Want to cook at home in New York? Think again

When we lived in London, my fiance and I loved to cook. Well, I say we loved to cook: he hated cooking but was very good at it – he was even, at one point, a contestant on MasterChef. I quite enjoyed cooking but was, as everyone who knows me will willingly attest, pretty damn bad at it. I personally enjoyed my signature chickpea stew and under-seasoned bolognese, but I have had enough feedback to come to accept that I was pretty much alone in that.

Nevertheless, we cooked together most nights after work and usually split a takeaway on a Friday or Sunday evening. Our fridge was filled with the usual groceries: onions, pieces of garlic, tomato pasta sauce, whatever veg we could chuck in a stew. We would go down to the local Tesco once a week, or order a delivery. We were normal, functioning Londoners. Then we moved to New York, and everything was turned upside down.

You’ve probably heard that people don’t cook in New York City, and concluded that sounds like a wild exaggeration. It isn’t. You can’t even get an apartment with a proper kitchen. If you’re renting somewhere with more than a couple of hobs and a microwave, the estate agent will proudly tell you that you’re looking at a “chef’s kitchen”, which will of course come at an extra cost.

And if you want to cook in that “chef’s kitchen”, you’ll have to go down to one of your local (usually non-chain) grocery stores and pick up the most eye-wateringly overpriced produce you have ever seen in your life. Packet of Ritz crackers? $5. Bottle of milk? $5. Single, half-mouldy green pepper at the bottom of a pile of old vegetables? Yes, that is also $5, ma’am.

By the time you’ve gathered together enough food to make an actual meal, yelled at each other to get out the way while you try to fry onions and boil pasta in your two-hob, cupboard-sized kitchen, and then stood miserably shoulder-to-shoulder while you wash the dishes in freezing cold water because the heat is off, you will have concluded it’s never worth it to cook in New York City. Not even if you love cooking. Not even if you’re good enough at it to go on TV shows.

Once you’ve accepted that you’ll never cook again, the world is your oyster (and yes, you can get oysters – they’re always on sale at your local bar before 7pm). It’s $30 for a healthy meal you can buy instantly at any one of the many, many, many instant meal bars dotted round Manhattan and Brooklyn, and all of a sudden you realise you’ve been liberated.

Out of work at 6pm, you’ve eaten by 6.30 and you have so much more free time. We’ve taken up hobbies. Actual hobbies! Who knew millennials with 9-to-5s had time for those?

A lot of people have asked us since we became “post-cooking” whether we miss it. And there are, of course, New Yorkers we know who do have “chef’s kitchens” and persist with cooking because they find it meditative and get joy out of preparing and eating a home-cooked meal.

To be brutally honest, I have learnt that that’s just not something which I value highly enough to continue to do it. So long as the food is there and it’s nutritious, I don’t care whether I chopped the carrots or not. All that’s in my fridge in Brooklyn right now is a few cans of Diet Coke and a face-mask, and I couldn’t be happier.