The OMFG: El Paso Taqueria in East Harlem, where my consort and I wound up on New Year’s Day when I was too flu-ish to risk infecting friends in Connecticut but still wanted to get out and about to start off my year of the rabbit with something new. I suggested walking up to Harlem and back and somehow agreed to Target and back, and it was one gorgeous expedition, through the snowy park and up avenues we usually see only from the back seat of a cab on the way to an airport. We stopped in beforehand on 116th and a surly guy was swabbing tables and said it didn’t open till 1, so we took our time a couple of blocks away in the miles of deceptively priced aisles before heading back and were so hellbent on eating there we didn’t notice not a single table had any more food than guacamole. And the place was not empty. So we succumbed to the guacamole hard-sell and were beyond forgiving when it finally crawled from the kitchen, oversalted and with all the jalapeños clumped on one side of the molcajete. But then we sat. And sat. And sat, while the couple at the closest table kept asking where his pancakes might be, and ordering more sangria (they went through two pitchers). And as we watched bag after bag of delivery orders fly through the little dining room. Which would have been forgivable if our food had not finally arrived at Greenland temperatures. The tortilla soup that was going to restore me to life was just a bowl of clotted chicken fat, with cold diced cheese sunk to the bottom and hard tortilla strips throughout. Bob thought I was exaggerating till we swapped orders and I tasted his stone-cold enchiladas on “hot plate” with cold rice and beans on a separate plate. My notion of taking the shitty soup home to reheat didn’t fly, so he flagged down the surly guy to ask to have it reheated. Which, as I anticipated, took just short of a millennium and only made the bland mess too hot to eat. The waitress did apologize for the temperature, but she can fry in hell for never coming back with the leftover enchiladas we wanted to take home to try to resuscitate. The red sauce was actually pretty decent. WIGB? Only with an Uzi to my head.

Also, too: We finally stopped at Eataly on our way to the C train, after a stand-up Sunday brunch at friends’ in the East 30s, because there was no line outside when Bob wanted a coffee. He immediately balked on seeing the human congestion at the Lavazza stand just inside, but we persevered and he soon had a macchiato in hand, rather quickly by NY standards — although if there is a word for molasses in Italian, real baristas would be tossing it around. Jeebus, Americans move slow. The proportion of milk to espresso was off, but it was good enough to encourage us to delve deeper. And to find Caffe Vergnano also has a stand. We bought bread (“rustic with olives”), and an oily/airy slice of focaccia, and some red-leaf lettuce and Cara Cara oranges because the produce section is (I hate to say it) better set up to service customers than Fairway is. We left wanting to come back to eat. . .