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My waiter came by, brought me a warm towel for my fingers, a stack of menus, a beer. Then we started talking -- about the menu, about the Izakaya concept, about how to order and what I should order and how much of everything I should order.

“How hungry are you?” he asked.

And pretty much everything after that was just a blur.

When I sat down to write this week’s review, I couldn’t decide on the best way to talk about Izakaya Den, the new restaurant from Toshi Kizaki, owner of the Sushi Den.

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Laura does not eat breakfast out. Ever. She’s one of those people who dreams of someday living in a hotel penthouse -- not for the housekeeping or the views or the glamour of being the sort of person who lives in a hotel penthouse, but just for the room service: bowls of cereal and coffee and platters of pastries appearing outside the door every morning as if delivered by magical kitchen elves.

I, on the other hand, am one of those people who dreams of food. And on Saturday night, I did. Knishes and chicken soup. A hot-plate special of kosher salami and scrambled eggs. Blintzes topped with a fall of shiny red cherries in syrup. Long before I fell asleep, I was imagining standing in line at the Bagel Deli & Restaurant -- reconstructing from my somewhat foggy recollections a rattletrap relic of other days and other places, a strip-mall operation that’s part market, part lunch counter and mostly Jewish deli, renowned for its tenacity, its salt bagels, its matzo brei, lox, chopped liver and bottles of rendered chicken fat knocking around its dark coolers.

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