It’s a monthly occurrence:

Susan and I stay over at my mother’s house on the Upper West Side; the next morning, Susan takes the subway — if the weather’s good, she walks — down to her office at Random House. In my mother’s refrigerator there is a gnawed-upon turkey leg and the remnants of the last half gallon of Chicken in the Pot she ordered from Fine & Shapiro; there are no carbs to found — no bread for toasting, no cereal, nothing that might dare to convert to sugar and calories — so I take my mother out for breakfast at Cafe Luxembourg, which is located just down the street from her apartment. We have been going there since it opened, in the 1980s, before I was out of college. The sister restaurant to The Odeon, in Tribeca, Cafe Luxembourg is a quintessential bistro, straight down to the red leather banquettes, the hard-boiled eggs served at the bar, and the mirrored walls. Like most New York restaurants, their menu changes regularly but always manages to return to what it does best: creative, often (not often enough, in my opinion) traditional French bistro food reeking of civility and the assurance that some things never change.