Food, Family and Memory

I once went to the most spectacular Hollywood funeral ever. And the love that poured out was well deserved. We knew her by one name, kind of like Cher or Madonna. Kaye. Do you all know whom I’m talking about? You do if you were lucky enough to grow up in Beverly Hills at that time. It’s Kaye Coleman, beloved Nate ‘n Al’s waitress of 38 years and star of our collective childhoods.

Although Kaye had a daughter, Sheri, and a son, Michael, she was the unofficial surrogate mother to some of the biggest mothers in Hollywood. And her “sons” looked after her well. I’d run into Kaye at the priciest restaurants, sometimes on Sunday at Matteo’s, in the booth near Sinatra, dining with her posse of waitress friends, the tab picked up by Lew Wasserman or Bernie Brillstein. Those two moguls would also send her on European vacations and Mediterranean cruises. At times, Kaye lived a fancier life than many of her Beverly Hills customers.

At the deli, she was on a first name basis with everyone, including the big agents and the bigger stars, but there was only one “Mr. Wasserman.” She’d be kibitzing with you, then spot Mr. Wasserman walk in and say, “Gotta go, there’s my twenty dollar tip!” Kaye would hit and run with her insults and barbs. She’d give you a tidbit, not finish the story, then walk away quickly leaving you wondering and wanting more. Later on, she’d circle back, finally giving you the punch line. And then she was off again to pick up the next order of Matzoh Brei.

Until I was sixteen, Thanksgiving was spent at my maternal grandparents’ house in Ashtabula, Ohio. Often prefaced by a blizzard, and by my father worrying about making the five hour drive with 5% visibility and black ice on the Interstate, these holidays really began when we arrived, cold and tired, to find a House Full O’ Jews at 5105 Chestnut Street. We put our bags in our assigned bedrooms (I preferred the front bedroom, with its partially removed, politically incorrect and leering 1940s Cleveland Indian stuck to the mirror), and found our way to the living room, where there was always chopped liver with crackers.

My grandmother’s chopped liver, a miracle never repeated in my lifetime, was smooth, addictive and so delicious that I could completely disregard the fact that it was made largely of chicken livers and rendered chicken fat, along with some egg and onion. If you have never had good chopped liver, I fully understand that you may find the idea repellant, and that you are possibly imagining liver and fried onions, raw liver, or some other equally unredeemable and noxious substance. This was not that; this was intoxicatingly rich, bore no resemblance to liver in its original state, and could have been classified by the DEA as Hungarian Crack. The fact that my brother and I loved it from the time we were small (notwithstanding the fact that we both hated liver) and would have eaten until we foundered, should give you an idea of its universal and supernatural appeal. Now, of course, no one has my grandmother’s  recipe and we are all doomed to wander the kosher delis of the universe, trying in vain to get just one more bite of what we can only have in our dreams. (There’s probably a joke in there somewhere, about “wandering jews,” but it’s just too easy).

So what's the first thing to order in the Florida Keys, after the mojito and conch fritters? Key lime pie, of course. So we did.  We ordered a slice just about everywhere we ate, and the hands-down best came not from a fancy waterfront restaurant or anywhere on Duval Street, but from the Key West Key Lime Pie Co.

We went to the store on Big Pine Key at mile marker 30, next to Pizza Works in the scenic Winn-Dixie plaza. The company sells pies out of about twenty other locations.

I turned fifty-two last week.  While I’m told that fifty-two is the new thirty-eight, no one told my metabolism.  It seems to have slowed even more than I have.  Knowing this, and knowing that the only way to really celebrate a birthday is to eat and then eat some more, my wife, Peggy, and I had been dieting from the end of the holidays to the big day – ten whole days.  And when the big day came, we wasted no time in returning to our post-holiday fighting weight.  Here is how we did it.

Thursday, my actual birthday, was the big kick off.  We went to Patina for its annual truffle dinner.  Patina has been having these extravagant dinners in honor of the truffle – yes, it is celebrating a fungus, but what a fungus - for the past several years, and we always talked about going, and this year, the dinner fell on my birthday.  Given that Peggy and I have been together for almost 30 years, and she has simply run out of things to buy me as a birthday gift, especially just two weeks after Christmas, we decided that this would be it.  She couldn’t have done better.