In my apartment hunt, all the kitchens are terrible

Rebecca Flint Marx is the editor of Eater at Home. All she wants from her kitchen is nice tiles on the backsplash and an oven she can trust.

I'm writing this from Week Don't Ask of a New York City apartment hunt. Looking for a New York apartment during the best of times can politely be termed a challenge; looking now, when rent has reached an "unusual" high and the vacancy rate is near an all-time low, can be termed a soul-chewing farce. I don't want to move but have no choice in the matter, and as such I've been seeing a lot of places, most of which evoke the LCD Soundsystem anthem "New York, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down."

This is a newsletter about food, not real estate, but the latter is making me think an awful lot about the former. Because one thing you'll notice if you see enough rentals, especially newly renovated ones, is that most of their kitchens suffer from a shared malady of stupefying, generic sameness. The cabinetry is featureless, the countertops are Caesarstone quartz, the appliances are smug stainless steel. It's billed a luxury, even if the kitchen is just a dedicated wall in a "living space," but this vision of luxury is so antiseptic that it's less culinary than mortuary.

Photo illustration by Andrea D'Aquino.

These renovated kitchens fascinate and repel me, because they reflect what developers think people want now: how they want to cook, and by extension, live. In New York, this is complicated by the dearth of square footage typically available. In this sense, a "luxury" kitchen becomes a distraction from the rest of the apartment's distinct lack of luxury — if you have a sleek, brand-new kitchen plonked in the middle of a dwelling with little to no natural light and a bedroom smaller than a walk-in closet, then how bad can the place really be?

New York is, of course, its own strange beast, and I'm aware that people in the rest of the country are prone to gaze upon our real estate woes with pity and scorn. But the sickness infecting modern kitchen design is not limited to the five boroughs, and more often, bigger just means blander, and luxury is shorthand for kitchen islands the size of minivans and styling that suggests either a minimalist tomb or a farmhouse in the throes of hagiography. It's difficult to imagine people cooking in these spaces, in part because they seem too immaculate, in part because their smart appliances look like they're programmed to kill you if you spill anything.

I love a beautiful kitchen as much as the next person, and accept that luxury means different things to different people. But, at the risk of sounding reactionary, I long for the kitchens that don't try too hard, and prioritize personality over keeping up with the Joneses. (Who are the Joneses, anyway? They sound like assholes.) To me, a luxury kitchen means functioning appliances and drawers that don't open of their own accord. Just give me a place I can make a mess and a landlord I can believe in. The rest is negotiable.

Kat Thompson

What I'm Enjoying on the Site:

WTF, Eggs? It's egg week!
As someone who has dabbled with gluten-free pasta — to mostly lackluster ends — I really appreciate this guide to gluten-free pasta by Eater LA's Nicole Adlman.
Passover is upon us, which means it's time to resurface our great matzo taste test.

What Else I'm Consuming:

Reading: It's been almost two weeks since I've read Martha Bayne's Oldster essay about dancing after recovering from breast cancer, and I'm still thinking about it.
Watching: Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag is a fun little espionage thriller, and also a great showcase for beautiful people wearing beautiful clothing. (And they have a beautiful kitchen!)
Listening: The excellent "Moonlight Concessions," the first new Throwing Muses album in five years.