Calvin Trillin is my favorite food writer. Every year he leads a walking tour of Chinatown as part of The New Yorker Festival and every year I try to get tickets and fail. I sit there on the Ticketmaster website and keep loading up the page until the tickets are made available at 12 PM and then I quickly say how many I want and then I’m quickly rejected. “Sold Out,” the message says. The tickets go that fast.
But this morning was different. This morning I sat there and loaded up the page over and over again and when it asked how many tickets I wanted I said “two.” The scrolling bar screen came on and then, miraculously, it showed two tickets available and I snatched them. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, your beloved Amateur Gourmet (and Craig who owes me big!) will be taking a walking tour of Chinatown with Calvin Trillin on October 8th. Because the tour is secretive and because it’s a yearly occurrence, I’m not sure how much I’ll blog about it but we’ll see. At the very least I’ll tell you if Calvin Trillin uses chopsticks and how much soy sauce he applies to his soup dumplings. Here’s to being persistent! I’m seriously psyched.
