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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
