherry tomatoes, shaved gran cru, and extra virgin olive oil), watched the cook head over to the wood-burning oven to get my pie started, and listened to nobody.
I thought, “Of the top 10 things I love in this world, I have to include
- fantastic NJ pizza and
- not having to listen to another human being.”
The pizza didn’t take them too long. It was as wonderful as I expected. As I finished it, the waitress came by to ask if I needed anything.
I should’ve asked her to play a Sam Cooke CD on an infinite loop. That’s about the only way the moment would’ve been better.