Feature

Gael Greene's Where to Eat in 2000

Will I still be writing this column in 2050? Or will we all be eating Soylent Green?

Five decades from now, I see myself semi-retired on half-salary ($2.5 million a year to keep up with inflation), zapping my work in to newyorkmag.com by genetic upgrade through GOL (Galaxy Online) from an air-cooled tropical-island capsule in near outer space. All that is left is my brain with its ever-expanding memory cells. Of course, I have an exquisite zip-up body for human interaction and video remotes, and so I don't scare the astronauts' kids. My lifelong passion for delicious excess has left all my senses purring along as if I weren't a day over 82, and I can report what's new and hot and worth the detour interterrestrially.

To me it seems only yesterday that most Americans stopped leaving their cell pads, thanks to the new technology that lets us call up a virtual restaurant, enter the bar, get sloshed waiting for a table, be insulted by a maître d', and receive whatever we order in situ by wireless delivery of biological molecules that reconstitute themselves on ancient plates in the style of whatever twentieth-century star chef we specify.

With the recent announcement that archaeologists have unearthed and restored a handful of twentieth-century dry-world restaurants atop venerable skyscrapers, teen skybladers are eating with anatomical mouths again after years of more convenient osmosis. The kids are discovering nourishing soups and porridges stewed from plant forms raised hydroponically in rotating farm capsules, and the heirloom vegetables that remain from before the polar ice-cap melted and New York's few survivors were washed up on the shores of Omaha. Of course, the vegetables must be pulverized since no one has teeth anymore. Those of us old enough to remember can program ourselves to experience the sensations of eating Shun Lee's hot-and-sour soup as we slurp the usual biodegradable organic mush. I'm amazingly content. No worry about fitting into last year's Armani. Though now and then, for auld lang syne, I slip on a vintage hat.