Michael Cruz Kayne’s Grub Street Diet

Michael Cruz Kayne is on the verge of a few send-offs: His daughter is heading to high school (“La Guardia, brag”), his job as a writer at The Late Show With Stephen Colbert is winding down in May, and his very personal comedy special, Sorry for Your Loss, about the death of his son, was just released on Dropout. After performing and developing it for over six years, the show is “one I could do every day forever,” he says. “It definitely makes me sad. But I don’t mind being sad.” He spent the past week promoting the special for possibly the last time, meandering around his sometimes unrecognizable neighborhood of Williamsburg on an off-week from Colbert (“Places where kids I went to college with would buy cocaine are now pediatricians’ offices”), and cooking vats of rice for his very busy doctor wife plus celebrating their anniversary. 

Saturday, March 21
It’s pancakes for breakfast, or I fear my kids will have me murdered. (I don’t usually eat pancakes, but it’s my cheat day.) I would like to say that I use a family recipe passed down to me from my pilgrim ancestors, but my ancestors were Jews and Filipinos, and the recipe is from a little company called Bisquick. Is that even a company? Or just a brand? What’s the difference? That’s something to Google later, and then Google can ask its AI, and then a whole village in a country I’ve never heard of will go without water for a month because I had a question about the taxonomy of corporations. Anyway. It’s Bisquick mix, eggs, milk, and vegetable oil.

I drink water with my pancakes and also with everything else. It’s pretty much the only thing I drink. I don’t like alcohol (no cool reason, it just tastes like shit and is expensive as shit and makes me feel like shit), and I don’t like coffee (ibid., tastes like a hot tire). On the rare occasion I have the tiniest sip of coffee, it feels like I’m on crack. I could fight a yak. I pretty much just drink water all the time, except occasionally I have a Coke, which tastes amazing for four sips and then like you’re being waterboarded with Jolly Rancher juice for the rest.

Whenever I’m not eating, by the way, I’m chewing gum. I love gum #GumBoy. Most sugar-free gums are good, but the gold standard is Trident White Peppermint. Little crunch on that shell? Ooh, yeah. If you’re ever trying to imagine what I’m doing (oh my God, you’re obsessed with me), I’m chewing gum.

Around lunchtime, my daughter (13) abandons us to hang out with her friends. My son (16) has taken a job watching the desk at the gym down the street from us during its slow hours. He’s paid $40 for three hours, which might be illegal but is definitely commensurate with the amount of work he’s being asked to do (sit, just sit). He texts me asking for food from a Venezuelan pop-up tent down the block. I go and buy him two cheese arepas, a massive chicken skewer (“Uno pollo,” I say to the guy. Does he think this is cool?), and a bowl of chicharrón. By the time I get to my son, I have eaten one of the arepas and half the chicharrón. My hands and the corners of my lips are stained with sauces, and I suck my fingers dry. I will eat anything with my hands, so what? I think of this habit as part of my genetic coding as a Filipino, but maybe it isn’t.

Between lunch and dinner, I nosh on a snack-size version of a mix that my mom bought us from an Asian grocery. The little packet has some Chinese words on it, and underneath, in English, it says “Daily Beans.” As far as I can tell, nary a bean in the bag. I eat three packets.

For dinner, I make a classic Kayne family meal: broiled flank steak, a side of broccoli, and a side of sushi rice. It’s always good, except for this time, when I overcook the steak, and it tastes like eating a belt. Oh, also, there’s too much salt. I encourage everyone to cut their slices small. It doesn’t help. My family eats it in quiet disappointment.

Before bed, I take a mix of water and ground-up psyllium husk because it’s supposed to be a natural aid for digestion. I try to keep everything natural if I can. Not including the steroid creams I use for eczema and the twice-monthly injectable I take for my eczema, and the oral minoxidil I take for none of your fucking business. That’s right, I eat minoxidil. So what.

Sunday, March 22
It’s my anniversary! My wife and I have been married for [redacted, don’t ask, we are extremely young] years! Ah! She has made plans for the evening; I have bought her a gift. That’s the division of labor that works for us and our marriage, and it’s okay if you’d do it a little differently. Every marriage is a foreign country, as I once saw Diane Sawyer say on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

In the morning, I whip up an MCK standard: yesterday’s leftover rice fried up with egg and whatever-the-shit is in the fridge. Today it’s chopped scallions and carrots. Little sea-salt flakes, little crushed red pepper, little garlic, and olive oil. Never not good. We make too much rice every night and then fry up the rest in the morning. The Kaynes don’t have a family crest, but if we did, it would be a picture of a rice grain with whatever the Latin word for “rice” is written around it three times.

Midday, while my son is at the gym, my daughter is at gymnastics, and my wife is with friends, I hit up Cooper Park to play basketball with guys who are young. I don’t know exactly how old they are, but I do know that they find my age disturbing. Once I said I was older than them, and one of them said, “You can’t be that much older,” and then I said my age, and he went, “What the fuck?! Holy shit! Wow. Really?” His eyes widened so far that they were in danger of becoming one big eye. I hurt myself every time I play. Today it’s the ankle. I convalesce at home with a Sapporo Ichiban ramen bag. I smash it while it’s still in the bag, then pour the smithereens into boiling water and a dash of the seasoning packet on top. I eat it before the noodles fully soften, so they’re still crunchy. Mmmmmmm.

At night, I give my wife a ring, and she takes me to Speakeasy Magick, which seems like it could be corny but was actually start-to-finish mind-blowing. I’m still thinking about one of the tricks. Guys, I love close magic, what can I say? They serve a popcorn (I don’t normally eat popcorn, but it’s my cheat day) with some kind of mystery seasoning (Old Bay?) that I devour throughout the show.

When it ends, we have a reservation at Audace (new to us!), and we arrive to find that we are crushingly tired. Having already ordered and mauled a beet, orange, goat cheese, and spinach salad as well as a pizza, we ask the waiter to pack our whole branzino and a side of asparagus to go and head home. Our kids have bags of Taco Bell strewn around and are scrolling on their phones (strict limit of 24 hours per day!). In some ways, I swear we are great parents. Son eats the branzino in one bite.

Monday, March 23
I don’t have work at Colbert this week, so I have the house to myself and wake up a little later. It’s our second-to-last dark week until the show ends in May. I don’t know how I feel about that ending. Whenever someone asks what I’m going to do after, I piss my pants a little. But mostly, the vibes are pretty good, and I try not to think about it. What I will miss: the snacks. We are given access to a criminal number of snacks. There’s a drawer of Famous Amos cookies that I have been single-handedly keeping alive. I am, I’m told, renowned for my Amos consumption.

Instead of my workday bag of Famous Amos, I have a Perfect Peanut Butter Bar. Are these good for me? They taste just a little bit like chemicals, so I assume they are.  For congestion, I also drink something called GNGR Immunity Aid, which is a juice shot containing a weapons-grade concentration of ginger. It clears my sinuses and probably turns my urine into magma. Worth it.

For a snack, it’s last night’s asparagus from Audace, which is perfectly cold. I eat it with my fingers.

Later, I go to Land to Sea, a Chinese coffee shop down the street. I get a sencha tea and a ham-and-cheese bolo bao. The sugary, crumbly topping (it’s my cheat day) of the bao all is over my mouth and my keyboard as I sit in their back room and work on my pilot (the ~19th pilot I’ve gotten to page two of). It takes some restraint not to pick the crumbles off the keyboard and eat them. I do not have that amount of restraint. Yes, people are looking at me weird.

At dinner, my wife and I team up. You know when everyone in your family is exactly aligned in their culinary tastes? We are not that. Son likes steak; daughter hates it. Daughter likes sausage; son hates it. So tonight, there are a lot of options. Baked chicken thighs (I like bone-in; everyone else is wrong), sausage with flecks of feta, rice, this beautiful Castelfranco radicchio salad (hey! Surprise, Michael! Your kids hate this!), and sautéed tomatoes and cannellini beans topped with broiled halloumi and honey. I love cooking so long as it’s easy.

Tuesday, March 24
Second day off in a row, so I am totally unmoored. I am thinking of posting something on Instagram today; if I do, I will spend the rest of the day psychologically entangled with the internet. If I post something on social media, then you can just assume the day is lost. I can’t hear you or see you. I am in the land of Likes. Why not more Likes? Why not Likes from this person or that person? Have I been shadow-banned? I eat a Twizzler (so good! My compliments to the chef). Okay, two Twizzlers (my fourth consecutive cheat day).

I have a lot of work to do this week because my one-man show is coming out on Dropout. Op-eds, podcasts, interviews. All of it is basically fun, but I am chronically tired (doctor says this has to do with diet?? and not sleeping enough??? but *I* say fuck you, doctor), so I am trying to do things that give me energy. I go to the gym! It doesn’t work. Actually, it is bad, and I don’t recommend it. I feel like throw-up. Not like I’m going to throw up. I feel like how I imagine throw-up itself feels. Nothing eight more Twizzlers can’t cure.

Around lunchtime, I decide not to post anything, which gives me the deepest possible relaxation on earth. I celebrate with three hard-boiled eggs, sliced, salted, sprinkled with crushed red pepper.

In the afternoon, Wife and Daughter and Daughter’s Best Friend and I go to an event for students who’ve been accepted to La Guardia (brag). My daughter is an excellent student, but she got a horrible lottery number. The best numbers start with 00. Hers started with E, not even in the numbers anymore. She’d been the lead in a bunch of shows, so she took a shot at auditioning. We hired Dana Berger, an acting coach who picked her two contrasting monologues. I looked at them and said, “I don’t think these are contrasting enough.” The acting coach said, “Actually, you pay me to do this, why don’t you let me do what I do?” She was completely right.

We watch teens do Shakespeare monologues (a 16-year-old has somehow perfected “Put out the light and then put out the light”), rehearse for Noises Off, and sail through every question posed to them by nervous parents. And the kids are all seemingly very old? Is my daughter this old? She is. The whole affair dazzles. We’re close to my office, so on the way home I stop in to grab a packet of the Gum We Keep in the Office™, which is Eclipse Spearmint, which is pretty good. We also stop by Sacco Pizza in Hell’s Kitchen for the unfussiest, best, most underrated slice in the city.

At night, I do something insane. Long story short, I have made an agreement with Daughter to try gymnastics, so I go to her gym (Ms. J’s in Williamsburg), where her coach takes me through gymnastics warm-ups (excruciating) and teaches me to do a handstand (impossible). With a bit of positive reinforcement, I manage not to die and instead have a lot of fun. I get a lot of “Actually, could have been a lot worse,” which I take as a tremendous victory.

We’re done late, so we go out to eat at Birds of a Feather on Grand Street. It’s the rare restaurant that pleases all Kaynes. The kids trust the kitchen enough that they’ll try anything. Tonight it’s steamed soup buns (exactly perfect), scallion pancakes (never too oily), dan dan noodles (opening up those sinuses again), sweet-and-sour baby ribs (never too sweet), Curiously Tasty Chicken (ordered for the name alone), and fried rice with shredded duck (some of us pick around the duck, not me!). If it seems like too much, it is! We overorder a lot, but I will house the leftovers, no problem.

Wednesday, March 25
Third day off of work, so I become completely untethered from reality. Should I buy a romper? How much are season tickets to the Rangers? If I did five push-ups at a time, could I do a thousand push-ups today? What if I took up the flute?

For breakfast, I get a bagel with lox from Simply Nova. I go capers, plain cream cheese, pastrami lox on a toasted everything bagel. Simply Nova’s sandwich construction is a master class in restraint. The bagels are tasty, but, even better, they’re a normal size, not the puffed-up monstrosities you get at most places. They spread only a human amount of cream cheese instead of trying to suffocate you with a massive slop of the stuff. This way, you can feel all the components of the sandwich. I remember hearing Dan Barber say the phrase “respect for ingredients” once. I think this is what he was talking about.

One of our family’s faves that I make around once a month is bo ssam. I stroll to buy the pork from the Meat Hook, where every employee is hot in their own individual way. The meat isn’t cheap, but it’s really delicious. At home, I coat it in sugar and salt and toss it straight into the oven, where it stays for hours. I have two podcasts, an interview, and a video shoot today, so the bo will be cooking while I’m out of the house. Is this safe? Sound off in the comments?

My only sustenance through all the media stuff is fistfuls of Trident White. I like doing press. Everybody’s nice, and they’re just trying to help you promote the thing. Roughly 50 percent of the time, it’s the exact same question, and it’s hard not to give the same answer. But I’m not famous enough to be over it. It’s all very, very fun. I don’t realize until afterward that my hair looks insane. My forehead, which is, uh, prominent, looks gargantuan. In the comments of one of the posts that comes out later in the day, someone says I look like Megamind. Sucks when your haters are right!

I’m tired after performing the persona that is myself all afternoon, so naturally, my body craves a quick jolt. I stop into a little bistro called CVS where the chef has some of my favorite Nerds Gummy Clusters (it’s fine, cheat day).

At home, the pork is cooking nicely and the house is not a pile of ashes, so that’s a relief. Just before the family gets home, I put on the finishing touches. The original inspiration is David Chang’s bo ssam recipe on the New York Times’ “Cooking” site, but if David Chang could see what I make, he would probably punch me in the neck. I don’t brine it overnight (can’t tell the difference), I don’t use bone-in pork (same), and I’m making my sauces with whatever is around. Carrots and soy sauce and cucumbers and olive oil and apple cider vinegar? Fuck it, why not.

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