You eat Ethiopian food in bread, right?
Yeah, exactly, but the bread thing is kind of porous and a little
sour and spongy. It's huge, and you break it up. They make lots of
curry and stewed dishes. It is so good. My best friend's favorite
restaurant was the Yankee Doodle. Again, the burgers were amazing,
but a totally different style of burger from Louis' Lunch, which is
more minimalistic. Yankee Doodle is just fat on fat on fat on fat,
but there's nothing better. They have, like, a refried donut there
that you can get, which is sick. But, yeah, the Doodle is pretty
outstanding. There's also Mamoun's for great Middle Eastern food. I
wasn't a regular at Mamoun's, but I know that a lot of people were.
So, yeah, those are my memories and, boy, was food essential while
I was at school, because I was often incredibly stressed and
overwhelmed and I needed the pleasure of really tasty food …
Got the food. Now tell us about New Haven.
Yale has a beautiful campus. I lived on old campus in a building
called Vanderbilt.
Yale is divided up into, like, 12 different
colleges. They did this to prevent the development of sororities
and fraternities, because they thought if they created smaller
communities for kids, they wouldn't need to create cliques in order
to feel safe. It was pretty successful. So there are different
places to eat and sleep and live. Each college is in a different
gated space.
How did you get to Yale?
I didn't grow up in Connecticut; I grew up here, in SoHo. But my
grandfather Gibson Danes was the dean of the art and architecture
school at Yale, so my dad spent a lot of his childhood in New
Haven. My aunt still lives there. I spent every
Thanksgiving at my
aunt's house, but she was in a more suburban area, so I wasn't so
aware of the university. It was probably a five-minute drive away.
We went there to eat turkey. I took the train, the Metro-North, and
it's about a two-hour ride from New York. I did my homework on the
way.