magazine chef

what do you do when you feel like you've just experienced some kind of real-life magic/serendipity/magic and you're astounded but you have no one to tell who will really understand?

i used to subscribe to bon appetit magazine when i lived in new york because i loved looking at the pictures of food. stunning. when i moved out of new york, i grudgingly tossed the whole collection. however, i for some reason still own one orphan issue, issue October 2014, which has now survived two states and three moves, and it has lived with me at 4 separate addresses total.

today i decided to flip through the issue and i stopped on a page about a young, up-and-coming italian-danish chef and i realized it was the same Christian whose pizza restaurant i ate at in Nørrebro on my last night in copenhagen this past july. i'd had dinner alone at the bar and ended up befriending the staff and drinking with this man in the magazine and one of the waitresses. he told me about how he just bought a farm and showed me pictures on his cell phone of the dairy cows he'd purchased and was going to start producing his own milk for the cheese for the pizza in the restaurant. after i forked over some extravagant sum for my lavish treat-yourself last-meal, i'd jumped into the basket in front of his bike and gone with him to a cocktail bar in the neighborhood to have repeated shots of mezcal with the same waitress from before, her boyfriend (the sous chef from the restaurant), and a handful of random internationals in the copenhagen fancy food industry (one was the nerdy American boy personal assistant to the owner of Noma, the current 5th best restaurant in the world). 

words feel so astronomically inadequate and any attempt at description fails to capture the lightning bolt shock of seeing his face in this magazine that i've been hoarding for the past almost exactly two years. when this issue was mailed to me, i had no idea that i would still be living in florida in two years' time, or that i would step foot back in copenhagen anywhere in the near-to-far future. i would never say that i feel like i inexplicably carried this magazine with me for two years because anything was meant to be, but this event provides concrete evidence for the spiritual enlightenment that i stumbled upon on that solo journey, where i came to the suspicion that there is far more serendipity in the world than i will ever know.