Marriage Quote by Poppy Z. Brite

There is a sly double exposure in that parenthetical: "(my husband is a chef)" reads like a credential and a confession at once. It signals access, taste, a kind of insider authority about food culture, then immediately undercuts itself with a plainspoken complaint. The sentence performs the move many city-dwellers know by heart: praise the scene, then name the missing pieces that would make it feel like a real metropolis rather than a well-fed bubble.

Brite’s phrasing is careful in its modesty. "Mostly I enjoy" is a hedge that feels conversational, almost apologetic, as if anticipating pushback from locals protective of their dining identity. The wish for "wider diversity of ethnic food" points to an appetite that’s cultural as much as culinary: restaurants become shorthand for who gets to be visible, who gets to be catered to, who is considered part of the everyday public. "Ethnic" is also a tell of its era and audience, a catch-all label that treats non-Anglo cuisines as one category, even as it asks for more of them. That tension is the subtext: a desire for difference expressed in the language of someone still centered within the default.

Contextually, it feels like a snapshot from a particular kind of American urban life: enough restaurants to be enjoyable, enough culinary expertise at home to be discerning, but not enough immigration-driven variety to satisfy curiosity. The line lands because it’s intimate and civic at the same time; it turns a personal palate into a small critique of a place’s cultural bandwidth.