BAYSIDE, THE BIRTHPLACE OF A FOODIE

Bell Boulevard - Bayside's Main Street

BAYSIDE, THE BIRTHPLACE OF A FOODIE

An Homage to Sal’s & McElroy’s

I love food, especially food eaten in restaurants… from funky diner cheeseburgers to five course meals at The French Laundry.  I also love writing about food, so much so that besides this food blog, I am the food and drink writer for the glossy magazine, the Ojai Quarterly… but Bayside (Queens, Long Island, New York) and much of the world were indifferent to fine dining when I was growing up in the late 50’s and 60’s. Fine dining was for people in Manhattan.  The foodie and fast food culture was decades away. Fast food “restaurants” weren’t on every corner and family restaurant chains were few and far between. People in Bayside mostly ate at home. 

Oh, we had a couple of Chinese restaurants in neighboring towns such as Flushing… you know the ones where sweet & sour everything reigned alongside gooey pork lo mein.  And for “special” occasions like Mother’s Day, graduations, or Easter Sunday there was always Patricia Murphy’s family friendly Candlelight Inn in Manhasset, a bit of a car ride schlep on Northern Blvd, but that just made it more “special.” 

And, I loved it when my dad would pack up my mom, brother and me into the car and drive us to Howard Johnson’s in Little Neck (or was it Douglaston? Great Neck?) for a family dinner of burgers with that “secret sauce” and fried clams… or when he took us to the car hop diner across from Kiddy City on Northern.

But these were “family” restaurants and weren’t in Bayside. There were no Thai, Korean or Greek restaurants in town, nor French or nouvelle cuisine restaurants for that matter.  But Bayside did have Sal’s Italian fare, and McElroy’s, an Anglo-American is it a pub, a bar, a restaurant? restaurant.

Even though we would walk “downstreet" to Sal’s on Bell Boulevard (as my New England bred mother would say), going there as a family seemed a very grown-up outing.  

The old movie house marquee that is no longer a movie house

This wasn’t a kids’ place… it was an “adult” neighborhood red sauce restaurant. I usually put on a dress for dinner at Sal’s. The dining room had a couple of Italian scenic paintings, white table cloths and red candle “globes” in plastic webbing, after all. Atmosphere. It was at Sal’s that I had my first pizza (pizza chains weren’t even in their embryo stage). 

Of course, we always started with a “first course” salad made of iceberg lettuce, cut up tomatoes, shaved carrots and maybe an olive or two. You had a choice of dressings including “Russian” (ketchup and mayo), Italian or blue cheese.  Blue cheese dressing!  How exotic was that?  When we didn’t have pizza (another exotic food to me), spaghetti with meatballs was our family’s popular second choice. There was no fettuccine alfredo or picatta or marsala anything on the menu, though I think steak pizziaola, eggplant parm and lasagna made nightly appearances.

It didn’t matter if the food was good or bad, to be at Sal’s, sitting at a white table-clothed table, white cloth napkin on my lap, having foreign food made me feel worldly and oh so sophisticated (well, I was in a dress). Yes, mom made spaghetti, even eggplant parm, but that was at home, and I could only have pizza at Sal’s (I never counted the pizza my mom made using American cheese and a slice of tomato on an English muffin).

After my dinners at Sal’s, I yearned to go to McElroy’s. But for me, McElroy’s was for grown-ups only. It was the place in town where my parents could go “on a date,” sometimes after seeing a movie at the old Bayside movie theater.  A sitter would show up at our house and dad would put on a sports jacket and mom a dress and they’d take the car “downstreet.”  I wanted to go, or at least be a fly on the wall so that I could discover the mystery of McElroy’s. What was behind its doors? What kind of food did they serve? Was it really forbidden to children?

I think I was about ten when I got my first glimpse inside. I was strolling down Bell Blvd. when I came to the restaurant. Its doors were open and I couldn’t resist. I peeked inside.  It was dark with a bit of amber glow from a few lighted lamps that was diluted by the daylight glare streaming in from the street through the open door.  I squinted to focus my eyes and saw a dark wooden (probably mahogany) bar and a few tables. Liquor bottles were lined up behind the bar like bowling pins and I wondered where the coca cola soda fountain dispenser was. I guessed that grown-ups didn’t drink cokes when they went out to dinner by themselves.

I liked what I saw. The room reminded me of bars I’d seen in old movies on TV where Nick and Nora Charles might get a nightcap, though I had no idea what a nightcap was. But it wasn’t until my dad died and I was in my early teens that I got to finally experience McElroy’s… the food and the total restaurant ambiance. 

My mom was working for a local contractor and asked my brother and me to meet her there for dinner. I was stunned. We were still kids! But I trusted she knew what she was doing even though I was at the age where I thought she was the dumbest adult on the planet.

My brother put on a good shirt and I wore my nicest skirt and blouse. It was summer, so the sun was still shining when we walked “downstreet” to the restaurant where she was waiting outside to take us in.

It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dimly lit bar, but once they did, I felt I had entered another world. As we went into the adjacent dining room and were seated at a table I was overcome with déjà vu. Why did I feel comfortable in this cozy dark wood paneled room? I thought. Why did it feel so familiar? As I looked at the menu with entrees of Salisbury steak, pork chops, chicken and London broil, it came to me. I felt as if I was in Manhattan’s famous Sardi’s that I had read so much about in movie magazines, sans all the drawings of famous theater people. I had arrived!

My mom ordered a perfect Rob Roy and I was given permission to have a coke with dinner (brought to me in a bottle). I ordered the London broil with mashed potatoes and peas and when I finished every last morsel, I thought it was the best meal I’d ever eaten. In fact, the mashed potatoes were instant and the peas canned, but I didn’t know that. Even if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered, my palate was not that educated and I was in love with the room.  Atmosphere.

I went to McElroy’s many times for dinner after that and each time I ordered the London broil with those potatoes and peas. I was never disappointed. I loved it there, and years later when I was a young writer in New York, I loved going to Sardi’s. Each represented my parents’ era, a pre and post WWII time I found so very sophisticated and glamorous. I wanted to be Kate Hepburn in “Stage Door” or Bette Davis in just about anything.

The last time I was in McElroy’s was the weekend I left my Manhattan apartment to go home to Bayside for my mother’s wedding shower. Eight years after my dad died, my mom had found a man whom she wanted to marry and family and friends from near and far came for the shower.

Afterward, some of us ladies met up with our husbands and boyfriends at McElroy’s for nightcaps (I had had a few nightcaps by then – often in Sardi’s). We sat at the bar and toasted my mom as memories of my London broil dinners and of mom going there on dates with my dad came flooding back.

A memorable restaurant for me is not always about the food… it’s about the feeling the room gives you and the memories it may trigger or the memories you create there. In that context McElroy’s and Sal’s were memorable, so when I walked Bell Blvd. the last time I was in Bayside after a thirty year absence, I was sad to see that both these restaurants were gone. There are so many more choices in Bayside now and I hope some of these new restaurants will feed fond memories to those who go there.

Bourbon Street - one of the hippest bars in Queens - and written up in the NYTimes

I wish I had had time to dine in all of them, creating new Bayside memories and food fodder for my blog.

For now, I’m content with the glorious memory of instant mashed potatoes and canned peas… and dinner with my mom.

THE DAYS OF WINE & SOAPS - Standing Sun Wines

THE DAYS OF WINE & SOAPS

Standing Sun Wines

OK, I admit it, I love soaps (the television serial kind) and I love wine… and did I find the perfect place to mix them both – from soapland’s Port Charles, NY to real life’s Santa Ynez Valley.

The soap part:

My addiction to ‘love in the afternoon’ dramas started in college with the character-driven, New York produced “Another World.”  This was a jewel of a show and when it was canceled, my heart was broken.

I needed a replacement.  A soap ‘fix! (Well, I did say I was an addict, right?) I soon found one when I was mentored by Doris Silverton (who also became my surrogate mom when Richard and I moved to LA).  Doris wrote for “General Hospital” (GH as it’s affectionately referred to) and soon I was involved (even writing a bit) in the lives and loves of the citizens of Port Charles.

It was in Port Charles that I met Carly (Benson, Spencer, Quartermaine, Corinthos, Jax), a complex “bad” girl created by the wonderful Sarah Brown and who is now played by the sublime Laura Wright, both Emmy winners for the role.  So, what has that got to do with wine?  Well, when you spend so much time with soap characters (5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, year in and year out), they become family.  So, like a lot of family members I follow on Twitter, I follow a few favorites and Laura/Carly is one of them.

Now the wine part:

While reading Laura’s tweets, I discovered that she and her husband, John, own and operate a winery in the “Sideways” Santa Ynez region.  I began following the winery and learned that John grows the grapes, blends...

 

...bottles and sells the wine.  Since I write about wine it was a match made in heaven.  So, when I knew Richard and I were going to be in the neighborhood, I tweeted John to see if we could visit Standing Sun’s new winery and tasting room even though it was still under construction. 

  

Graciously, he said yes.

When we arrived mid-afternoon, John was knee-deep in hammering and sawing, but stopped and warmly welcomed us into a small room with a plywood bar set up for wandering tasters.   

 

As he uncorked the wines, he told us how the winery’s name and label came into being.  The label is a photograph of his and his son’s shadows as they stood side-by-side in the setting sun.  John, who’s also an architect, designer, artist and cook (a true renaissance man), used that photograph to design the wine’s label.  A sun was born.

We tasted five of Standing Sun’s wine and all five were truly scrumptious.

The first was the 2010 Blanc ($24) – I’m not usually a ‘blanc’ lover in the sharp sauvignon blanc sense (I’m more of a buttery chardonnay girl), but this wine was an interesting complex blend of 34% Grenache blanc, 33% Rousanne and 33% Viognier that I’d never had before. I fell in love in the afternoon.

Next was the 2010 Pinot Noir Rose ($20).  It was Richard’s turn to fall in love at first blush (I know, I know – I couldn’t help myself), and I joined him (I’m just a fickle wine lover).  Delightful, slightly fruity (but not sweet), we loved this rose so much, Richard paired it w/ an entree of sea scallops in an orange-mustard-basil sauce served w/ a citrus couscous that he made last night.  A perfect marriage of delicious food and wine.

The 2010 Pinot Noir ($20) is a marvel for the price - filled w/ tastes of berries and spices and aromas that brought back childhood memories of the rich tobacco blend that my father tamped into his pipe. 

Time for the 2009 Grenache ($28) – I had been reading the Twitter love letters to this wine and have joined them in their love affair.  I told you, I’m fickle.

Last – and my very favorite Standing Sun wine (well, at that moment anyway), was the 2009 GSM which is 30% Grenache, 40% syrah and 30% Mourvedre.  100% delicious!

Laura tasting the 2010 GSM blends - I'm jealous

John then took us inside and shared his plans and his vision for the soon to be finished winery and tasting room he’s designed as a mix of cozy comfort and industrial chic.   

He projects that it will all be completed mid-September and Richard and I hope to be standing at the bar for another tasting in Standing Sun’s new winery as the sun is setting.  Or rising.  Or at high noon.  I'm easy!

So, if you find yourself on the 101 approaching the town of Buellton and looking for a little liquid love in the afternoon, take the next exit and head to Standing Sun.

Standing Sun Wines
(Rhone Variety wines)

P.O. Box 1944

Santa Ynez, Calif.  93460

805-904-8072

866-851-2927

www.standingsunwines.com

john@standingsunwines.com

Discounts for Wine Club member

  

THE GARDEN - a musing memory piece

I did my “roots” thing two summers ago and went back to my hometown to wander the tree-lined streets and relive old memories.  That place was Bayside, Queens, Long Island, New York and when I grew up there it was still considered a small-ish town. It even had a few old potato fields. Bayside was where I twirled my baton as I led P.S. 41’s band in the Memorial Day Parade, where my Girl Scout troop marched to Fort Totten on the 4th of July and where I studied dance at Miss Mildred’s neighborhood ballet school.


Bayside is where dad mowed the lawn in summer, burned leaves in the fall (before toxic fumes) and shoveled the driveway in winter, while mom sewed my dance costumes, made cookies and grilled Velveeta cheese sandwiches on Wonder bread. And in spring, magically, the gardens of each lovely two-story home in my neighborhood burst with vivid colors of blossoming hydrangeas, irises and daffodils. But I knew at an early age I was going to be a city girl one day, because the city had its own magical “garden.”

I was five years old the first time my parents took me to Madison Square Garden. The first thing I remember was being terrified as we made our way down the steep steps to our seats high up in the blue section. The height was dizzying and the energy in the air overpowering and I was sure I was going to plunge to my death. But my father saved me from that terrible fate when he took my arm and guided me to my seat.

Suddenly the lights went out and terror gripped me once again. In the darkness a booming voice announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen and children of all ages, welcome to the greatest show on earth.”

The lights flashed back on and music blared as elephants and horses charged into the arena, led by the most colorful, sparkling, beautiful people I had ever seen. I was no longer afraid, for I knew, at that moment, that this was a magical building.

That magic took on a new meaning when, as a Bayside H.S. cheerleader, I cheered for my team in the race for the NYC basketball championship. Thousands of students, teachers and parents filled the seats for that first play-off game. And there I was, in the middle of the floor of Madison Square Garden, not lying dead in the center ring as I had envisioned on my first visit, but kicking and cartwheeling myself into a frenzy. The score was 55-55. With only a second to go, my boyfriend took the pass, glided into the air and let loose a long hook shot. The buzzer sounded and everyone held their breath as the ball hit the backboard, then circled the rim. Around and around it went, but I knew it was going to go in. This was my magical building. The moment was intoxicating.

I didn’t get to feel that rush again until a few years later when a friend invited me to see the Knicks “live” for the first time. When I entered the Garden arena, I once more felt that intense surge of energy, giving me a thrill I’ve felt nowhere else on earth. As the Knicks played, the crowd’s cheers and groans were deafening.

Soon after, I discovered the Rangers. Hockey drew a different crowd from basketball... more dark suits and club ties... but the energy was the same.

Whether basketball or hockey... Connecticut commuters, gamblers, Wall Street manipulators, society ladies or homeboys… all lifted their voices in joy and agony in the Garden... their cries bouncing off the walls like a million Spaulding balls. Cheers at Shea and Giants Stadium can’t compete with the reverberating sound of rabid fans in the Garden. It’s a magical building.

Back in Bayside after so many years - my hometown no longer had potato fields, and the local movie theater where I spent every Saturday watching cartoons, westerns and Audrey Hepburn movies, eating Dots and buttered pop corn is now a multi-plex. My favorite mom and pop pizza place has been replaced by Pizza Hut or Dominos or both. White Castle now has to compete with Burger King, McDonald’s and Wendy’s and most of the small family businesses in town have closed, no longer able to compete with the shopping malls.  But nothing negated my happy memories.

This growth is happening all over America, but it won’t change who we are if we remember to water and nurture our children with their own joyous memories of gardens of cotton candy, clowns and basketball and we allow them to find their own magical “garden.”

And for disbelievers who say 'The Garden' is not the building, it’s the people in it, here’s one last tale… it was my first political convention as a press liaison. It was held in the Garden, and before the delegates were to arrive, I needed to check out the podium teleprompter. I left my office in the building’s bowels and walked into the arena. No one was there... not a workman, not a convention organizer, not a single secret service agent. I stood on the spot where Jimmy Carter would soon accept his party’s nomination for President, and as I looked around the expansive room, the air filled with exhilarating electricity. Suddenly I realized I wasn’t alone after all. The walls were alive. Bill Bradley and Rod Gilbert were there, Emmett Kelly was there and so was a “small” town cheerleader ready to spark her team on with new energy... we were all there, happy ghosts in the walls of the Garden.