beautiful food writing

This is wonderful. Read the entire article, please, but if you're "too busy", savour this:

From that night onward, Sunday dinner at Alex's became our weekly ritual. Between feasts -- and sometimes during -- life-altering decisions were made, hearts broken, songs badly sung. People came and went. For a few uncomfortable months, Josh the TV executive and I shared a girlfriend. Lucy the playwright arrived in the City of Light with an arrogant, pasty-faced, vegan boyfriend none of us liked, but then one Sunday she showed up at dinner on the back of a Frenchman's motorcycle, suffused with an unmistakable glow. Overnight she had become, as it were, a carnivore, and we responded by toasting her liberation and welcoming Yves into the gang. Ditto for Paul, the huge-hearted Russian who stole Deb the photojournalist's heart one night at a party; the following Sunday he became one of us, and is still.

And so it went. Sunday morning would roll around, and each of us would receive a mumbled phone call from a very hungover Alex: You, bring bread! You, haricots verts! You, wine! You, fresh sage! The meal's centerpiece -- the lamb shoulder, the Cornish hens, the poulet de Bresse -- our chef would trust to no one but himself. Dressed like a dandified gangster, he would roam the narrow streets around the Place du Temple and in his highly eccentric French discuss the freshly killed birds with the butcher.