Discovering Delight

Milkshakes, blooms & gratitude.

Hello lovely readers! How’s everyone doing today? If your default answer is good, I invite you to take a pause and assess how you’re really feeling. If the response is still good, then yay! But if it’s not, honor what emotions are coming up for you and then dive into today’s word essay for some inspiring ways to discover delight in your everyday. As always, thank you for being here!

DELIGHT: Great pleasure, satisfaction or happiness, or something or someone that gives this. (Source: Cambridge Dictionary)

Sometimes, a quote stays with you.

In my dozen or so years as a journalist, I’ve interviewed hundreds of subjects on such wide-ranging topics, from favorite Maui cocktails to Michelin-starred restaurant chefs’ cooking tips to reducing restaurant food waste. Back in 2018, when I was living in North Carolina, I was the food editor at INDY Week, an alt-weekly newspaper covering Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.

For the 2018 style issue, I wrote about how chefs worked with local potters to source or create custom plates and serveware for their restaurants. One of the potters I interviewed was Michelle Vanderwalker, a talented potter and hospitality professional who co-owns Kingfisher (one of my all-time favorite bars) and Queeny’s (a fun, laidback bar with vibes for days), both in downtown Durham. Vanderwalker made all of the bar top tiles, drink coasters and ceramic cups for Kingfisher and when I visited her studio back in 2018, we talked about what ceramics add to the dining experience. Here’s what she had to say, a quote that I also included in my original article.

“It’s not necessarily something that people think about going into restaurants. They’re not going to go in and be disappointed that their serveware isn’t unique. But I think it’s a really nice surprise, and I think surprises are a really underrated element of the dining experience,” Vanderwalker says. “If you can be a little bit surprised and delighted by a detail such as the serveware being unique, and then you ask about it and find out that it’s made by someone locally, that elevates your experience of that restaurant.”

Since then, I’ve applied this notion of surprise and delight to the broader dining experience just about every time I go out to eat, whether it’s for fun or a restaurant review. I’ve repeated the “surprise and delight,” comment in the context of conversations about hospitality and what I think makes for a memorable restaurant or bar experience. It could be an unexpected ingredient, like the dill pickle hummus (pictured above) that accompanied falafel at a recent lunch at The Wine Kitchen on the Creek in Frederick, Maryland. Or maybe it’s a surprising way that a menu is written, like how The Wine Kitchen’s sommelier organized the wine list with whimsical and cheeky categories such as The Fizzy Business, described as “delightful and sparkling,” or I’m Not Drinking Any F#$%ing Merlot, with the descriptor of “Okay, okay. Relax, Miles.,” a cheeky nod to Paul Giamatti’s classic line in Sideways.

I think it’s possible to experience secondhand delight while dining out too. During our spring break trip to Naples, Florida to visit dear friends, my daughter ordered her first milkshake at Lake Park Diner. Ava herself is delight personified and my family and I often use the word to describe her, as do friends and teachers, one of whom described Ava as a literal ray of sunshine. When that strawberry shake hit the table, her eyes light up and she practically beamed with happiness. Watching her take her first sip, the way she closed her eyes and let her shoulders sink back, I felt a ripple of happiness spread across my belly.

Maybe this experience was made all the more delightful by the fact that I was surprised that this was her first milkshake. Ice cream is a year round season in our house, but I guess we usually opt for scoops when we go out for ice cream and though we’ve talked about making milkshakes at home, we usually opt for sundaes. You could see how much pleasure Ava derived from that shake, taking licks of the whipped cream, slowing slurping as if to make it last, then eyeing it longingly when I slid it out of reach so she’d eat some of her chicken tenders and fries. And she was practically giddy with delight that the kitchen had forgotten the cherry, as if they had anticipated her preferences.

My friend Lisa Archer, who is also my editor at and the publisher of Edible Blue Ridge, is also someone who personifies delight, which is perhaps why she’s particularly attuned to delight. She posts photos of places, people, and moments that delight her on Instagram with beautifully written, heartfelt captions that are equally delightful to read. I noticed that so many of her delight posts, whether they’re about food, flowers, or farming, are inextricably linked to gratitude. Like her backyard hens who provide the eggs for her seasonal frittatas, or the farmers and growers who supply ingredients for nourishing dinners, or for the blooms she spies in her garden and around town. It’s made me notice flowers I hadn’t before, like the proliferation of tiny wild violets sprouting in our yard and even in between bricks. Or the surprise tulips outside my aesthetician’s office s of a random cherry blossom tree in the parking lot of the bowling alley. How delightful!

Lisa’s posts are a powerful reminder that practicing gratitude is a conduit to delight, enabling us to more readily find satisfaction and happiness in everyday moments and to prime ourselves for great pleasure in novel ones, whether we’re receiving delight or offering it. Whether you’re sitting down to a homecooked meal or dining out, whether you’re tasting your first something or rejoicing in the return of spring blossoms, I hope you discover delight along the way.