New York has its own kind of gastronomic fascism too. Even worse than Moscow’s. A friend of mine, who claims to know everything there is to know about restaurants in the Big Apple, was horrified by my culinary adventures here and gave me a list of places that were supposedly mandatory visits. Every single one of them was a French restaurant. In his view, American restaurants in NYC are places that insult any civilized human being. So yesterday at lunch we decided to join civilization. And discovered one horrifying thing: half of New York’s restaurants close from 2:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Isn’t that idiotic? That’s prime eating time. We drove around to three places from the list and everywhere heard: We are closed for lunch. Complete nonsense. I honestly can’t even explain it. In the end, we gave up on haute cuisine and went to Harlem instead. There we had monstrously fatty ribs with a monstrous amount of sauce and yams. Wonderful. Really delicious. There is no visible gentrification in Harlem. We were the only white people there. In three and a half hours, we only once ran into some curious Japanese tourists. You should have seen how tightly my wife clutched her handbag. It was obvious that all the Black people in the world together wouldn’t have been able to yank it away and run off with it. But overall, there was no sense of danger. Just ordinary people going about their business. You can walk around and look at everyone. At night there might probably be trouble, but even then only if you go looking for it yourself. Still, the main conclusion I drew from visiting Harlem is that we must not allow districts like this, or anything similar, to appear in Moscow and other cities at any cost. Maybe today some fools think creating towns and settlements for migrants is an interesting idea, but in 5–10 years it will become a colossal headache and an almost unsolvable problem. Especially given Russian realities.