A dainty marble table, set among the bottle-lined shelves of a wine shop and facing into the public walkway of Melrose Market, makes for an elegant scene in which to casually sip rosé, complete with a hooked stand for hanging your purse. It is not, by any means, a place that a self-conscious person should endeavor to eat an oversize hunk of toast piled high with garlic-slicked greens and roly-poly halves of six-minute eggs cradling fudgy yolks. And yet. 

I dove, knife first into the day’s toast special at Cafe Suliman, letting the serrations do their best to tear through the pile of seasonal vegetables and sturdy sourdough from Ben’s Bread. Even once I divided it into what was as close to bite-size pieces as possible, it became clear that using a fork to lift a piece would doom the pine nuts and micro-herb garnishes to languish behind.

Thankfully, I am a messy eater to start with and hardly a self-conscious one at that, so I freely admit that I used an awkward combination of plate-level inhalation and my own paws to shovel every last bite of it into my mouth. Worth it, would do it again, and frankly, so should you. Just learn from my mistakes and sit facing away from the bustling central aisle of the market.