What am I, crazy? Miserly? On a vendetta against all the brilliant and passionate chefs and restauranteurs of the most delectable city currently enjoying a renaissance of fine dining?

Yes and no. I am just like all of you. I love exciting, fresh, flavorful and diverse foods and appreciate how much of it I am exposed to. I live in Brooklyn and work at an office in Manhattan. After a couple years of lunching on what’s available at the delis, gourmet sandwich, salad, and soup shops in my immediate vicinity, I realized that everyone was serving up essentially the same things, under different colored awnings. The cold cuts were fresh and cold, the bread crusty, the salads were chopped and tossed that day, and there were the same twenty-or-so salad dressings to choose from. There were also the mega-delis that served sushi, stir-fry, udon, maybe brick oven pizza, and it was as if all the sushi assortments and panini combinations had been dictated by the mayor of the city. Collectively, unconsciously, Manhattan lunch spots had likened themselves to a chain. At a certain point, I stopped feeling whatever it was I was chewing. I became robotic, eating one thing out of seven or eight things I usually like to order, out of the twenty-one or twenty-four things that there were to order. None that were so much as difficult to prepare as to buy the choice ingredients, and layer together in some fashion.

And then the day when all hell broke loose: I got bored with brunch. I got bored with brunch in New York. I got bored with all the brunches in Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Fort Greene, and everywhere. I felt like the restaurants were all competing too hard with one another, that they managed to churn out the exact same things, for the same set price. I began dreaming of ways I would concoct my own twist on eggs benedict. I love eggs benedict, and what a joy to make myself.

Hence, my idea for Not Eating Out in New York sprang. It isn’t to say that the food here isn’t good enough for me, that I can cook better, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. But there’s a certain culture in this city of eating out your every meal, and that, to me, grew stale. Sure, it takes precious time away from that which you would spend busy at work. But I’m with those who think it’s their best time spent.

Maybe partially, influentially, I could be stealing this idea from my Media Criticism professor at Emerson College, Thom Cooper, who made his classes go on a month-long “media fast.” During the fast, we couldn’t listen to music, radio, read books or magazines, watch TV or movies, or pay heed to any of the above even in regard to the news. This kind of abstinence is comparable, in my opinion, to trying to receive all one’s solid nourishment from food prepared by oneself while living, and working, in New York.