Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh

by Unknown

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  I asked my father if he enjoyed my grandmother’s food, and he replied diplomatically, “It was very good.” Actually, she wasn’t much of a cook, but she was a lovely grandmother who had a habit of bringing me a football whenever she visited.

  “I was happy to find somewhere to eat,” my father added.

  “And I was happy to find a boyfriend,” said my mother. “There was nobody in Somerville, and then he came along, a Jewish boy.” He was quite a catch, a young man who had a master’s degree, played baseball, kept kosher, and said his morning prayers.

  My sister and I grew up outside Philadelphia in a sprawling, low-rise, postwar apartment complex. She’s a few years older, and my first food memory is of crying uncontrollably when she came home from first grade and announced that hot dogs had been served in the cafeteria. I haven’t felt so cheated since. Her favorite food was the fried clams at Howard Johnson’s, the highway restaurant chain whose business would ultimately be usurped by McDonald’s, which prevailed, in my opinion, by staying out of the clam business. I was bewitched by the hamburgers seared on a flat metal grill at the Drexelbrook Swimming Club, which we didn’t belong to but I could look down upon from the yard behind our building. I was never fortunate enough to eat one of those burgers, but when the winds drifted upward, carrying their bouquet, my craving was nearly unbearable.

  I remember that Dick Clark, not yet a national phenomenon, lived in our apartment complex, a factoid I’ve dined out on for decades. My father recently informed me that I was wrong and that the celebrity was Ed McMahon. Possibly neither of us is correct, for the memories of young boys and old men are equally unreliable. I vividly recall a childhood craving for another savory foodstuff denied me, the Taylor Pork Roll sandwich sold on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. My father may have tolerated non-kosher, but he never moderated his prohibition against pig.

  He was an executive with Gimbel Brothers, and on Wednesdays, when the Philadelphia department stores remained open late, he didn’t come home for dinner. On those nights, my mother would often broil F O R K I T O V E R

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  a ham steak with pineapple and brown sugar, a treat beyond imagining, although I seem to recall her overcooking it from fear of trichinosis, a dread disease of the 1950s that deviant Jewish pork-eaters dared not ignore. Fridays we ate broiled flounder, the rationale being that the fish had to be fresh for the Catholics. My sister reminded me that Fridays were the only nights my mother served bread with our meals; it was on hand to rescue us in the event a bone became caught in our throats.

  None did, so I never learned exactly how white bread saves lives.

  For more than twenty years, I’ve been visiting my parents at Wynmoor Village, a gated community with walls so low I assume they were constructed not to keep cat burglars out but to keep the less nimble occupants in. Their apartment is on the second floor of a four-story pink-and-white building. I remember when they stopped using the stairs and started using the elevator. I remember when I did, too.

  When my parents left Philadelphia for Florida in the late seventies, my mother continued preparing meals much as before. Leaving the single-family, split-level house where she and my father had lived since the late fifties meant adjusting to a much smaller kitchen, which she managed effortlessly. Unlike the other great cooks of the late twentieth century, she was no prima donna who demanded state-of-the-art equipment before she would broil a veal chop. Nor was she dismayed by Florida’s heat and humidity. She was as tough as a steel-worker, having spent her life standing over a stove.

  My sister and I each visit four or five times a year, mostly because very few others do. My father’s brothers and sisters, all of them still in New Jersey, have difficulty traveling. All three of my father’s golf partners, Larry, Irving, and Sidney, passed away. I enjoyed their company a lot, because they were sweethearts and I could outdrive them.

  When I asked my father if he had seen my mother’s oldest friend, a woman from Somerville, he replied, “At some point, she forgot about us.” The last time I went down to see them, I learned that my mother’s closest friend from the building, a widow, had died, but she hadn’t been around for the previous five years. She’d been in a nursing home all that 2 4

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  time. When I hear something like that, I do the math: five years in a nursing home equals 1,825 days at $185 a day, about a third of a million dollars. I asked my father to tell me what he knew of the life she led in the home. “She just lay there,” he said.

  I always feel pain when I think about my mother. She can hardly use the telephone, and the television disturbs her. Because her legs are so weak, she can no longer stand outside the apartment on the terrace, watching over the parking area, hoping to see me drive up when she knows I’m coming for a visit. I’m not always sure she remembers when I’m coming for a visit. Having parents as old as mine is about knots in your stomach. People who have aging parents might think they understand, but a slightly dotty mother who forgets where she puts the car keys is different from parents who have reached their late eighties or nineties. I cannot think of a single advantage to being my mother’s age except one. She is now so old that her doctor has lifted all dietary restrictions and she is allowed to eat whatever she wants.

  I don’t believe I missed a meal in my life. My mother cooked, day and night. “It used to drive me crazy,” said my sister, “hot food three times a day and meat and potatoes at lunch.” I’m sure I developed my contempt for salads and my need to toast or grill sandwiches from this childhood taboo on cold food.

  The only time my father prepared food was when we had a barbecue—that’s what we northerners call food burned in our backyards. I would gather twigs, and he would twist newspapers, and we would finally get the briquettes to glow. For a long time, I found it impossible to understand how my father got permission to cook. It wasn’t like my mother to relinquish control of a meal. Only recently, when I spoke to my Aunt Dorothy, did I obtain an explanation that made sense. She told me that while my father was making burgers and hot dogs outside, my mother was in the kitchen readying brisket and chicken as a backup.

  I didn’t resent my mother’s refusal to teach me to cook. I come from an era when parents did what they did and kids did what they did and F O R K I T O V E R

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  the borders weren’t crossed. I played outside a lot, read a lot, and hated piano lessons more than any kid alive, which means I was a pretty standard fifties-era child, unexceptional in every way. Because I never knew hunger, my mother always found clothing for me in the

  “husky” section of the children’s departments, and when I finally confronted her on that, she said, “You weren’t fat. Plump.” I know school counselors of today think this is a recent trend, kids desperately wanting to be thin, but I have firsthand knowledge that it wasn’t unheard of when I was growing up.

  My mother represented what she had come from: industrious, Eastern European, rising-middle-class stock. I know she regretted not going to college, but she had no idea how to express such a lofty ambition and was held back by timidity. My sister, who went to graduate school, claims that my father had no desire to send her to college and that without my mother’s insistence it would not have been possible.

  My mother was a housewife, as were most of her friends. A few helped out in their husbands’ businesses, but that meant not being home to make dinner, which would have been unimaginable. She wasn’t beautiful, but I believe she might have been described as handsome had she not been short and a little portly. I always thought she looked nice, and that skinny women such as Twiggy and Audrey Hepburn were more to be pitied than admired. I remember her on her knees a lot, scrubbing floors, and I remember that she often smelled of onions, or at least her apron did. I wasn’t much of an eater until I was five or six, and so my mother spoke often about the starving children of Europe and how grateful they would be for the food I refused. I alw
ays thought of them as Nazis and didn’t care.

  Most of all, my mother was upright. That was vital to American Jews of her peer group, because they were the last generation of Jews to be intimidated by an ironfisted lesson of history: Jews never got away with much, and even when they weren’t trying to get away with anything, somebody powerful thought they were. She went to synagogue, put coins in the pushke, made her son wear itchy wool suits on the High Holidays, stayed on a first-name basis with butchers, and cleaned 2 6

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  the house before the housecleaner arrived to make certain no inappropriate impressions were formed. We may have been colorless, but we played it straight. I don’t remember missing much that other kids had, except for the Taylor Pork Roll sandwich.

  My parents weren’t formal people, but I don’t recall them slouch-ing. My father’s posture was perfect when he watched baseball on our black-and-white TV. I wasn’t privy to my parents’ thoughts, because they discussed nothing in front of my sister and me. Whenever my wife accuses me of not having an “inner life,” I know where I didn’t get it from. My parents were never rumpled. Even today, when we go out to eat, I tell them how nice they look compared to me. This is not flattery; it’s a fact. I do not know of divorce or incest or cruelty or illegitimacy in our family tree. Perhaps ugly truths about my relatives are hidden in an attic in some otherwise placid New Jersey town, but I would be shocked to learn of them. When it comes to exemplary behavior, I would put my parents and their sisters and brothers up against the Mennon-ites or the Quakers any day.

  My mother is sweeter than ever. She’s lost weight, which looks good on her. She’s stopped dying her hair, so now she appears angelic, surrounded by a halo of white. She holds my father’s hand and kisses him often. If she did that in the old days, I wasn’t around to see it.

  Whenever something is done for her, she’s grateful, which isn’t the mother I knew. These days she complains so infrequently my father says he longs for the days when she was difficult. “I miss her disappointments,” he says. She communicates mostly by touching, in a way that says more than she did back when she talked a lot. Because she says so little and forgets so much, I tend to underrate her mentality. She recently lost track of how many children she had, and I said to her,

  “Maybe you should have had more.” She replied, impeccably, “Not at my age.” And when I confronted her on the ham-steak issue, demanding to know if those Wednesday pork nights reflected a rebellious streak we didn’t know she had, she replied, “Don’t tell everybody.” F O R K I T O V E R

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  When I travel down to Florida these days, I always spend time visiting nursing homes, reassuring my father that it’s not for now but for emergencies. My father is opposed to a nursing home for my mother because he believes it means permanent separation and it will hasten her death. He is correct on both counts. The nursing homes I’ve seen have lots of services that none of the patients are in any shape to appreciate. I can’t say how many times I’ve gone into a cheerfully painted room to find the wheelchairs lined up in a semicircle and the occupants sitting motionless, heads lolling to the side, while activity directors jump up and down clapping their hands.

  When I see a piano in a nursing-home dining room, I wonder how frequently anybody is hired to play. When I see a nicely furnished private room designed for family dining, I wonder how often families come to eat.

  My mother talks about death all the time. She might not understand actuarial tables, but she knows how long she has lived and how long she has left. The last time I asked her what she thinks about, she replied,

  “Dying,” so I dropped the subject. I asked her if she had learned anything about life after so many years, and she said, “It was fast.” I’m ready for the day I’ll have to set off on the mission I’ve dreaded for so long, the day the fragile life-support system my sister and I put in place becomes inadequate and my mother will be wheeled into a nursing home. I won’t feel guilty, because we’ve done everything possible to postpone it, but I believe that someday history will judge this country harshly for placing our elderly in such facilities, no matter how nicely decorated they are. I hate thinking of my mother in a nursing home, her head lolling, but even worse is that once she’s in such a place, nobody will ask her for a recipe or for advice on how to cook.

  She will never step into a kitchen again.

  GQ, december 2001

  W H A T A D I V E !

  Seldom praised and often shunned, joints are the most misunder-stood of American restaurants. If they only had been labeled bistros, which they resemble in countless ways, they would be beloved.

  Joints are ignored by foodies and critics and are treasured only by the people who regularly eat in them. Joints are creatures of neighborhoods, not restaurant guides. Those who dismiss them lose out on bare-knuckled food, good-hearted (if rarely good-natured) service, and a rambunctious ambiance impossible to capture in the pages of an architectural magazine. A joint brings joy to the heart. Depending on whether or not the cook is having a good day, heartburn is also a possibility.

  Unquestionably, joints have sunk perilously close to the bottom of the restaurant caste system, so low that upon occasion they are misiden-tified as dumps. This is because the food lacks a certain . . . what’s the right word? . . . elegance. So much about dining today concerns appearances—the comely chef, the artful cuisine, the gleaming kitchen, the designer walls. A plate overflowing with a very large portion of very decent food is seldom admired. Still, the good joints quietly linger on, surviving every intimidating food trend, every urban renewal project that threatens to close them down. Were they more chichi, they’d be classified as cafés, and eager tourists would storm their doors.

  I recently asked David Rockwell, the eminent restaurant designer, if he could express in technical terms the difference between a joint 3 0

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  and a dump. He explained, “A dump is a place on the way down; it probably didn’t start out being a dump. A joint is and always has been a joint.”

  A joint has no high concept. It just is. It is a safe haven in a culinary world that swirls with inconsistencies. It is a respite from fast food, small food, tall food, and fancy food. Nothing is flambéed in a joint—

  except accidentally, should there be a grease fire. While the food in a joint is usually native-born American, the people who work in them are more likely to have been naturalized. English is always spoken, but not necessarily by the employee assigned the job of answering the telephone.

  My two favorite joints are Big Nick’s in New York City and The Pantry in Los Angeles. What they both have that I particularly admire are (1) long hours: The Pantry never closes and Big Nick’s shuts down its pizza operation for an hour each day, and (2) one-pound hamburgers. Joints have a lot of leeway where menus are concerned, but a great hamburger is pretty much a prerequisite.

  I paid a visit to Big Nick’s (technically, Big Nick’s Burger and Pizza Joint) on Broadway near Seventy-seventh Street recently, squeezing into a booth for four that would be tight for two, knowing that I would order the same food I always order. My only dilemma: Did I want to go for the small (quarter-pound), the medium (half-pound), or the Sumo (full-pound) burger? When I opted for the $6.50 Sumo, which is what the owner, Demetrios Nicholas Imirziades, calls his magnificent mound of freshly ground chuck and sirloin cooked on an indoor charcoal grill, the waitress looked skeptically at me.

  “It’s big,” she said.

  “Fine,” I replied.

  “It’s big and gross,” she added.

  “Just the way I like it,” I replied.

  Grudgingly, she wrote down my order. As she turned, she looked back over her shoulder and said, “It’s big.” Undaunted, I replied, “Fine.”

  I didn’t show it, but my feelings were hurt. The guy one table over F O R K I T O V E R

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  had just ordered a Swiss cheese and onion omelette with hash browns, Ita
lian sausage, and a Bud Light, and she hadn’t doubted his capabilities. Just to show her, I ate every bite. Well, almost every bite.

  I have to confess that I haven’t been to The Pantry (technically, The Original Pantry Cafe), located at Ninth and Figueroa in downtown L.A.

  in three or four years. I was a regular there in the seventies, when I was a much-traveled sportswriter. In recent years, after becoming a food writer, I started neglecting it in favor of lesser restaurants with better public relations departments.

  The place has globe lights, heavy crockery, cheap flatware, and a dull patina. What I particularly love about The Pantry is the rumor that all the employees are ex-convicts, which I refuse to check out because I don’t want to find out it’s untrue. The last time I was there, a counter-man who served me a bowl of clam chowder while I was waiting for a friend to join me for lunch sure looked as though he’d received a par-don from the governor. He was an old guy with a buzz cut who never smiled.

  “Doesn’t seem to like me,” I said to the big guy on the next stool.

  “It started long before you got here,” he replied.

  I telephoned a friend living in Los Angeles, a retired sportswriter named George Kiseda, who had introduced me to the place. I asked him to eat there and report back to me. He said he’d be happy to do so since he was obligated to take his brother and sister-in-law out to dinner, and this way he’d have to spend only seven dollars apiece on their meal.