January 1, 2003

AS YOU READ these words, I will most likely be eating cassoulet (or, to be completely candid, taking a break from eating cassoulet by drinking champagne). Cassoulet is, of course, a traditional New Year's dish in France, and while it does turn up on restaurant menus there and here, it isn't – to say the very, very least – a short-order item and therefore is invariably disappointing when produced by restaurant kitchens. Paella is like that; chicken cacciatore too.

As luck would have it, the cassoulet I will be eating will not be restaurant cassoulet – deconstructed and artily plated to conceal the fact that it's been thrown together in five minutes instead of simmered for three days – but neighborhood cassoulet, made (more or less) each New Year's by a neighbor (not French) who invests the time and effort to make the dish turn out right. And so it does, time after time, (new) year after (new) year. We like to joke that our neighbor could get rich selling her cassoulet, except that it's not really a joke. She could, or somebody could, if somebody would open a restaurant that served only slow-cooked foods – the dishes that take hours or days to make and leave the air warmed with their perfumes.

So I suppose that's one of my wishes, or hopes, for this new year, part of a broader hope for more slowness and less frenzy: Why are so many of us rushing so much of the time? Another is that restaurants take more seriously the issue of sustainability. I would like to spend this year not finding Chilean sea bass on a single menu, or so-called Atlantic salmon, which is farmed salmon and a horror in almost every conceivable way.

The last two years or so in this city have been bumpy ones – a new economy collapsed before anyone quite understood what was happening; an old economy (tourism) now collapsing in part because of the collapse of the new economy and in part because of the aftereffects of Sept. 11, 2001. If we ever permitted ourselves any illusions about how fragile the city's economic fortunes would be at the turn of the millennium, we cannot fail to see the reality now: a dependence on tourist and business travel whose sharp contraction over the past two years has, among other things, brought the closing of too many restaurants to contemplate.

Let's raise our champagne flutes, then, to happy, or at least happier, days, fewer restaurant closures, better health for the planet and its multitudes, less time spent rushing and swerving and honking and more spent making – and eating – cassoulet.