Food, Family and Memory

My father was a dyed-in-the-shorts Bermudian who loved to feast on all things from under the sea. Shrimp, crab, oysters, mussels, fish of all kinds, and lobsters. Five years of serving in the Canadian Army overseas in Holland and France during World War ll chewing on K rations in a trench didn’t diminish his early island jones for a crustacean or almost anything seaworthy and edible.

Relocating to the Toronto suburbs in Canada in the late Forties where seafood restaurants were almost as scarce as mermaid sightings still didn’t discourage his quest for a taste of the ocean. He did his best to pass his glorious seafood cravings on to his children, but as a toddler, I balked at the thought of sliding one of those grey slimy, pulsating mollusks down my tender young throat no matter how much tangy cocktail sauce was dumped on it.  I cringed at the thought of cracking open a giant scarlet claw to scoop the steaming white meat dripping with warm clarified butter and lemon.

There was one prerequisite for our birthday dinner for Robin. A red leather booth. Where to find one? So few places left with that old Rat Pack-era feel. I still miss them. One of my all-time favorites was Sneaky Pete’s on the Sunset Strip. It was next door to Whisky A Go-Go, where Duke’s Coffee Shop is now. Waitresses were dressed in really short-skirt barmaid outfits. A place where Johnny Carson sometimes sat in on drums with the musicians. How great was that? Good that it’s been closed for a hundred years, or it might make me miss my father too much. I went there with him all the time for steak and a baked potato with tons of butter, sour cream & chives.

Peggy had gone last week to Dan Tana’s, the dimly lit, checkered-tablecloth, celeb-oriented Italian place in West Hollywood. Libbie thought it was perfect for the Robin dinner. Since I never went to Dan Tana’s much back in the day, it would be a nostalgia-free zone – no memories with my dad to weigh me down. Still, I spent the rest of the week toying with the idea of changing restaurants. Many texts and phone calls back and forth between the girls. Robin said she would be just fine if we all met at Nate n’ Al’s, the Beverly Hills deli we all grew up in, but some of us just couldn’t envision a birthday celebration there. So, I never cancelled the reservation -- and here is how retro Dan Tana’s is: they never called “to confirm.”

Okay, I admit that I have read Patricia Wells' Food Lover’s Guide to France so many times that the pages are no longer glued to its spine. My copy smells old because it is old. It isn’t all that accurate anymore but there is still some relevant information, just less. This book is the reason I have had so many treasured memories of France.

The most memorable one in the whole book for me was finding the walnut oil man - Patricia Wells wrote that he had a water wheel that aided in the extraction, used no electricity, the farm was difficult to find and beware of the dogs. All true, but so much more...

I was the navigator, not the driver that day. I was responsible for finding all the tiny little roads on our paper map to the mill. Half the roads weren’t on the map and any signage was obscured by overgrown trees. It was very rural and our afternoon was turning into either a treasure hunt or wild goose chase. I could feel we were near. When my boyfriend asked if I found the road on the map, I nodded. Not true, we were lost.

You can guess what the driver said as we drove threw the same intersection for the fourth time. “How can we be lost if you are reading the map? You know how to read a map?” “Yayyyy”, I replied - you could cut the tension with a butter knife. One more try, then I would agree to give up the goose chase. Suddenly, I saw it - the faded yellow sign covered with ivy and grown up trees like Patricia had described, only more overgrown.

For most of my dad’s young life, he lived above and worked at Felcher’s, his parents’ candy store/ neighborhood lunch counter, tucked between P and G's Bar and Grill and Simpson's Hardware Store on Amsterdam Avenue between 73 and 74th Streets. Christopher Morely, imagined the man of the future while watching my dad as a tiny boy play in front of that store and immortalized him in his novel Kitty Foyle.

Throughout college and law school my dad scooped ice cream and served meals at this lunch counter, as his then girlfriend, my mother, perched herself on a stool out front, eating fudgicles and enticing much of the passing parade, including Frank Gifford and his pals, the other NY Giants. I can still see the scoop my father kept from Felcher’s with its well-worn wooden handle and the scored thumb press that pushed a slim metal band, which would release the perfect scoop every time.