At Blanca is a 12-seat tasting counter hidden in the back of the Bushwick pizzeria Roberta’s, just beyond the recording studio and the tiki bar, a tomato arrives on a plate. It’s a Canestrino, from Italy, grown upstate in the Hudson Valley at Norwich Meadows Farm. Victoria Blamey, the chef, cooks it for 14 hours with a little sherry amontillado. It mostly holds its shape on the plate, but when cut it collapses into a pool of almost creamy pulp. It’s pure umami. There are slices of bluefin tuna belly picked off the grill with juniper branches on a plate to the side, but it doesn’t matter. At that very moment, nothing could ever taste as good as this tomato.

“It’s just the tomato,” Blamey says from behind the counter.

There are moments like this happening every day in the almost 50,000 restaurants in the city of New York. They have been happening since the city was founded by the Dutch in 1624. These moments come and go, scattered across the five boroughs, from the Sri Lankan restaurants on Staten Island to the natural wine bars on the Lower East Side. Moments of pure joy and ecstasy. When all the elements of life here – all the shouts and horns in the streets and the rumbling of the trains, the sweltering heat of summer or the frigid cold of winter, the rotting garbage in sidewalk trashcans or smoke of the Nuts 4 Nuts carts wafting down 5^th avenue – seem to come together magically on a plate.