I want to be clear that I said baklava. Singular. I said I wanted to find somewhere with baklava, eat it, and then go home. That was the plan. That was the entire plan. I communicated this plan clearly, in direct words, while standing on a sidewalk on Ashmun Street at approximately two in the afternoon on a Tuesday that had no business being this nice.
Felix said, "Yeah, obviously, baklava first, but also — did you see there's a whole crawl going on?"
There it was. The pivot. The pivot always sounds so reasonable when it happens.
The Appetizer & Dessert Crawl, for context, is a real event where downtown restaurants participate in a tasting series and you walk between them sampling things. This is a perfectly reasonable activity for adults who have planned for it, worn comfortable shoes, and eaten a sensible lunch beforehand. We had done none of these things. Felix had eaten a protein bar at eleven and was operating on confidence and ambient street energy. I was wearing sandals with a strap situation.
He pulled up a map on his phone. The map had seventeen stops on it. Seventeen. He showed it to me with the expression of someone presenting a reasonable itinerary, not a man who had just announced we were doing a ten-thousand-step tour of New Haven on a whim at two p.m. on a Tuesday.
"We don't have to do all of them," he said.
We did seven.
I want to document this accurately: the first two were genuinely great. There was a place near Broadway that had a little spiced lamb thing and I forgave him temporarily. There was a café situation — new spot, Yemeni, very good, the coffee was excellent and the pastry involved honey — and I forgave him again. Felix was glowing. Felix had a little notebook. He was rating things. I don't know when he got the notebook.
By stop four he was using the word "comparing" with the confidence of a man who had been doing this for years. He said things like "the sweetness profile is different here." He said "okay but contextualize that against the first one." He was having the time of his life. His strap on one sandal had started rubbing.
We ended up on a bench near the canal area because I sat down and simply did not get up. It was 69 degrees. The light was that late-afternoon New Haven light that hits the brick in a very specific way that makes you feel like you're in a movie about yourself. Felix sat down next to me and ate the last bite of something wrapped in phyllo and made a small sound of profound satisfaction.
"That was so good," he said.
I looked at him. He had a smear of honey on his wrist. He had reviewed seven restaurants in a notebook he produced from nowhere. He had said the phrase "I think the cardamom is more forward here" without irony. He was wearing the expression of a man who had done exactly what he set out to do, which is interesting because he had not set out to do any of this when we left the apartment.
"I just wanted baklava," I said.
"You had baklava," he said. "You had it at two places. You liked both of them."
This was technically true.
He leaned back on the bench and looked at the street with enormous satisfaction, like a general surveying a successful campaign, like a man who had absolutely not just improvised an entire afternoon out of a phone map and ambient downtown energy and dragged me across half of New Haven in impractical shoes.
"We should do the rest next weekend," he said.
There are ten more stops.
I am going to wear better shoes. I am also, probably, going to go.
The baklava really was excellent.