Eating Out

Eating Out — I can recall when those words were filled with promise, and what was promised was swell food, an interesting scene, dressing up, a festive feeling, an occasion. The first serious restaurant I was taken to as a child was a Romanian-Jewish steak house on Roosevelt Road in Chicago called Joe Stein’s. It was an upstairs joint, and had large parrots in cages along its walls. The specialite de la maison was lengthy strips of skirt steak and wonderful fried potatoes, both brought to the table, family style, on platters; also bowls of pickles, pickled tomatoes, and icecream-scoop shaped balls of chopped liver that one spread on heavily textured dark bread. Flat-footed, world-weary, damp, slightly soiled towels over their arms, pencils behind their ears, the waiters had strong greenhorn accents and seemed to come out of classic Jewish waiter jokes: “Vich of you gentlemens vants the clean glass?” “Sorry, sir, dey heppen to be out of cream in de kitchen, vill you take it mit out milk?”

My first time at Joe Stein’s, I remember, I asked our waiter if he had any soda pop. “Ve got pop,” he said, deeply uninterested. “What kind do you have?” I asked. “Ve got red,” he said, shifting smoothly from boredom into mild disdain, “and ve got brown.”

I must have been five or six when this visit occurred. People did not then — in the mid-1940s — go often to restaurants with young children. People did not then go often to restaurants, period. Certainly not as casually and frequently as they do today, when they not only eat out all the time, but do so in odd places. A recent marketing survey in Washington state found that more people ate in their cars than any other place, including home. Drive-in restaurants, one of California’s great gifts to western civilization, were chiefly for adolescents, but now that no one is required to depart adolescence until heavy dementia sets in, why not eat with one’s own children in the old haunts of the formerly young?

My own youthful gastronomic range was greatly limited. My mother, the best of all mothers, was the least adventurous of cooks. Although not orthodox, nor even synagogue-going, she would not let certain — though not all — foods outlawed by Leviticus into her kitchen. No pork in any form was served, though shrimps were. Rare, even unto the lightest pink, beef was unknown; kosher chickens were, for reasons never made clear, thought to have more flavor than unkosher ones. Iceberg lettuce in those days held a monopoly greater than any dreamed of by Bill Gates. In our house, most vegetables and many desserts — peas, beans, corn, pears, fruit cocktail — came out of the can. Good at baking though my mother was (also at soups), Jell-O in exotic combinations was a fairly frequent dessert; so, too, bananas and sour cream.

When we went to restaurants, it chiefly meant one steak house or another, for Chicago in those years was still the site of the stockyards, and beef, in all its forms, was the specialite de la ville. The standard “deluxe” meal for middlewesterners in those years began with a shrimp cocktail, followed by a wedge of iceberg lettuce with thousand-island dressing, then either a steak or prime rib and a baked potato for a main course, with strawberry shortcake or pie a la mode for dessert. All this, of course, was long before awareness of cholesterol, the first of many snakes to have crept into the American gastronomic Garden of Eden. Diets were not up for discussion. People didn’t seem much to mind being overweight — “a little heavyset” was a frequently hauled-out euphemism of the day. The carcinogenic, far from being a terrifying factor, was not even a known word.

We were once taken out, with an extensive cousinage, by a wealthy and high-rolling uncle of my father’s, a bootlegger in prohibition days, to a steak house, where I, a boy of perhaps nine, ordered a T-bone steak. This turned out to be a vast wedge of beef, flopping over the sides of the plate and causing some attention because of its monstrosity. On the drive home, my mother, normally so gentle to her spoiled older son, upbraided me, saying that I had embarrassed her; in the future, when taken out by other people, I must never order the most expensive item on the menu. I hadn’t noticed the price. Apparently, there was a slightly complicated etiquette — even an ethics — to dining out. One didn’t always order exactly what one wanted.

My boyish dining out on my own chiefly involved hot dogs (with mustard, onions, piccalilli, never ketchup) and small bags of french fries, the two together costing a quarter. I first tasted pizza in my freshman year in high school, at a joint called Laurie’s, and thought I had gone to heaven. Fried shrimp, at a stand called Davy Jones’s Locker nicely located in the middle of a parking lot, was my next gastronomic thrill. I can even now recall the pungent smell of Polish sausage cooking out of doors on Maxwell Street — Polio sausage, a pal called it, lending it a nice touch of danger during those years when polio was still a danger. Not long after, I was taken to the basement of a great Chicago restaurant called the Berghoff, which is still in business in the Loop, where, for less than half-a-buck (a phrase, John O’Hara once said, never used by any woman who graduated from high school), I was served a handsomely unbalanced meal of pot roast, German potato salad, and noodles, with a large stein of root beer.

Drivers’ licenses were available at fifteen years old in the Chicago of my youth, and a driver’s license meant freedom, access to a large city with many secrets, not a few of them gastronomic. In our father’s cars, we tested the claims most of us had until then only heard about. The best ribs in those days were thought to be at a place called the Tropical Hut, with fairly hokey Polynesian decor, twenty miles away in Hyde Park; the best pizza was Pizzeria Uno, its sausage being especially splendid; the best shrimps were those at a take-out place on Grand Avenue called Al’s Fishery.

Viewed from today, when I find I can eat only one substantial meal a day, I am much impressed by my youthful capacity. (A contemporary recently observed to me that, as he grew older, the only activity at which he wasn’t worse was drinking.) My aim was always to eat as much as possible; satiety was not a notion I knew. After a light breakfast (two fried eggs, orange juice, toast), for lunch at a store nearby our high school called Harry’s I would eat two bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches slathered in mayo, fries, and a chocolate square, washed down by a Pepsi-Cola. (Who, I wonder, invented the BLT? His or her identity ought to be known, for that person brought much more happiness into the world than any modern poet.) At home that evening I might eat four or five chicken breasts with a mound or two of mashed potatoes.

After a night out roving with the barbarian band that constituted my dearest friends, we generally stopped at an open-all-night delicatessen called Friedman’s, where it was not uncommon to sup on a bowl of kreplach soup, a jaw-expanding corned-beef sandwich on a kaiser roll, and another Pepsi or the drink known as a chocolate phosphate, with coffee to follow. Then it was home for eight or ten chocolate chip cookies, perhaps two or three fingers of salami, a few soup-spoons of ice cream eaten out of the carton, and then eight or ten hours during which I slept as soundly as a monk.

When I was young, putting on weight wasn’t a consideration. Despite my own locust-like appetite, I remained thin. A. J. Liebling, still my favorite writer about food, said he grew up during a period when a diplomat weighing fewer than two hundred and fifty pounds was not to be trusted. (Recall the deviousness of the “lean and hungry Cassius.”) I grew up at a time when stocky, burley, husky, portly, even stout were not insults; Moose was an approbative nickname; thick calves, heavy arms, the beginning of a paunch were signs of manhood.

I ate less well in college, for the University of Chicago, that least hedonistic of institutions, provided chiefly brain food. Food somehow seemed, for that brief time, of tertiary interest. The United States Army was even worse, lean pickings for the finicky glutton I then was. On my way into the mess hall at Fort Hood, I recall asking a fellow enlisted man coming out what was for dinner. “I dunno,” he memorably replied, “some red sh — t.”

When I moved to New York in the early 1960s, my gastronomic range widened considerably. New Yorkers made demands of their restaurants that it would never occur to people elsewhere to make. In the simplest luncheonette on 15th Street, I heard a man order a sardine sandwich on rye toast, with a single leaf of lettuce, a very thin slice of onion atop it, and a light rinse of lemon over that — and then grumble because the counterman hadn’t got it quite to his liking. In New York I learned about Northern Italian food; I went to my first French restaurants; I shared a Chateaubriand and roaring laughter with my friend Hilton Kramer at the Oak Room of the Plaza but couldn’t bring myself to ask for a side-order of peas at $ 5 (in 1963). I discovered great secret restaurants behind grocery stores in Hell’s Kitchen: Hell for the Italian immigrants who arrived there near the turn of the twentieth century to live in crowded tenements; heaven for me in the early 1960s.

Interest in food took a jump in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the rise of ethnicity. Suddenly everyone felt called upon to try the newest Thai, Afghan, Ethiopian, Symbionese restaurant. Food replaced movies as the interest of choice among the upper-middle and so-called educated classes. One would go to a party and be asked, not what one thought of the latest Robert Altman or Woody Allen film or (more important) what Pauline Kael thought of it, but if one had been to the recently opened bistro on Halsted Street or trattoria on Southport.

The age of competitive cooking had begun. During this time, I sat at dinner tables where a serious topic of discussion was lettuce. The phrase “just a touch of tarragon” seemed to come up with astonishing frequency. Ginger and dollops of sorbet were served between courses to refresh what were said to be “tired palates.”

I enjoy pretentious talk about food; I recently met an acquaintance in Chicago for lunch, and he suggested a place that served, as he said, “a fairly reliable risotto.” (Yeah, baby.) I don’t, however, like to theorize about the deeper significance of food and the rituals surrounding its preparation and consumption. The secondary pleasures in life — food, sex, sport — are, in my view, better enjoyed for not being talked to death; besides, I’ve never met an anthropologist with a really good appetite.

“The French,” one learns from Amy Trubek’s recent volume Haute Cuisine, “invented the cuisine of culinary professionals.” Miss Trubek, who is today an instructor at the New England Culinary Institute, was set on her gastronomic path at the age of twenty by a meal at the only really serious French restaurant I have ever eaten in: Le Francais, a restaurant not in France but in — of all places — Wheeling, Illinois, perhaps half an hour from where I live. Jean Banchet, its chef and owner, is everywhere acclaimed whenever anyone makes up a list of the ten best restaurants in the solar system, and, near as I can tell, rightly so. The food was expensive but — here is the bad news — worth it.

French cookery generally, in my view, has set a poor precedent, especially among the status-nervous upper-middle classes. French restaurants charging fixed prices of $ 200 and beyond feel wrong; and more than wrong when they charge more yet to seat you in the kitchen (as a place in Chicago called Charlie Trotter’s does). I took a pass on the nouvelle cuisine stage of French cookery; I am currently taking a pass on those French-inspired restaurants that bring food to the table in a vertical presentation; Viagra meals, the man who runs Morton’s in New York calls them. I was in a Chicago restaurant called Avanzare, where a lunch companion was served such a meal and had to call upon the waiter to help him deconstruct it. Japanese is the most beautiful of all cuisines, but seems to me generally more elegant than good; and I feel about sushi, as the joke has it, that it is food fit only for cast-aways. But then between the raw and the cooked, I’ll take the cooked every time: Even sex tartare seems to me a bad idea.

In California, in Santa Rosa, I felt the French influence in what used to be a very sound restaurant when neither I nor any of the five other people at the table could identify more than two of the six main course dishes. One of the dishes was called “Alphonsino.” “What might Alphonsino be?” I asked the waiter. “Oh,” he said, “it’s a kind of red snapper.” A kind of snapper, eh? I suggested that perhaps Alphonsino was the fish’s first name. In New York, at the excellent Coco Pazzo Teatro, they threw the names of at least three pastas at me that I had never heard before.

I’m not keen, either, at having waiters break down the so-called “specials” to the cellular level. I’ve had enough of specials generally, and I have never met anyone who, when presented with more than four specials by a waiter, can recall the first two. I also dislike the new democratic chumminess of waiters: “Hi, my name’s Zack.” (Waiters telling you their first names has its dishonorable roots in the odious Playboy Clubs of unsainted memory, where the poor waitresses were instructed to begin by saying, “Hi, I’m your Bunny Karen.”) I’m not keen either on Zack telling me what his favorite dishes are, that he has already tasted this evening’s specials, or that he thinks I’ve ordered very intelligently. Take the order, bring the food, and bugger off, Zack.

At a Chicago restaurant called Ambria, the waiters not only bring out all the main courses at once, but lift the salvers from each with neatly timed simultaneity, a great voila-ish flourish. At this same restaurant, when one of our table went off to the bathroom, a waiter appeared and took her dish out to the kitchen to keep it warmed until her return. Can one get too much service in a restaurant? Perhaps not. Still, things begin to seem a bit fussy in restaurants where the male waiters are so much more carefully coiffed than their customers, male or female.

Part of the pleasure of eating out, it seems to me, is to put a certain distance between oneself and everything to do with the preparation of the food one is served. Especially, if one is wise, does one want to avoid too much knowledge of what goes on in the kitchen. George Orwell, in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), made nauseatingly plain the point that the more successful the restaurant the more chaotic — and probably the dirtier — the kitchen.

Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, another recent volume and the best book I have ever read about the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of running serious restaurant kitchens, doesn’t speak to dirtiness but is brilliant on the tumult of running a kitchen that might turn out anywhere from two hundred to four hundred or so serious meals a night. His is also a book with much useful instruction to diners: You want to avoid brunches and buffets, which are outlets for previous days’ uneaten food; because of delivery schedules, Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best nights to order fish in New York; much restaurant bread is probably recycled from someone else’s table. Calling himself “a wrangler of psychopaths,” Bourdain is particularly fine on the sociology of the wild, goofy, lost, occasionally admirable people who wind up working in the hellholes of restaurant kitchens, from head chefs to night porters. Bourdain has worked at the Rainbow Room and been executive chef at Coco Pazzo Teatro, and is currently head chef at Brasserie Les Halles, but, in his talk of food, is almost the reverse of pretentious. He’s a wild old boy and a bit of a lost soul himself, and, being strongly anti-malarkey, utterly believable.

It didn’t take me long to understand that serious fancy gastronomy was not for me. My own palate was a good bit less than refined. I don’t think I am gastronomically disabled, but though I enjoy food immensely, I seem to taste things merely blatantly. Even though all the world’s famous chefs seem to have been men — Brillat-Savarin, Dubois, Escoffier, and other famous culinary frogs — my sense is that women seem to taste food with greater sensory refinement than do men. (Perhaps women don’t have the first-sergeant, kick-ass personality that is required to run a large kitchen staff.) “Men don’t like complicated food,” says one woman character to another in a Barbara Pym novel, and I believe there is something to it.

My wife can often tell, with real precision, what herbs and spices have gone into the preparation of a dish we have just eaten; I can only tell you whether or not I like it. And I like a lot, not least a lot of fairly coarse food. A Chicago specialty that gives me heightened pleasure, for example, is a sandwich called an Italian-beef-sausage combo, with peppers, a wet and dripping thing, the mechanics of the devouring of which would have stripped the dignity from General de Gaulle. It is a sandwich that takes three hands to manipulate, generally requires anywhere between fifteen and twenty-five small paper napkins, and costs $ 3.95, not including dry-cleaning bills.

A man of selective cheapness, I don’t like to spend too much money on restaurant food. I think of Flicoteaux, the restaurant mentioned in Balzac’s Lost Illusions, favorite dining place of students and struggling writers during the first twelve years of the Restoration, which offered a three-course meal for eighteen sous, a bottle of wine included, and “bread at your discretion.” Today a meal that, apart from bar bill and gratuity, costs more than, say, forty dollars per person seems to me, somehow, morally excessive. Expense accounts long ago ratcheted up restaurant prices, but I, gluttonous and thrifty at once, still search for great meals at reasonable prices. In Between Meals, his account of his youthful dining in Paris, A. J. Liebling reports that the best bargains in food were those restaurants at which priests and prostitutes ate when they paid for their own meals. When I was a kid, the legend used to be that the best restaurants on the road were those at which truck drivers ate; perfectly untrue, of course.

I have all my days been searching for the excellent, reasonably priced Italian restaurant. While French cuisine may be architectonic, as Trubek argues in her book, my own preference is for Italian and Chinese food. An inexpensive Italian restaurant would perforce have to be a southern, or red-sauce, one. For years I tried the Italian restaurants around 26th Street, an old Italian Chicago neighborhood run by an alderman with the delicious name of Vito Marzullo, but with no great success. On Taylor Street the best: Italian restaurants tended to be northern Italian. What I wanted was plain fare, properly cooked homemade pastas, fresh sauce, fiery sausages, bread that suggested spiritual nourishment — all for from six to ten dollars a serving. I despaired of ever finding such a place, until one day ten or so years ago in South Bend, Indiana, I walked into a place with the solidly cliche name of Sunny Italy. A sign at the cashier’s counter read, “No credit cards.” Behind the cash register sat a short dark man in his late seventies, complaining about the hopelessness of his grandchildren. El Dorado discovered at last. And so it turned out, solid grub, straight, large portions, no artifice, the complaining owner’s wife in charge in the kitchen. The only problem is that South Bend is 110 miles from where I live. I needed a Sunny Italy in the neighborhood.

Marcel Proust, the most complicated and impractical man in the Paris of his day, had the Ritz Hotel in his neighborhood, and used it to give lobster and champagne dinners for friends; and became such good friends with the maitre d’hotel that he had a key to the kitchen, and on occasion sent his servant and dear friend Celeste Alberet down, after the restaurant closed, for a very late night beer. I have in my neighborhood, all within a hundred yards of my apartment, a not-good-enough Italian red-sauce restaurant, a more ambitious restaurant that serves too many Viagra meals, a Nepalese restaurant, a Greek restaurant of the kind known among the cognoscenti as a Grecian spoon, and (a winner at last) a fine Spanish restaurant called Barcelona Tapas, where I have lunch at least once a week. A mile or so away is Kendall College, which has a culinary school at which I have eaten four or five times, but never with real satisfaction.

What’s missing in the neighborhood — sorely, sorely missing — is a Chinese restaurant. Jews need Chinese restaurants. An old joke has it that Jewish civilization began nearly six thousand years ago, Chinese civilization nearly four thousand years ago, and so for nearly two thousand years the Jews went hungry. Jackie Mason, meanwhile, reports that though Chinese restaurants are filled with Jews, you never see any Chinese in Jewish restaurants. Quite so. This Jew finds he could, without any difficulty, eat Chinese food no fewer than three times a week, and to go more than two weeks without it makes him a touch cranky.

Not only is there no good Chinese restaurant within ten miles of where I live, but the great restaurant of my life, which once was in my neighborhood, has long ago closed down. It was called “The Bird,” in part because one of the chef-owner’s signature dishes was a great delicacy that he called “Crispy-skinned Chicken,” and in part because, phoenix-like, the restaurant had had many rebirths in different locations. I first heard of it from an English friend, then a visiting professor at Northwestern University. “It’s rather pricey,” he reported, “and not all that good.” I didn’t go there for a year. I shall always hold a grudge against this man, as would you of anyone who had deprived you of perhaps sixty or seventy grand meals.

Because the food from The Bird is no longer available to me, describing it, rather like recalling an old love, is painful, though I shall try. Ben Moy, the owner, is Chinese, but his cookery was so distinctive that I came to think of it as Moyan. He served courses one at a time, unlike the normal convention of American Chinese restaurants, where one’s plate becomes a melange. All his dishes were beautiful, without ever lapsing into the merely arty. The crispy-skinned chicken, a deboned chicken served on romaine lettuce with a dressing of subtle pungency, had a brown, burnished look, resembling nothing so much as the color of an old and precious violin. Mr. Moy could cut a wall-eyed pike into the most delectable morsels. A butcher in his earlier career, he always cooked his beef dishes to a perfect pinkness, and they sang with flavor. He taught me how to stop worrying and love squid — at least as he prepared it, in the most various ways, none of them rubbery or tasteless. He introduced me to green mussels. Every so often a hunter friend would bring him pheasants, the taste of which, with Mr. Moy’s perfect touch added, made plain why Wallace Stevens once described great poetry as “a pheasant disappearing into the brush.” None of it seemed expensive.

Food at The Bird was — how to say this in a single word? — honest. Mr. Moy served nothing goofy, went in for no exhibitionistic exoticism: no cheeks of veal, no head of pork, no schwantz de boeuf. His light sauces, piquant dressings, vegetable accompaniments, everything he did had only one end: to bring out the highest possible flavor in all he served. A great chef, he was a genius of a shopper. If he served a melon, it was, inevitably, the Platonic ideal of a melon. I was impressed upon learning, after we had become friends, that, with the exception of Chinese vegetables, he found most of his produce at the same supermarkets where I bought mine. Almost all other food, after Ben Moy’s cooking, felt a little gross.

A year or so after I discovered The Bird, the restaurant did another of its phoenix turns, moving nearly twentyfive miles away to Melrose Park, a suburb west of Chicago, once the home of many of the city’s mafia middle-managers. Twenty-five miles was not at all too far to go for Ben Moy’s cooking, and I continued to dine there at least once a week for the next eight or nine years, with his annual Chinese New Year’s banquets thrown in gratis. I would probably be dining there still, but an elderly gent, in a moment of mental lapse, put his heavy foot on the accelerator when he intended the brake and drove his Cadillac into The Bird’s kitchen. The damage, Mr. Moy decided, was beyond repairing, and he packed his two enormous, magical woks and closed up shop.

The phoenix fluttered briefly one last time in a smaller location in Oak Park, where Ben Moy, who had all along given cooking classes, opened a cookery school, serving meals without a restaurant license to old friends, so to say, out of the back door. Another of these friends was Dale Clevenger, the first French horn for the Chicago Symphony. One night when I was there, Clevenger brought Pierre Boulez and a small party to dine. In the kitchen, Ben Moy, before carving a vast Lake Superior whitefish, announced that he wished to dedicate this fish to “two artists, Pierre Boulez and Joseph Epstein.” I have photographs marking the event. Having a whitefish dedicated to one is not, I realize, the Nobel Prize, but it continues to please me hugely — and besides, unlike the Nobel Prize, I didn’t have to share the whitefish with Sully Prudhomme, Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison.

Not long after Ben Moy closed up for good, and, like the Jews in the joke, I have been hungry ever since. Still, I shall always be grateful for the gift of more than a decade of superlative feeding.

I not long ago read the theory that when one is young sex is one’s main preoccupation, when one turns to middle-age that preoccupation changes to food, and in old age it is good sleep one most craves. To let you know exactly where I am on this spectrum, I find it a great pleasure to get a good night’s sleep in which I have dreamt of eating course after course of Ben Moy’s food. After a long career of eating out, I begin, I fear, to eat in.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.