by Holly Hughes
“What I’m going to do,” Vince said, “is I’m going to close up. Then I’ll drive you over to the hospital, we’ll pick up your mother, and I’ll drive you both home. Don’t worry, okay?”
I wasn’t worried. I was disappointed not to be staying overnight at La Serenata. Or—I hadn’t thought of it till that moment—at Vince or Paul’s house. And I was embarrassed that the restaurant had to close, even though they had no customers, because my mother couldn’t come to get me. But more than anything else, I felt overwhelmed by the kindness in Vince’s voice and in his actions.
A few weeks later I had a mini-breakdown over a plate of Baked Ziti with Meat Sauce. Earlier in the day, I’d gotten home from school and decided the time had come to find out what was inside the carton my mother had stashed in the garage shortly after my father was injured. She’d told me never to touch it, had written DO NOT TOUCH across the top in large red letters, and stashed the carton underneath an old bedsheet against the back wall. All of which drew me until I could no longer resist.
It was too light to contain books or dishes. I felt sure it had something to do with my father. Something he didn’t need now but was too important to throw away. I wasn’t sure what a will was, but had heard the word mentioned lately. Was a will large enough to justify a carton like the ones we’d used when we moved from Brooklyn?
When I opened it the first thing I saw was a large envelope containing photographs of my father lying on the ground in the immediate aftermath of the crash. He was flat on his back, hands raised as though warding off further assault. Below the envelope were his blood-drenched wingtip shoes and socks, torn pants, shirt and tie. Some kind of sheet or blanket that must have been used to cover him. It would all be evidence for the trial of the man who had crashed into my father, but I didn’t grasp that then. I thought my mother was saving it as some kind of ghoulish souvenir. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop smelling it.
At La Serenata, when Vince put the plate of Ziti with Meat Sauce in front of me, all I could see, in its mixture of deep red and bone white and bits of meat, was gore. I was swamped by a kind of sensory overload—the sight before me, the odor rising from it, a feeling as though my entire body had become entangled in the gruesome fabric I’d touched that afternoon.
I pushed the plate aside and tried to stand, but the configuration of booth cushion and table seemed to hold me down. Vince, who hadn’t yet left the table, reached for me as I sat back and began to cry. Then he slipped into the booth and settled next to me, moving the plate out of sight. He didn’t speak, just stayed with me, waiting with me for the moment to pass.
My father came home from the hospital in late spring and my nightly dinners at La Serenata stopped. A few weeks later I went away to summer camp in Pennsylvania for two months and by the time I returned my father was able to get around in a wheelchair. The hospital bed we’d rented was gone but now there was a set of parallel bars in my parents’ bedroom where he would work three or four days a week with his physical therapist.
In the fall of 1959, we resumed our monthly routine of dinners out. I remember how bizarre it felt to return to La Serenata with my parents. The first time, Vince solemnly bowed to my mother, shook my father’s hand and asked how he was doing, then looked at me for a moment and opened his arms in greeting. He seated us at a central table my mother requested, not at my booth. Being there began to feel so formal, familiar but unfamiliar, like visiting a house you no longer live in. Vince never stopped to sit down with us or put his hand on my shoulder as he passed by.
My father died two years later. He’d gone from using a wheelchair to using crutches to using a cane to, at last, walking with the aid of a built-up shoe. In November 1961, he and my mother went with a group of friends for a Veterans’ Day holiday weekend at a hotel in upstate New York. Despite how much effort it took for him to get around, he must have felt somehow liberated to be there, away from the places that reminded him of his injuries and long recovery, because he spent most of his time either riding horses, playing shuffleboard, throwing horseshoes, and walking on wooded trails. Toward evening, after dozing under a poolside sunlamp, he dove into the water and drowned. Going from the heat to the cold, he might have had a shock-induced heart attack, or he might have found himself too tired to swim after all his activity, might have become disoriented—there was no autopsy to establish cause of death—but he died there beside the pool, having finally been dragged out by friends who at first thought his flailing was meant to be comic.
After his funeral we followed the Jewish seven-day ritual of mourning, shiva, sitting in our living room on small hard stools, saying prayers, talking about my father, welcoming visitors and their gifts of food. I remember my aunt calling to ask if there was anything special I’d like them to bring for dinner, something that perhaps reminded me of my father. I hadn’t felt like eating since he’d died. But once my aunt asked, I knew exactly what to request. I asked her to stop at La Serenata—124 West Park Avenue, they’d pass right by it on their way to our house—and pick up an appetizer of Clams Posillipo and an order of Chicken Cacciatore.
By the spring of 1982, I’d been gone from Long Beach for seventeen years and was living in Springfield, Illinois. My mother and stepfather, Julius Rosen, whom she’d married the year I left for college, planned to drive the 950 miles for a visit. But they didn’t get past the first mile, running a stop sign and smashing into a delivery van.
I received the call from Julius at my office. His voice was tight with pain and his breath rattled. “Broken ribs,” he said. “Cuts. And bruises. I’ll be. Fine.” But my mother was in bad shape, with a leg broken in at least three places. “They had to cut her out of the car,” he whispered. “She wants you here.”
I was in Long Beach the next day. And that night, after visiting my mother and Julius, after dealing with the towing company and insurance and police, I went to dinner at La Serenata. I hadn’t been there in so long I wasn’t sure Vince and Paul would recognize me, bearded now, hair close-cropped, eyeglasses with transition lenses that made me look like a Mafioso in the least light.
As soon as I entered, Vince said, “Evening, Mr. Skloot. We’ve got your table ready.” He shook my hand. “I heard about your mother and Mr. Rosen, so I knew you’d be here.”
Paul nodded at me from behind the bar. “Not a Shirley Temple, Mr. Skloot, am I right?”
I laughed for the first time that day. When he brought me my martini, Paul whispered, “On the house.”
That dinner (Shrimps Scampi, Veal Pizzaiola, String Beans Marinara) and the four others I had there during my five-day stay in Long Beach were the last I ever ate in La Serenata. The restaurant closed in 1984, after a twenty-six-year run. Paul’s wife, Frances, recently told me that she and Vince’s wife, Lisa, wanted to keep it open. “But the men were done,” she said.
In 2014, on the fifty-third anniversary of my father’s death—the year in which he’d been dead as long as he’d been alive—images and memories of La Serenata flooded back. I wanted to research what had happened to the place and to the Russo family. I wanted to remember more details about the menu, decor, atmosphere, wanted to pay homage, maybe try to cook their version of Chicken Cacciatore.
I learned that the building is still in use as a restaurant, currently occupied by Sutton Place Great American Bar & Grille. I emailed the owner to ask if he had any old materials—a menu, a photograph, memorabilia—he’d be willing to share with me.
“I am sorry,” he wrote, “but we don’t have anything from those days. This location has changed hands so many times since then. I am here my whole life since 1969 yet I was too young really for La Serenata. We have been here for 13 years now.”
Calls to the Long Beach Public Library and to the Long Beach Historical and Preservation Society yielded no information. Internet searches turned up very little as well, though I did find an obituary for Vince, who died in 2007 at the age of eighty-three.
I suppose it’s not u
nusual for there to be little public notice of a small family restaurant located on a small barrier island nine miles long by one mile wide, an establishment that has been out of business for thirty-two years. But the virtual absence of information made La Serenata seem like a kind of Brigadoon, a mystical place that appears for just a single day every hundred years. If it lives in the present, if there are traces of it in 2016, they exist in the memories of those who knew it.
In 2005 The New York Times interviewed my classmate and friend Billy Crystal during the Broadway run of his play 700 Sundays. The play recalls his Long Beach childhood, and in amplifying details for the interviewer Billy said his family “ate Chinese at Wing Loo’s or dined at La Serenata, at Italian restaurant.” I think because I’d always felt cocooned in my booth, and isolated within the strangeness and fear and grief over what was happening to my father and my family, I didn’t remember seeing people I knew in the restaurant. But Billy was there, and there had to have been kids eating there with their families when I was present, kids I knew. I wondered what they remembered of La Serenata, what they liked to eat. So I wrote emails to a few old friends with whom I was still in touch.
“I loved La Serenata,” Murray Schwartz wrote back. As our graduating class reached its fiftieth anniversary, Murray’s capacity to recall details from our school years became legendary. “My strongest memory of La Serenata is of their hospitality. You were welcome.” He gave me email addresses for some other friends and I learned that many of them ate at La Serenata weekly or biweekly. Donna Selnick wrote, “it was my family’s go-to place to eat out and it set the standard for Eggplant Parmagiani and Veal Parmagiani for the rest of my life.” Janie Samuels wrote “Stuffed Clams, Veal Parmagiani, and Spaghetti with Clam Sauce were always our favorites.” Arlene Krasner loved the Antipasto so much she would order it as her main course. My neighbor and lifelong friend Billy Babiskin wrote that the Veal Parmagiani and the linguine were very good.
One of my friends mentioned a closed Facebook group, “IF YOU GREW UP IN LONG BEACH NEW YORK IN THE 50’S, 60’S & 70’S.” I was accepted into the group and posted a query asking for recollections and for the names of their favorite dishes. Never having belonged to a Facebook group and not knowing what to expect, I was astounded by the response: seventy-two people offered comments and a few photographs. Seven had eaten at La Serenata once a week and another remembered eating dinners there three times during a single Christmas week. Many said they ate there “often” or “all the time,” three recalled celebrating their elementary or high school graduations, two celebrated their sweet sixteen, and one celebrated his midget football league championship at La Serenata. I’d anticipated that if anyone named a favorite dish, it would likely be the Veal Parmagiani, which my email correspondents had each cited. But instead, the group’s members named thirty different dishes as their favorite. From the Antipasto (nine) and Baked Clams Arreganata (eight) to the Veal Francaise (two), Beef Rollatine (one), and Chicken Cacciatore (one—me), this was a menu of greatest hits, consistent, memorable, and apparently much missed.
Among the respondents was Frances Russo, Paul’s wife, who told me that Paul had died in March 2016, at ninety-two and after sixty-three years of marriage. She photocopied and mailed me a menu. When I asked her if she could send a recipe for Chicken Cacciatore so I could cook the dish here in Portland for my wife, Frances said, “What recipe? We just cooked.”
In a sense, the Russos are still taking care of me. Of course there’s no point in my attempting to duplicate La Serenata’s Chicken Cacciatore. I’ve cooked many versions of that dish since 1959 when I first tasted the Russo version. Each time, it brought back memories that, for all their painful associations, were full of warmth, tenderness, and a kind of sanctuary.
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Addison, Bill. “I Want Crab. Pure Maryland Crab.” Copyright © 2016 by Vox Media, Inc. Originally published on Eater.com, September 15, 2016. http://www.eater.com/2016/9/15/12929848/baltimore-maryland-where-to-eat-crab-crabcakes
Amster-Burton, Matthew. “Japan’s Cult Food Drama The Lonely Gourmet Is Essentially Pornography.” Copyright © 2016 by Matthew Amster-Burton. Originally published by AVClub.com (September 21, 2016). Used by permission of the author.
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Excerpt(s) from TREYF: MY LIFE AS AN UNORTHODOX OUTLAW by Elissa Altman, copyright © 2016 by Elissa Altman. Used by permission of Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Birdsall, John. “The Story of the Mission Burrito” / Bon Appetit; Copyright © Conde Nast.
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Chau, Danny. “The Burning Desire for Hot Chicken.” Copyright © 2016 by Danny Chau. Originally published in The Ringer (August 31, 2016). Used by permission of the author.
Clement, Bethany Jean. “Why You Should Eat All the Asparagus Right Now.” Copyright © 2016 by the Seattle Times. Originally published by The Seattle Times on May 10, 2016. Used by permission of the publisher.
Diamond, Jason. “The Unrecognizable Genius of Guy Fieri.” Copyright © 2016 by Esquire.com. Originally published by Esquire.com (September 7, 2016). Used by permission of the publisher.
Duane, Daniel. “My Dinners with Harold.” This article first appeared in California Sunday Magazine (December 1, 2016). Used by permission of the author.
Dumitrescu, Irina. “The Curious Appeal of ‘Bad’ Food.” © 2016 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic Magazine. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Edge, John T., and Tunde Wey. “Who Owns Southern Food?” Copyright © 2016 by John T. Edge and Tunde Wey. Originally published by the Oxford American magazine (Summer 2016 issue). Used by permission of the authors.
Excerpt(s) from IN MEMORY OF BREAD: A MEMOIR, copyright © 2016 by Paul Graham. Used by permission of Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Grodinsky, Peggy. “The Chef, the Dishwasher and a Bond That Keeps Back Bay Grill in Sync.” Copyright © 2016 by Peggy Grodinksy. Originally published by Portland Press Herald (June 8, 2016). Used by permission of the publisher.
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Hoffman, Steve. “Wine Pairing with Jill Mott.” Story by Steve Hoffman, Photos by Wing Ta, © 2016 The Growler Magazine.
Isle, Ray. “How Much Is Too Much for a Glass of Wine?” Copyright © 2016 by Ray Isle. Originally published by Food & Wine (July 1, 2016). Used by permission of the author.
Jacobsen, Rowan. “Seaweed Dreaming.” Copyright © 2016 Rowan Jacobsen. Originally published
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Kessler, John. “Pimento Cheese in a Parka.” Copyright © 2016 John Kessler. Originally published by Gravy (Summer 2016). Used by permission of the author.
Khong, Rachel. “What’s True About Pho.” Copyright © 2016 by Rachel Khong. Originally published by Lucky Peach (The Pho Issue). Used by permission of the author.
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Kliman, Todd. “Michel Richard, 1946–2016.” Copyright © 2016 by Todd Kliman. Originally published on toddkliman.net (August 2016). Used by permission of the author.
Kornegay, Jennifer. “The Art of Boucherie.” Copyright © 2016 by Jennifer Kornegay. Originally published by The Local Palate (October 2016). Used by permission of the publisher.
LeMay, Eric. “Baby Foodie.” Copyright © 2016 by Eric LeMay. Originally published by The Weeklings (June 30, 2016). Used by permission of the author.
Levin, Rachel. “The Piano Man of Zuni Café.” Copyright © 2016 by Rachel Levin. Originally published by Lucky Peach (July 2016). Used by permission of the author.
López-Alt, J. Kenji. “Let It Bleed (Humanely): We Taste the Vegan ‘Impossible’ and ‘Beyond’ Burgers.” Copyright © 2016 by J. Kenji López-Alt. Originally published by SeriousEats.com (October 31, 2016). Used by permission of the publisher.
Excerpt(s) from VICTUALS: AN APPALACHIAN JOURNEY, WITH RECIPES, copyright © 2016 by Ronni Lundy. Used by permission of Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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