My brother thinks I’m crazy.
I grew up in Phoenix, and my parents and brother still live there. Whenever I visit, I am decidedly uninterested in going to any of the restaurants my brother has on his list of new and happening foodie places. He knows where the best seasonal local beers are on tap and where the hippest new micro-regional Mexican food is to be had. If you’re looking for a recently opened place in Phoenix with street tacos the way they make them in, say, the Xochimilco neighborhood of Oaxaca, check with my brother. Generous with his insider knowledge, he’s eager to share his discoveries.
No thanks.
When I visit someplace I used to live, the first order of business is to eat or drink at some spot I used to love. These are restaurants as time machines.
The last time I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I sought out Cafe Pamplona, a bohemian half-basement on a backstreet off Harvard Square. It’s where I was introduced to espresso. On snowy days I would nurse cup after tiny cup, trying and failing to keep my eyes open through such page-turners as the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. I was grateful to find it hadn’t changed: dim and cramped, just as I remembered, and as I waited for a cup of coffee, I felt that droopy-eyed grad-school drowsiness. The only thing missing was the thick cloud of cigarette smoke perennially pressed against the low ceiling. A healthy change for the better, no doubt, but a sad strike against verisimilitude. Perhaps the health code would allow them to install a theatrical fog machine for atmospherics.
I’ll be in Phoenix this week, but, alas, there aren’t many of my old favorites left. For years, a visit home wouldn’t be complete without dinner at La Fontanella, an Italian restaurant where I learned just how good veal piccata could be. It was an environment conducive to a civilized date, and I’m grateful to the place for the implicit lessons. It finally closed a few years ago when the owners retired after a long and happy run.
Lucky is the eatery that makes it five or 10 years. Remarkable is the place that can hold on for 20. Partly it’s about ever-changing fashion, our desire to try out the new. And there’s the near-impossibility of meeting expectations of day-to-day consistency. As a restaurateur friend who was going out of business once told me, “You can serve somebody a dozen great meals, but if the 13th is lousy, the customer won’t tell you. He just won’t come back.” Now he’ll probably give you a bad online review too.
The Miracle Mile Deli has beaten the odds, surviving some seven decades. It’ll be the first place I go when I’m home. I already know what I’ll order: a “Straw” sandwich: pastrami, sauerkraut, and Swiss, hot off the flattop, on an onion roll, and with none of the Russian dressing that renders a Reuben soggy. Miracle Mile has moved a couple of times since I was in high school, when I used to go there with my grandparents. But a bite of Straw is still better than any seance in summoning their presence for me.
Then, come Saturday night, my folks and I will enter the venerable downtown Phoenix steakhouse, Durant’s, as everyone does: through the kitchen. The dining room, with its crimson, velvet-flocked wallpaper (so comically outre when I was a kid; now retro-chic), its scarlet leather booths, gold-framed paintings of old Jack Durant’s long-dead dogs, and its infernal dimness, could be mistaken for a Scorsese set. A few years ago a gangster pic was indeed shot in and around the restaurant.
I will order a martini and, with my parents, celebrate those oases of semi-permanence in the otherwise whirling ephemerality of life.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
