Delancey: A Man, A Woman, A Restaurant, A Marriage

Delancey: A Man, A Woman, A Restaurant, A Marriage (2014), a memoir by American author and food blogger Molly Wizenberg, chronicles Wizenberg's marriage and her efforts to open a pizzeria in Seattle with her husband. For Delancey, Wizenberg received a Goodreads Choice Award nomination in the category of Best Food & Cookbooks.

At the beginning of the book in 2004, grieving for her father who has recently passed away, Wizenberg is in Paris researching her PhD dissertation in cultural anthropology. However, in her grief, Wizenberg is drawn to the local patisseries and chocolates. This sparks a life-long love affair with gastronomy that causes her to quit her PhD studies to start a food blog. Wizenberg moves back to Seattle and her blog, Orangette, becomes a huge hit. The London Times names it the world's best food blog.

Through her budding celebrity and food writing, she attracts the attention of New Yorker Brandon Pettit who is trying to earn a living building wooden boats and violins. At first, they correspond only through email. Soon they meet in person, and a romantic relationship develops. Within a year, Brandon moves to Seattle for a PhD program in music composition. They marry in 2007, and Brandon pays for school by working on the kitchen staff at a number of Seattle restaurants. His musical background is partly what lands him a job at Seattle's award-winning Boat Street Cafe. According to Wizenberg, the cafe's owner, Susan, prefers to hire artists because "artists have a keen sense for details: you can teach an artist to cook, but you can't always teach a cook to understand nuance and details."



Brandon misses his former home in Manhattan and, in particular, the storied Brooklyn pizzeria Di Fara. With some experience in the restaurant business under his belt, along with an obvious love for pizza, Brandon abandons his PhD program, setting out to recreate the Di Fara experience for Seattle food-lovers. With the help of Wizenberg, Brandon travels the country eating pizza, low-end and high-end alike. As they continue their research, Brandon is fortunate to obtain a sample of the dough Di Fara uses for its pizza. Again, Brandon's musical background comes in handy as he pokes and stretches the dough, attacking it the "same way he’d been taught to parse music—to break it down to its component parts, to pick out and listen to a single instrument amidst the noise of an orchestra—he began to teach himself to parse the dough."

As Vizenberg helps Brandon with this quest, their marriage comes under a great deal of strain. After Vizenberg publishes her first book, the New York Times bestseller A Homemade Life, she becomes a full partner in the restaurant Brandon has decided to call Delancey, one of the last subway stops in Manhattan as one heads to Brooklyn on one of the most-used lines. The stress of preparing the restaurant, followed by the stress of operating it, gives Vizenberg time for little else, including writing and enjoying food.

Yet, Vizenberg's love for Brandon keeps her going. She learns, in dramatic fashion, a valuable lesson about marriages—they are never free of conflict. Vizenberg finds ways to incorporate her more intimate relationship with food into her new life as a frantic restaurateur. For example, when one of the pizzas comes out all wrong and is unsuitable for consumption by customers, she calls it a "love pie," writing, "The only person they’re fit for is someone who already loves you and doesn’t mind that dinner looks like a volcanic eruption."



Delancey is an instructive and poignant memoir about marriage, written with the verve and style of an ace food blogger.