Home is invoked with increasing frequency in writing about food. In a recent, randomly selected issue of Gourmet magazine, the concept of home threads its way throughout the pages: shrimp cakes with wasabi vinaigrette are “sophisticated yet homey and accessible,” while a story about a chef who has worked his way across the U.S. ends in his native Africa, where he will stay “just long enough to learn about the cooking of the one place he’s always called his home.” Even the restaurant kitchen is “starting to look more like home,” Gourmet says.

Home is a construct that inspires a surprising degree of consensus. It is “understood” that we are nostalgic for home and that we long for the comfort that home represents. There is an unspoken agreement that food memories are happy ones: a smiling grandma pulling steaming cookies out of the oven, or a happy family sitting around the table eating roast turkey and stuffing. It doesn’t matter that, in reality, your memories of home might include being yanked from the dinner table, a bar of soap shoved in your mouth as punishment for telling your brother to shut up, or being forced to sit at the table for hours and hours because you can’t bear to eat another bite of your mother’s foul cooking; and you aren’t excused until you finish everything on your plate.

When food writers evoke home, they refer to a nostalgic ideal that most likely never existed. This fantasy of home is a warm and comfortable place where the food is always delicious, nutritious and easy. It is this idyllic vision of home that fuels the concept of comfort food—home-style food, “just like Mom’s,” available on demand in restaurants everywhere.

Comfort food is not a post-9/11 phenomenon; it is part of the Zeitgeist of the mid-to-late 1990s. In 1999, Martha Stewart published Favorite Comfort Foods: A Satisfying Collection of Home Cooking Classics—a book so sumptuous I want to crawl into it and live there. Full-page photos of potatoes toasty in their crisp jackets, cheese oozing down the sides of a porcelain bowl steeped with onion soup (I can almost feel the warmth) invite envy and imitation, but do not remind me of any home I have ever lived in.

In my family, eating at home meant criticisms about table manners. It meant arguments, fueled by sibling rivalry over who got the bigger piece, which one of us was a pig, what food needed to be saved for leftovers, whose turn it was to do the dishes, and why there was never anything good for dessert. As the youngest, I learned to eat as fast as possible, in order to keep the rest of the family’s hands out of my plate.

Going out to eat was another matter. Everyone in my family was always on his or her best behavior, all of us acting as if we were socialized human beings. Culinary adventurers all, the members of my family were eager to sample exotic cuisines, to taste animals or vegetables we had never heard of before. For example, in Chinese restaurants, we always attempted to order from the Chinese side of the menu and waved away warnings that the food might be too spicy for us.

When I long for a homey place, I generally think of other people’s homes. I think of Aunt (not actually a relative) Rollie’s tuna noodle casserole and butter cookies, Sally’s mother’s chicken with mushrooms, and chocolate cake with lemon icing. That is why, right now, I am sitting, eating, drinking and writing at a place much better than home. I’m at Ciao for Now, a bakery and café in New York City’s East Village. It’s not like home. It’s like the home of a very good friend. Because here you get to pick your own mug from a hook that hangs in front of the counter, but you don’t have to wash the dishes. No one will criticize your table manners. Instead, they will tell you jokes and give you advice, or leave you alone while you read the paper or write an essay. They will do the shopping and the cooking, and you may come and go as you please.

When I go out to eat, I am looking for something new, something I can’t find within the four walls of my apartment. I want to experience the unfamiliar—or to escape to a fantasy of the past, rather than a memory of it. After all, if I wanted to be home, why would I go out?