The Dough Doesn't Lie
There is a particular kind of love story that only New York City can produce — two kids from the outer boroughs who meet on a dorm room floor eating pepperoni pizza, who build something beautiful together, and who eventually have to reckon with the fact that the thing they built outlasted the marriage that built it. Emily and Matt Hyland walked into Armchair Expert carrying chocolate bonbons from Matt's new wife's chocolatier business and advance copies of Emily's new book of poetry, which tells you everything you need to know about how far they've traveled from that floor. What this conversation reveals, quietly and then all at once, is the way that a shared creative act — a restaurant, a marriage, a sauce made from wing drippings and Kewpie mayo — can become its own third entity in a relationship, one that neither person can fully possess or fully abandon. The Emily burger didn't just win awards. It became the child of a custody battle. The cookbook copy was due the same summer the marriage collapsed, which meant Emily Hyland had to sit down and write their love story in real time while the love story was ending. That is the kind of psychic weight that no amount of New York Magazine coverage can metabolize. What Dax keeps circling, with the particular hunger of someone who has rebuilt himself from rubble, is the question of what survives. Not the restaurant — the restaurant survived fine, thirty locations and counting. But the thing underneath it: the friendship, the mutual respect, the ability to sit in a Los Angeles studio together and say his wife is lovely and mean it. That takes years of therapeutic work and separate growth and, apparently, one week in L.A. with Simone acting as referee. The sauce, it turns out, was an accident. Crispy pig ears, wing sauce, Kewpie mayo, and a moment of inspiration at the family meal. Most of the best things are. The burger is underpriced at fifty-five dollars. The love story is still being written.