Musician Kyp Malone’s Grub Street Diet

Before making his home in Williamsburg and later the East Village, Kyp Malone, an artist and musician best known as a guitarist and vocalist for TV on the Radio, grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. “We mostly ate Eastern European food just because that’s what was in the markets,” he said. “I thought Polish food like kielbasa and sauerkraut and pierogis was just food.” The most resonant takeaway from that period was a love of potatoes, which remains his staple food: “They’re very versatile, they’re inexpensive, and they’re nutritious.” Recently back from a summer trip to Europe, Malone popped back to New York, where he has lived for 25 years — he co-owns the bar the Francis Kite Club in the East Village — in between stops on a national tour with TV on the Radio that will also hit Mexico and Australia later in the fall. Wherever he goes, he’s always looking for spuds: “Potatoes, fish, and greens — that’s what my body likes the most.”

Monday, August 25
My longtime friend and neighbor Lauren Bilanko brought a loaf of sourdough over. It was a leftover from an event she hosted over the weekend at Twenty Sided, the games store in Williamsburg. I didn’t want to climb above the sink to pull the toaster down, and it felt like overkill to turn the oven on, so I just drizzled olive oil over two slices, cut up an avocado and cherry tomatoes from the fruit stand on Broadway and Havemeyer, sprinkled some salt on top, and ate it standing over the kitchen sink. Pretty good.

Then I walked over to PPL café on Roebling Street, which I like because it’s full of plants. It’s very small and you can’t really sit inside, but the vibe is great — it’s mostly Japanese folks running it, and they know how to make coffee very well. I ordered a flat white with oat milk, which I prefer to cow’s milk, because it doesn’t make me shit my pants.

I ended up needing to go deal with some sound-tech stuff at the Francis Kite Club, the social club on Avenue C that I co-founded two years ago. But I couldn’t do much with the gear I had on hand, so I decided to walk around and ended up in Soho. I needed to at least try to do some clerical work and decided to sit at Odd Sister, where I ordered French fries, a glass of Barbera D’Alba (two glasses, ultimately), and some club soda.

The young people working the afternoon shift were upbeat and charming. So often when you go out to eat in New York City, you’re being served by people who, depending on the establishment, are likely being underpaid or mistreated in some form. And then it also feels like you’re stunting because you’re sitting outside and there are people passing by who don’t have the money to eat there — or maybe don’t even have the money for food that day. All of the contradictions involved in the experience of eating in a restaurant can make it something that I just don’t want to do most of the time. But if the people working are having an all right time, I’m comforted by the feeling that the culture of the house is positive — and I don’t feel like a dick for being there.

The chef and culinary artist Chantael Takeuchi, who I know from Los Angeles, was in town and hanging out at my dear friend Quinn Caruana’s apartment in Chinatown. I heard she was cooking and immediately made plans to take advantage of that. She made a red curry with sole that we poured over leftover takeout white rice. I also brought Broccolini, garlic, and a couple of sweet potatoes that I roasted with olive oil and salt. Kind of a funny combination with the fish curry, but delicious nonetheless. It was very vegetal and subtly, but not mildly, spicy. Quinn had a couple of bottles of Susucaru Rosso, a Sicilian red wine, that we got through by the end of the night.

Tuesday, August 26
An oat-milk flat white along with half a chocolate-chip cookie from PPL. Chased by an American Spirit Yellow cigarette.

I needed to go to Control, the musical-instrument store on Lorimer Street, to see if I could put a Eurorack modular synthesizer on consignment. On my way there, I stopped by Williamsburg Pizza and ordered a Sophia Loren slice, which is fresh mozzarella and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and marinated tomato slices, finished with garlic and basil. For my money, it is only rivaled by Two Boots’ Buckminster slice, which is marinara sauce, spinach, and roasted garlic with a blend of Parmigiano, provolone, and mozzarella cheeses. I added a little bit of crushed red pepper and garlic salt.

It’s close to the tomato-and-basil slice from Pizza Como I used to eat religiously when I was a teenager in New Jersey. I literally did eat it religiously, because I had two slices after church every Sunday and then went out preaching with garlic on my breath. There is a comforting nostalgia to these ingredients: The perfect combination of fat and salt. Halfway through, though, I remembered that Control had moved their shop from Bushwick to Greenpoint. Old habits die hard.

At the Francis Kite Club, I ran into one of my partners in the business, Alice McGillicuddy, and she generously gave me some kale and oyster mushrooms from her 607 CSA allotment. Later, I sautéed them both with garlic and olive oil, then cut up and boiled about a third of a five-pound bag of russet potatoes from the nearby CTown supermarket. I roasted them with olive oil and garlic and finished the plate with a tin of mackerel.

Before going to bed, I put six PG Tips tea bags in a two-liter carafe of water and left it on the counter to steep overnight.

Wednesday, August 27
When I woke up, the tea was opaque and very strong and tanninful. I probably drank two and a half pints of that tea over the course of the morning — closer to an espresso high than a cup-of-tea high.

Then raccoon breakfast: five handfuls of unsalted, unroasted cashews; a pint of blueberries; and a can of Brunswick sardines in olive oil. It’s quick and very low labor, full of things that I love, and enough to get me through the afternoon.

I had plans to see the movie Weapons with Catherine Brookman, a singer and composer I’ve had the good fortune to become friends with. But she was tied up finalizing things for her upcoming LP and didn’t make it to the neighborhood in time. So we changed course and had dinner at Samurai Mama, the noodle house on Grand Street. We had to sit at the communal table, which can sometimes be anxiety-inducing for me, but it ended up being fine, our neighbors being polite and nice to look at. I ordered iced green tea, the garlic-chicken appetizer, and cold udon noodles with salmon and ikura. I never waver from that order — I know that I’m never going to be disappointed eating it.

I end the night with a frozen Snickers ice-cream bar from a 24-hour bodega on Havemeyer. This is an indulgence that scratches an itch without encouraging self-loathing or sugar disease to the same extent that eating a box of chocolate-chip cookies or a pint of ice cream could.

Thursday, August 28
Oat-milk cortado from Oslo Coffee Roasters on Roebling. Hemp milk used to be my go-to milk, but when Oslo stopped serving it and switched to oat milk instead, I just got used to it. Then I ate the rest of the bag of cashews.

Coffee No. 2 was a flat white with oat milk from Ninth Street Espresso. I had a lunch meeting with my club comrades at Ayat on Loisaida Avenue (as Avenue C is also known). There are a lot of people making delicious Palestinian food in New York City, and Ayat is one of them — it’s also been regularly fundraising to send aid to Gaza.

My team and I share the baba ghannouj, labneh, and the chicken shawarma, washed down with a bottle of sparkling water. It took me a long time to open my heart to eggplant. I think that a combination of things happened: There is a really sizable Lebanese community in São Paulo; I spent some months there over the years and went to some incredible restaurants. And then, one summer, I found a couple of seedlings for sale at a Korean market. I just bought as many as I could carry home, and two of them turned out to be eggplant plants. I grew them on my Brooklyn terrace, and they were fairly generous with what they yielded — despite the black carbon from the BQE. It’s a later-in-life discovery that I can really get something very significant out of that flavor.

Somewhere near midnight, I found myself eating a tortilla-wrapped fried egg, avocado, and cheddar over the kitchen sink. Mixed the rest of the blueberries in Greek yogurt with some cacao nibs and a little bit of agave syrup and streamed some copaganda (a.k.a. Law & Order).

Friday, August 29
A flat white with oat milk from PPL. Walking toward McCarren Park, I passed the Rite of Passage vintage store and locked eyes with its owner, Giselle, through the window. She beckoned me in and offered to share a Tupperware full of brown rice and black beans with potatoes and cassava in a red sauce. I went to the closest bodega and bought us an avocado, a lime, and two cans of seltzer. Delicious.

I met up with Garrett Devoe, a singer-songwriter who is half of the acoustic duo Pure Horsehair. He had rented a car to drive us upstate to a sort of a “farm aid” gig we were booked to play the following day at the Belvedere Inn in Stamford. It was a three-hour drive, so a bit of a hike. Long enough for me to allow myself to buy a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and a bottle of unsweetened black tea. There may have been a couple of small bags of Planters cashew nuts and the requisite bottle of seltzer as well.

We were staying at Star Route Farm, which grows vegetables and is a staple of the Catskills Agrarian Alliance, a group dedicated to creating sustainable food systems. But we didn’t arrive until after midnight, and Tianna Kennedy, its co-owner, very generously made us some Swedish-style pancakes, which are thinner because they have more eggs and butter but less flour. We ate them with local maple syrup and butter; the pancakes could just have been a vehicle for the butter, because it was that good.

Then we very sleepily drank Meadow of Love absinthe from Delaware Phoenix, a local Catskills distillery. Absinthe is a very romanticized drink, and there’s a ritual involved that makes it feel more like you’re getting ready to do drugs than, say, have a vodka martini. We poured it over sugar cubes and ice cubes, several different ways, and at a certain point I was just experimenting with what was in the kitchen.

I was pretty wiped out by the time we were drinking, so I was riding fatigue as much as I was riding the high of the booze. We ran our mouths semi-coherently until we drifted off.