Williamsburg's Culinary Book Club Lets Writers Eat Their Words

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN — You could smell the government cheese in Gregory Pardlo’s memoir about growing up during the air traffic controller’s strike, feel the bitter crunch of arugula in Morgan Jerkin's story of defending her humanity over brunch, taste the tang of Dutch rye bread in Mona Awad’s tale of a husband who just won’t stop dreaming his wife is trying to kill him in hot pants.

It wasn’t the notable authors' skill alone: After the authors read their pieces, a Williamsburg chef brought out the food.

Egg, the farm-to-table restaurant at 109 North Third Street that's been a neighborhood staple since it opened in 2005, is also the home base for Table of Contents, a culinary book club run by chef Evan Hanczor.

Hanczor has been running this literary get-together for years, reaching out to authors whose writing appeals and inspires him. His past guests include New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, Serbian-American novelist Téa Obreht and essayist Annabelle Gurwitch.

"We're sort of adding another sensory element to the experience of the words," said Hanczor told his audience Thursday night.

"I was a writer before I was a cook," he added, "so I'm sneaking in the back door authors who I wouldn't otherwise get to talk to, without having to write the same bad poetry I wrote in college."

On Thursday night, Hanczor and the staff at Egg hosted essayist Morgan Jerkin, memoirist Gregory Pardlo and fiction writer Mona Awad, who read from their work.

Jerkin opened the event with a reading from "This Will Be My Undoing," her collection of essays about what it means to identify as black and female in America. She told the story of a painful brunch with a Princeton administrator, where one guest demanded to know why she had to call herself a black woman.

"If I had been in the middle of swallowing a pear slice it would have caught in my throat," Jerkin read. "I call myself a black woman because that's what I am — I can be both a black woman and a human, those identities aren't separate."

When the applause died down, Hanczor handed out small plates of arugula and pears, which were probably much easier to swallow.

Up next, Pardlo read from his memoir, "Air Traffic," which details life as the son an air controller, one of thousands to lose his job in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Strike of 1981. Pardlo wrote about his parents' struggle to keep their family afloat and their dignity in tact.

"In this time of resourcefulness under duress, we made the most of our rations of government cheese; it was a minor holiday the day the cheese arrived," he read. "The big as a shoe box, a taxi cab-colored block of cheddar played a large role in our diet."

"Goey slabs topped all our carbs ... The cheese was there for us."

As Pardlo's listeners considered his passage, Hanczor passed around grilled cheddar cheese sandwiches.

Mona Awad, the fiction writer who's first novel "13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl" debuted in 2016, read a short story called "Dream Me," about a woman whose husband keeps dreaming she's finding new, painful and interesting ways to kill him.

"Like last night, he had one where it’s his birthday and I give him a tarantula baby, and when he doesn’t love it, I drag him by the hair through this hole in our bedroom wall which turns out to be a portal to hell," Awad read.

"Satan, who is my lover and a dead-ringer for Alex Trebek, is standing there beside a table full of forceps, gags and multi-tailed whips, awaiting my instructions. I order Satan/Alex to have his way with my husband and while he does this, I sit there looking bored but hot in this leather outfit full of holes."

The night concluded with a batch of Dutch rye bread smothered in house-made almond butter and honey, which the distraught and fictional wife had served to her husband in an attempt to prove that she's "f---ing nice, see?"

For more information about the next upcoming event, keep an eye on the Table of Contents EventBrite page. Tickets cost $10 at the door and include one drink and three snacks.

Photos by Kathleen Culliton