Friday, December 25, 2020

Restaurants: Dining Out

Frank Bruni wrote a column recently in the New York Times about the flood of restaurants that we are losing nationally due to the pandemic.  And that we really need to take note, and maybe try to do our best to preserve wherever we can.  He was writing really about restaurants as a cultural phenomenon.  And his column caused me to think back, because restaurants to us have become an important part of our lives together.

Because I grew up relatively poor, living in a single parent’s home during the Second World War, restaurants did not figure much in our early lives.  But they did still figure. When I was very little, we lived in Brooklyn with my mom’s parents. Grandpa Inglis continued to make a modest income working on building or repairing houses in Flatbush. They had a modest bungalow in what is remembered as a rural part of Brooklyn, if that can be believed.  I have dim memories of wandering from their bungalow and encountering a field where cows resided. In Brooklyn.

And then the War broke out—yeah that Second World War thingie. And my mom somehow figured out a way to get herself trained as a bookkeeper—she did not go past 8th grade. My sister, in contrast (being ten years older than me) went on to Julia Richmond High School for a couple of years, before she dropped out and went to work. It was War Time and women were in demand.  So, my Mom and my sis got jobs with a naval architectural firm, Gibbs and Cox, in lower Manhattan.  And so we moved into Manhattan, into a flat on Second Avenue.  As I was then 6 in 1940, and my brother was 10, we attended a school a couple of blocks away. And we played on the streets of New York, while my mom and my sis worked to support us.

But every now and again, my mom and her girlfriends would take an evening and go to some club where they would have dinner and watch a show (I guess things were a bit less expensive in 1940). And my mom would give my brother a couple of dollars which we could use to go to a neighborhood Italian restaurant a couple of blocks uptown from our 71st Street flat. But think of that. A ten year old and a six year old would walk a couple of blocks uptown and go to a neighborhood restaurant where we would dine together. That was my first restaurant experience. And that experienced kicked off a lifelong love affair with restaurants.  I don’t think we went out to dine more than a few times together, my bro and me. But it awakened my brain to the thrill of dining out.

Note, we did not have many dining out experiences. Generally, we were lucky to be able to dine in.  And, then, after the War, my mom grew tired of having her two young sons playing on the streets of New York, and routinely getting hurt. So, she took some savings she had managed to accrue during that War, and used it to buy an old bungalow in Rockland County, New City Park.  It was a place where New Yorkers would come to spend their summers out of the city. And so we moved out of Manhattan.

And that restaurant thing, or “dining out”? Well, some, but very little. Again, that money thing.  Plus, New City Park had no restaurants, and the nearby villages of New City, Nanuet, and Spring Valley only had a few.  So, mostly, we “dined in”.

But then, I went off to college in the San Francisco Bay Area, to Stanford. And then I got married and we moved to that same San Francisco Bay Area. And there, my lifelong love affair with restaurants and “dining out”  became a real thing.  Over my long lifetime, I have grown to understand that New York City, Manhattan especially, is a restaurant-rich region. But first, I had to discover San Francisco.  After we married, we settled into the Bay Area. Because I traveled a fair amount, Carol and I arranged a standard baby sitter to care for our two kids when we went out to dinner. And out we would go, not quite, but almost every Saturday night.  We had our favorites of course.  There were two restaurants right across from where we lived on Nob Hill. One was a Russian restaurant and one an Italian restaurant, both on California. But because we lived on top of Nob Hill, we were surrounded by a restaurant-rich part of the City. We had our choice of cuisine, both foreign and domestic, and including all price ranges. We could walk to most of the city’s really fine restaurants, like Ernie’s or The Blue Fox, or, sometimes we would drive. I just read about the closure of The Cliff House restaurant, on the water overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was a treat because it was an old resort style restaurant, quite lovely with a nice dinner awaiting you.

The area was so rich in restaurants that we would periodically pick a restaurant blindly out of the yellow pages and dine there. Literally, we were never disappointed.  Now, please remember, we never attended any fast food, or chain restaurants. These were all one-of-a-kind places.  But this was San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s. And dining out was now a tradition, as I say, almost a weekly affair.

Now, mind you, restaurant closures was never even a thought that ever passed into or through our heads. All the restaurants we attended were filled with customers on every occasion we visited. Clearly, our love affair with restaurants was shared by many of our city’s residents.

And then we were given the opportunity to travel abroad.  Now, mind you, this was a huge opportunity, Aside from our winging our way from New York to San Francisco, neither of us had ever traveled very far from our respective home base.  Even when we moved to San Francisco, we still didn’t travel much. I had some business travel, but that was by myself, and, although I dined out for every meal, it was by myself, so I count it not at all in my tale of restaurants.  See, dining out is intended to be a shared experience. One eats exotic foods, yes, but one also converses with someone close, while so dining, and drinking fine wines.

And this travel opportunity cemented our love affair with restaurants and dining out.

On our first trip headed overseas, we stopped in Beirut. Now, the well-traveled might consider this a mere trifle, but for two kids from New York who had hardly ever been on a plane, our stop in Beirut was amazing. Now, to be fair, we were traveling with two young kids and eleven suitcases, cuz we were headed off for what turned out to be a four-year stint in New Delhi, India. We arrived into a nice hotel in downtown Beirut, noting that the taxi drivers all seemed to drive Mercedes, and everyone was smiling or laughing.  This, of course, was way before everyone began killing everyone else just because they could.  And we ordered room service for the kids and we went out to dine. We dined outside at a nearby café, and simply drank in the exotic aromas of a truly foreign land, and some wonderful Middle Eastern cuisine.  We both looked at each other in amazement and ate slowly, but methodically, lingering on some lovely French wine.

And then the next day we were all headed for New Delhi on Pan Am #1.

Now dining out in India was special for many reasons. See, we had servants, one of whom, Joseph, was our cook.  He was the head man of five servants. So, most of our meals were overseen by the memsahib, but prepared by Joseph, as Carol slowly turned him into a chef superb.  But dine out we did. In Delhi, we grew accustomed to dining in Old Delhi, at an outdoor restaurant called Moti Mahal. They prepared Chicken Tandoori and Butter Chicken, along with some amazing vegetable dishes.  But it was the whole experience that mattered. Yes, the food was wonderful, but dining outside, watching all the other folks also gathering and dining, looking at the night sky, and occasionally going over to gaze into the open tandoor ovens where they cooked the tandoori chickens and the Nan made the whole experience quite wonderful. Once, we even dined there during a blackout. See the Pakistanis decided to wage war with India, again, and so they would occasionally launch their US-supplied jet fighter-bombers against India, which was protected by Russian SAM missiles.  But dine we did, still enjoying our meals, but watching the skies a bit more intensely.

And then we traveled around India, dining out wherever we went—Jaipur, Agra, so many places so little time. But each time, the dining was special. Yes, we insisted on good food, and India had an abundance of fine food restaurants. But each experience was a complete cultural event.  How about enjoying a fine meal at a local restaurant and then traipsing over to the Taj Mahal to witness the Taj at full moon, standing there bedazzled by the sight.

Or we traveled to one of India’s many “Hill Stations”, places up in the mountains that the Brits created or captured for themselves to escape the heat of India’s Monsoon season.  And each Hill Station had its own wonderful hotels (often palaces of one or more of India’s rajah’s) and yes, restaurants. You could combine a fine-dining experience with views of the Himalaya’s.

And we continued to travel, and dine. Once in Greece, we visited Athens. And atop one of the hillsides in Athens, we dined out at a restaurant atop Mount Lykavittos. And we drank a nice Greek retsina wine, ate some wonderful Greek cuisine, while down below outside the acropolis, a son et lumiere was going on.  Or we sat outside at a coastal restaurant in Mykonos, watching the sun setting over the windmills, while we chatted and ate fine Greek food and drank some nice Greek wine.

But whether we were in Germany, alongside the Rhine, or in Bangkok, sitting on a barge cruising along a Thai canal, while drinking fine wine and eating Thai food, the experiences continue to plow into our brains. Interesting places, wonderful food, chatting with nearby people, and, of course, looking into each other’s eyes as we lifted our wine and toasted, “To Us”.  We arrived back into the US aboard a ship from London, and immediately greeted our family and then headed for a nearby harbor restaurant, where our family toasted our return and we ate in style, and enjoyed a nice bottle of 1959 Chateau Lafitte Rothschild.

See, the dining out with friends and family, perhaps especially with a loved one, is a multifaceted cultural experience. It is a phantasm of sights, smells, tastes and chattering, absorbing everything wonderful in a few hours, but forging a memory lasting forever.

Wherever we lived we experimented with dining out, but we often forged relationships with particular restaurants that offered us the fine food and wine, but also a social experience. Here in Concord, we forged that relationship with our local Italian restaurant, Gianni’s Trattoria, which is like that show “Cheers”, where “everybody knows your name”.  Fine food, wonderful chats with the owners and their staff. This is the stuff of dining out. Now I should stress again, that I am never speaking of fast food/chain restaurants. They are more like shopping at your neighborhood supermarket. I refer in my wanderings here of local restaurants that are one-of-a-kind.  Locally owned, with often long time staff, and chefs that keep trying to dazzle you, because that is what they do.

And why do I go on and on here? Well, I fear that this Pandemic is also a unique event, unique in its killing power. Yes, old folks like me will get killed by this dreadful virus. But, it seems to possess even greater powers, the power to kill restaurants, pubs, and other similar places. How can these places survive, if people cannot go out and experience their offerings?  This damned COVID thing could kill off a vital part of our culture.

And yes, I understand that other institutions also are suffering and may be shuttering their services.  But I mourn the loss of restaurants, because they are such a wonderful addition to our lives.  And I keep hoping that folks will do everything they can to minimize the damage. We can buy gift cards, purchase their take-out food, and even, whenever we are permitted by local ordinances and common sense, return to dining in.

We will eventually survive this pandemic, because our scientists continue to work at ways to defeat these virus creatures. Vaccines and other scientific methods are being devised as we speak.  And yes there will always be Stupid people like President Trump who decry our scientists, mainly because that is what stupid people do.  And we will have to also survive idiots like Trump, which hopefully our recent votes have accomplished.  But one can never be certain. The idiots of the world procreate with abandon and they keep producing more idiot-malenfants. So, we all need to keep our wits about us. Dine out With Care. Vote With Care. And keep your brains alive and well.  The only way to defeat idiots or viruses, is with brains hard at work.

Welcome to the new world just now coming—2021, at your disposal. Smart people are on the way now.

 

 

1 comment:

Carol K said...

What wonderful trip down memory lane for me as you wrote about our love of restaurants all over the world. Really special. That is why it is so important for us to try to do our best safely to keep our restaurants going as much as we are able to during this very sad time for all.