Find it here.

It’s here.

Rubin writes:

Over the months I discovered that if I could recreate small moments of home that would carry me (in my imagination) to times and places and people I loved, then the worst hardship could be endured.

Food has a  central place in Spy Rules, much as it does in New York, the center of the American melting pot. Food is the front door through which you can enter another culture, and most everything is represented. There’s no finer New York experience than biting into something you’ve never eaten before as people around you speak a language you’ve barely heard before. Preferably late at night.

Sounds like a terrific movie, and I love casting Gina Carano as the “professional black-ops superwarrior.” (Sound familiar?) Wish I’d written it.

For the most part, people consider the subway an extension of their tiny apartments. There’s a delicate ballet to let people on and off and to keep from getting extra personal during rush-hour crams. It mainly works pretty well.  But there are those moments when you begin to take a seat and realize it’s layered in trash. Most of the time, it’s the remains of someone’s fast-food feast.

Last week, I caught my downtown C and slid onto a seat opposite a short husky woman in a black parka who was eating ravenously. She was businesslike with her multi-course Mickey D. At the end of her meal, she collated, placing wrappers thus and small bags within larger ones. At 50th Street, I glanced up and she was waiting for the doors to open as the train slammed to a halt. The parka could now be identified by the patch on the shoulder: MTA. Panning left, I saw her food detritus — McD bag and medium drink — sitting on the floor  where she had sat. A stray wrapper sat on the bench. Really? I thought. A subway worker trashing the subway?

As the doors parted and she fled the scene, I noticed a garbage can placed not three steps from the train doors.

Some people don’t have a taste for all that variety.  Give them meat and potatoes, not carne y papas. I recently ended a three-year stay in Meat & Potatoes America. There were other lures: mountains, desert, towering trees, wide-open spaces. Nice place to visit, but we woke up to find ourselves living there.

Which brings us to the lamb.

This is it:

Muslim Lamb at Fu Run in Flushing

A full and colorful explanation can be found at The Girl Who Ate Everything, a wonderful title for a blog and so much more appealing a subject than kicking a hornets nest. What you need to know about the Muslim Lamb is that it is indescribably sensational. With the first bite, the sensations unleashed in my taste facilities made me think of landing on a small island, hunting down a corpulent, surprisingly fierce beast and roasting it on the beach encrusted in a paste of hallucinogenic seeds and herbs.

Which brings me to urban density and why I came screaming back to New York. According to this article in The New York Times,  I am a Vietnamese chef, or at least I think like one. The short version of the author’s treatise is, the more people in a community, the more chance for exotic delights like Not Meat & Potatoes. Increase the density several fold and you get places like Fu Run in Flushing, and the magical Muslim Lamb (which, as far as I can tell, has little or nothing to do with Islam).

Strangely, Fu Run and its many delicacies including, well …

Stomach or spine? So hard to choose

… can be found across Prince Street from the Bland Houses.

Escape to Fu Run when it gets too bland.

For now, I’ll let you guess where it is. (Throw your comments on the Spy Rules page on Facebook. Sorry, but on an ebook budget, this site is not yet equipped for comments.)

During the day, the tunnel is crowded and busy and kind of annoying to fight through. Some of the subway system’s worst musicians seem to gravitate here — it must be the bad acoustics. At night, it’s a downright spooky place. I spent a lot of time in past years speedwalking through here from line X to line Z about 1:30 a.m. This was when I put a lot of Spy Rules together in my head. What a great place for a hit, I thought. What do you think?