Dinner with Edward: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship

by Isabel Vincent

We took solace in our mutual love of food, taking turns buying Petrossian croissants—fat, chewy, and buttery—whenever we had to go on a stake out. When on assignments in Flushing, Queens, we conducted “source” meetings at Joe’s Shanghai so that we could order the soup dumplings—pork meatballs encased in delicate little pagodas of white dough, steaming from the broth. We picked up tuna sandwiches—on thick slices of freshly baked, crusty rye bread, with finely chopped iceberg lettuce and tomato slices—from a Westchester deli when we were in the area. It was unlike any other tuna sandwich I’d had, and I am not sure if it was because it was truly great or because food just tasted better outside the newsroom, where on many days we ate three meals at our desks piled high with documents, which, in my case, intermingled with crumbs, stray pouches of Heinz ketchup, and old paper coffee cups.