Blue Ribbon Brasserie: Bone Marrow and Oxtail Marmalade
The audience is thin at a Brooklyn bar, and the comedians are trying to make a dead night feel alive. The show is a welcome struggle for us all. Like the city, it is compelling even when it isn’t funny.
After the show I join the comics at the bar. They’re a motley bunch: a Portland joke writer with no backup plan, a woman who could be Fran Drescher’s niece, and the sound guy who rambled about his long-absent dad. Now that we are offstage, everyone is warmer and more attentive. We talk about making it in the city, learning to read the signs. Manhattan’s walls are too thick to crack, but sometimes they open of their own accord.
The stranger seated next to me has seen this happen. She shares the comings and goings of the comedy club where she works tables, a place any of them would kill to book. She talks quickly, her eyes slightly lidded, brimming with hard-earned casual confidence. Our conversation turns to food. There is a place you need to eat, she tells me. I am not remotely hungry, but I don't yet want the night to end. I follow the Stranger back to Manhattan. We swap reading material on the L train, walk a brisk half mile, and at 1 A.M. step into an American bistro.
Blue Ribbon Brasserie is a magical exception. With New York University just a few steps away, most of this neighborhood caters to students, serving them the ramen, bongs, bao, and beer they need to succeed. But there is occasionally a hidden gem like this one. The interior is gorgeous, timeless. Every surface is edged with old oak molding and trimmed with merrily lit Christmas garland. The bar is backed with broad, shining, wall-to-wall mirrors. A small, cautious man named Victor leads us to our seat. The Stranger recognizes him, congratulates him on becoming the host. He ushers us into a giant booth where we eye the menu, order, and wait for our fare.
As we wait we feel the oppressive presence of the table next to us, a sloshing man mumbling into his date's ear. Everyone else here looks sharp and sober, but these two slump and stare, their gazes alternating between each other, the table, and the space I occupy. They are the sole sign of how late it is. My inner clock is still reeling from the combined forces of an encroaching winter and California jetlag. It's been dark for eight hours already.
Our oysters come first, a half dozen of them. They need none of the horseradish I line them with in California. Their flavor is concentrated, briney, and fresh. I inexpertly lay the empty shells back on the ice as the Stranger and I debate the application of lemon juice. She keeps up a steady patter while I grow quiet in anticipation. I feel a wire drawing tight, ready to be plucked.
Then it arrives, the only plate that matters that night, perhaps the only plate that matters all month: bone marrow with oxtail marmalade and toast.
Three generous cross-sections of cow femur stand upright in the center of the plate. Marmalade the color of caramelized onions, thick and glossy brown, surrounds the bones’ bases. Around the perimeter are triangles of toast, light and fluffy. The oxtail marmalade is a clear bridge: its form nods to the effete sweetness of the toast, but its flavor embraces the rich and primal marrow.
I take my wooden skewer and spear the marrow. It clings to its cradle, weak strands tethering it to the sponge of the bone. My skewer stretches and breaks its thin tethers one tug at a time. Butcher's butter, they call this. I slather it on a toast point and take a bite.
Though the marrow is much deader than the oysters, it feels far more alive. It is a warm and quivering gel, shaking and straining as you pull it into your mouth. Its feeble attempts to hold itself together immediately lose to your bite, coating your tongue in melty tallow. The taste is animal, spurring a predatory instinct to eat more now. It is an ambrosia of uncommon nourishment. All your cells call out for more as nutrients that would normally require chewing through a foot of steak and gristle slide down your throat in effortless abundance.
With each passing moment the tallow melts further, revealing a glimpse of the thready inner tissues inside the bone. Then, after four or five scant scoops, the skewer catches. Out comes a massive lump of marrow, tender and whole, enough to span an entire triangle of toast. You may try to bite off a piece, but the rest will come with it, like it or not, filling your mouth with the stuff of life.
This is where blood comes from. It is as close as we get to our shared origin. All other meats are a memory and a tribute to this, the center, more heart than the heart itself. It is along this thready tangle that connections are made best and fastest, the body of streets along which trains and cabs chase, bursting forth in an endless stream of precious, inseparable lives, strivers, dreamers, all thinking and talking and hoping as they traverse their shuddering home.
In the dead of night you stand on a concrete stage. As you speak, the walls flex and pump, pressing you forward into the crowd. You are caught in the current of ancient arteries, the invisible circulatory system of the urban body. You cannot resist the rush. It has been too long since you felt grass under your feet, and you don’t know how to stand in place anymore. Your tether to yourself is too thin, too easily severed, but you are part of the tangle. You are held together by quivering threads to Victor, the Stranger, the joke writer, and eight million more.
This island is a living bone, and we are its blood. There may be other places more alive, but none that feel this alive.
In such an embrace, you can easily swallow a piece of the ox.
