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.

ELAINE'S, STUFFED MUSHROOMS & NORMAN MAILER - an appreciation

ELAINE’S, STUFFED MUSHROOMS

& NORMAN MAILER

an appreciation

Elaine Kaufman, one of the great New York saloon keepers, died last week.  No one, IMO, except Vincent Sardi and Toots Shor (whom I’ve blogged about before) could match her presence as she presided over her establishment appropriately named Elaine's.

 

Standing at the end of the long mahogany bar tallying up patrons’ bills w/o an adding machine which often did not resemble the prices of anything consumed by the diners, or table-hopping to chat w/ favored diners, she was a force.  

I started going to Elaine’s when I was married to my first husband (hereinafter referred to as “the ex”)…  He was a slick, Nicky Arnstein-type, rock/nightclub agent who loved to gamble and fly down to the Caribbean or Miami to work on his tan (tho he looked more like Omar Sharif, than Arnstein, thank god).  He was a Bronx boy who grew up playing schoolyard basketball and dreaming of the high life in Manhattan.  Elaine was a Bronx girl w/ a little Queens thrown in w/ her own dreams of life in Manhattan and, though her first loves were writers and journalists, she adored ‘the ex.’  In fact, she loved most men.  Women?  Not so much.  But she liked me well enough, even though she never bothered to learn my name, because I came w/ ‘the ex.’

When ‘the ex’ officially became ‘the ex’ dinners at Elaine’s seemed to be over for me… I was a fledgling writer making ends meet working at ICM as an ‘agent-in-training’ - no Dorothy Parker by any means, though Elaine’s was my era’s Algonquin Round Table.  But during my short marriage, I had made friends w/ a few ‘favored’ by Elaine so I got to go now and again… each time Elaine quietly tolerating me because of the guy I was with.  I didn’t care.  I was ‘famous adjacent’ sitting at a table near Woody & Mia or the always elegant George Plimpton or Jules Feiffer or Gay Talese or near the wall phone where I would overhear one of her ‘guys’ call his bookie to bet on the Knicks (pre-cell phones)… or see who would come out of the bathrooms next w/ white powder on their noses.

But it wasn’t until I became a BFF of Erica - another junior ICM agent who also was a ‘regular’ at Elaine’s because of her husband – that I became a ‘regular’ again (sort of).  When Erica joined me in ‘singlehood’ – Elaine took her under her wing and she became the first female I ever saw Elaine dote on, always giving Erica one of the ‘good’ tables along the right hand wall as you entered the restaurant.

We were barely out of our teens and unaccomplished at the time, but that didn’t seem to matter to Elaine (at least as far as Erica was concerned).

So there I was, once again, eating at Elaine’s a couple of nights a week at Erica’s table (or w/ one of Elaine’s other ‘favored’ friends).   Sometimes it was just the two of us – other times we had dates or she would entertain a few writer clients (she’d finally been promoted to full literary agent after getting Robin Cook his first book deal).  Often we stayed long after closing, playing backgammon and lighting up the cookie wrappers from macaroons (I think they were macaroons) then watching them shoot up in the air and burn out.  I never knew when these cookies arrived at our table – but they were always there at the end of the meal.

One night I spotted Norman Mailer w/ a couple of  people at a table along that right hand wall just before the doorway into the “Siberia” room (reserved for those in disfavor or people Elaine didn’t know or want to know).  On the wall above Mailer was a lighted sconce which, for some reason, bothered Norman to no end.  He stood up and turned it off.  Within a nano second, Elaine materialized at his table and turned the sconce back on.  After a few friendly words Elaine returned to her post at the end of the bar and Norman again turned off the sconce.  Elaine scurried back and turned it on – Norman turned it off – Elaine turned it on… It was her restaurant, after all.  Friendly words turned to angry words, angry words turned to yelling and the yelling turned to fisticuffs (well, a little skirmish anyway) – the clash of the titans!  I was transfixed.  The next thing I knew, Elaine was shoving Mailer out of the restaurant.  And this was a guy who once took up boxing.

I miss those days in New York – the energy, the political discussions, the celebrations when a writer had a book published or a play opening or a breaking story… but what I miss most were her fantastic stuffed mushrooms overflowing w/ so much melted cheese you could hardly find the mushroom.

Many obituaries have told stories about Elaine often feeding ‘her’ writers who were down on their luck – even running a tab for them for years – at the same time dismissing her food.   I had to laugh at the remarks I recently read online that bitched about this entrée or that appetizer - wanting to know why Elaine’s was so feted when the food was so bad.   Frankly, they just don’t get it… Elaine’s was never about the food.  It was a sense of place!  A clubhouse!  Sardi’s was never about the food, either.  Neither was the Algonquin or Toots Shor’s… they were watering holes for friends, not a place for foodies.  But, like Toots and Sardi’s, Elaine’s best entrees were simple steaks and chops --‘saloon’ food -- and not the Italian food featured on the menu.  So being a meat eater, that was fine dining for me… and, IMO, she had the best veal chop in town.  But nothing  back in the day could top her stuffed mushrooms. 

I was addicted to them.  Another ‘favored’ friend of Elaine’s was fashion photographer turned film director, Jerry Schatzberg.  We, too, were friends (though I did have a mad crush on him) and we often dined at Elaine’s.  One night at dinner, I astounded him when I ordered those “dripping w/ melted gruyere mushrooms” for an appetizer, a main course and, again for dessert.  What can I say, I love cheese that bubbles and stretches like a rubber band when you fork it into your mouth. 

To abate this yearning during the many years we’ve lived in LA, Richard found a recipe for stuffed mushrooms that almost takes the place of the ones I still dream about from Elaine’s.  In her memory he made them the other night as an appetizer for a small dinner party we hosted.

So, if you’re into mushrooms and melted cheese and aren’t able to go to Elaine’s – bite into these.

Mushrooms Stuffed w/

Walnuts & Cheese

(from the Silver Palate cookbook)

Ingredients:

12 medium-size mushroom caps

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon sweet butter

½ cup finely chopped onion

1 garlic clove, peeled and minced

5 ounces frozen chopped spinach, thoroughly defrosted & squeezed dry

1 ounce feta cheese, crumbled

1 ounce Gruyere cheese, crumbled

2 tablespoons minced fresh dill

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Directions:

Remove stems from mushrooms and save for another use.  Wipe the mushroom caps w/ a damp cloth or paper towel and set aside.

Heat olive oil and butter together in a small skillet.  Add the onion and cook over medium heat, covered, until tender and lightly colored, about 25 minutes.

 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Add walnuts and garlic to onion and cook for another minute.   

 

Add spinach and cook for another 5 minutes, stirring constantly.   

 

Remove from heat and cool slightly.  Stir in cheeses, dill, and salt and pepper to taste.

Arrange the mushrooms, cavity side up, in a baking dish. 

 

 Divide the spinach and walnut mixture evenly among the mushroom caps.

Set baking dish in the upper third of the oven.  Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, or until filling is browned and the mushrooms are thoroughly heated through.  Serve immediately.

 

12 mushrooms, 3 or 4 portions

DINING AT KENDALL'S BRASSERIE & BAR - A Very Enchanted Evening

DINING AT KENDALL’S

A Very Enchanted Evening

Recently, Richard and I saw the glorious “Broadway” production of “South Pacific” at L.A.’s Ahmanson Theater and the restaurant we chose to have dinner beforehand left me feeling “Younger than spring time.” Why? Because it brought back memories of when I first left college and started working in Manhattan... before the ‘fine wine & fine dining’ foodie craze and at the tail end of the two martini lunch ‘saloon’ era of the 50’s to mid-60’s. My parents’ post WWII era. The ‘Mad Men’ era.

When I worked at CBS (known as Black Rock) the 21 Club and Toots Shor’s were down the block. The famed 2l (still one of my favorite bars/restaurants ever), a former speakeasy, is still thriving, I’m happy to report… but Toots toodle-oo’d years ago.

I loved Toots and his saloon. I’d listen to his booming voice as he chatted up customers while I hung out at the bar sipping a Cutty Sark on the rocks or a scotch sour (you only had wine back then if you were eating in a French restaurant). Sinatra drank and ate there, as did his fellow Rat Packers and the ‘Copa’ comics of the day. Sitting on a bar stool at Toots’ bar made me feel I arrived. I don’t know to or at what I was arriving, but it was a heady feeling.

And when I went to the theater which was every other week, my friends/dates and I would have dinner after the play at Sardi’s which was still hanging on to its heyday. If not Sardi’s, we’d walk over to Joe Allen, a saloon/pub (still heydaying now) for a late night burger w/ the actors and gypsies appearing on B’way. But Joe Allen represented a new era – my era. Sardi’s was becoming a remnant of an “All About Eve” past.

I miss those old watering holes, as they were often called, even though the food was never what anyone would call ‘fine dining.’ The places had a certain glamour and cachet. So, when Richard and I find a restaurant/bar that reminds me of that era, I’m a happy camper.

Which brings me to Kendall’s Brasserie & Bar which is downstairs from The Music Center (LA’s version of NY’s Lincoln Center) and the only place I want to dine if we’re going to the theater. One perk is we can park our car at the Music Center and walk a few steps to the restaurant – no moving the car or finding a theater shuttle to get us to the show before curtain time. The second perk is that the staff and décor flood me w/ memories of those saloon-restaurants I loved so much when I was a 21 year old ‘career’ girl.

There’s a semi-circular bar in the main dining room surrounded by a dark mahogany half wall topped w/ etched glass panels between shiny brass posts. The TV is set to ESPN (Toots always had some sporting event playing on a screen over his bar, too)… The night we were there George Steinbrenner was being eulogized – an end of a baseball era which I found ironic because I was in a restaurant that reminded me of the saloon era of which Steinbrenner was very much a part.

The dining rooms sport vintage metal sconces from France, red leather banquettes, tables w/ white cloths and comfortable bistro chairs of dark wood and black leather. One sponged mustard-colored wall in our dining room displayed vintage hotel silver trays and serving pieces. A huge chandelier shaped like a steel drum w/ cream glass bowls in metal frames hung from the ceiling. Rooster sculptures ruled the roost near two charming Toulouse-esque murals painted on the back wall… Food was served on white dishes – of course.

But I really fell in love w/ the French imported tile floor with its octagon stars surrounded by solid terra cotta colored tiles and an Aztec-style border. If those old saloons didn’t have dark wood floors – they always had various style tile floors.

Kendall’s is a comfortable, masculine place w/ just enough softness in its design to be welcoming to women.

I no longer drink scotch …wine is my preferred drink w/ dinner now and, unlike those bygone saloon days, most ‘saloons’ now have a fairly nice wine list. Richard and I started off w/ a glass of Shannon Ridge chardonnay. But, speaking of perks, Kendall’s was in the midst of a no corkage fee promotion (still going on), so we brought our own bottle… Woodenhead Pinot Noir, a delicious find from our Sonoma wine trip (see my “Long & Wine-ing Road” blogs of a few months ago).

Also, unlike those bygone saloon days, the food has become more important and Kendall’s offers an interesting selection of delicious French-California cuisine.

For our overture, we shared a watercress & endive salad w/ chevre chaud & walnut vinaigrette…

Then the curtain went up on our entrees. Richard had a grilled loup de mer fillet (sea bass) w/ green asparagus, carrot anise puree & lobster vinaigrette. I had the Chateau steak w/ a béarnaise sauce, roasted tomatoes, baby spinach & pommes frites maison. We left humming the sauces.

I miss those old saloons and that heady feeling I’d get when I was in one (and not from the scotch), but Kendall’s Brasserie & Bar brings back that memory… and the food’s better.

All and all… dinner and a show… a very enchanting evening.