The Sunday Memory Drawer - Eating Out

If you're not watching Phil Rosenthal's terrific PBS show "I'll Have What Phil's Having," you should be.   It's a fascinating look at cuisine from all over the globe.  From Tokyo to Italy to Paris to Hong Kong.   The last two episodes have Phil guide through some eateries in Barcelona and finally Los Angeles.  These hour-long shows are terrific travelogues for people who don't go anywhere.

Rosenthal, long before he created "Everybody Loves Raymond," was one of those people.  As a kid growing up in Rockland County, he probably never dined anywhere south of the Tappan Zee Bridge.

That would be me, too.  Anywhere my family went out to eat was within a five-mile radius of our home.  If the establishment wasn't in Mount Vernon, New York, nearby Yonkers, or the North Bronx, we didn't got to it.   And we went to the same places over and over and over.  

Take, for instance, the legendary Bee Hive on Fourth Avenue in Mount Vernon. This was a spot where my mom would take me every Friday afternoon after school.   I'd have the same thing repeatedly.   A BLT on toast with mayo.  A chocolate malted.   And then we'd head down the block to either Loews or RKO Proctor's movie theater.

Trust me, for us, this was fancy eats.

There were fancier eats and that would be for visiting relatives.   For instance, up on Central Avenue in Yonkers, you had Patricia Murphy's Restaurant.   I have no clue who Patricia Murphy was, but my mom loved to hold court there.   These days, it's gone and nothing but a strip mall.  But, back when I was a kid, we had to dress up to go there.

Just a little bit to the south in the then high-falutin' Cross County shopping mall, you had the Red Coach Grill.

The Red Coach Grill actually hung in there for a long time.   I went there with relatives and, oddly enough, it was a hot place to take a date in college.  You'd look like a big deal as you splurged on a big cut of prime rib.  I even wound up going to a wedding reception there.   Of course, as Cross County Mall went down hill, so did the clientele.   For a while, the building became a Sizzler.  

Now my family always had a Sunday dinner at 2PM every week.   This was clockwork.  But, on those weeks when neither parent felt like cooking, we drove a couple of miles into Yonkers to dine at Bruno's Restaurant.   This was straight out of the Sopranos and run by a similar family.   Allegedly, my father had some connection to the guy who ran the place.   In retrospect, I don't really want to know the details.  A trip to Bruno's for me always meant that I got to have a shrimp cocktail.  You know, the big deal with about ten or twelve shrimps sitting in a tray of ice.   This eight-year-old felt awfully special and adult-like eating one of those.  Well, somebody must have gone to jail because Bruno's didn't make it past my 12th birthday,   And now it's paved over into this parking lot.

A more practical...well, cheaper...Italian restaurant was also frequented by our family.   It was called Sorrento's and it was on the corner of 232rd Street and White Plains Road in the Bronx.   For our crowd, this was the only acceptable place to get pizza.   To this day, it was the best.   There were many Saturday evenings where I sat there.   Pulling the melted cheese into my mouth as the elevated train clickety-clacked past every five minutes.  How does a restaurant with the best pizza in the world not last?   Well, neighborhoods change and, as you can see, in the photo below, so do the dining choices.

When it was hot, nobody wanted to cook.   And so my mother would make the summer meal pronouncement...

"I'm not cooking tonight..."

Yes, it was time for Chicken Delight.   And there was one convenient to us near the Gramatan Avenue circle in Mount Vernon.   You can see how long that franchise lasted.   Now it's nothing but a vacant lot.

Yes, there was that iconic staple of comfort food.   The diner.   And the one we went to all the time was the Cross County diner on Yonkers Avenue.   That was back in the day when there were childrens' meals named after comic book stars.   The Roy Rogers.   The Flash Gordon.   The Popeye the Sailor Man.   The latter had spinach.   I had yet to establish a taste for that vegetable.   Almost miraculously, the diner is still there and caters to a lot of old people who are saving their bucks for the weekly trip up to Empire City Casino on the grounds of the Yonkers Raceway.

Eventually, we wound up with a restaurant owner in the family.   My dad's cousin bought a bar and grill on the corner of 241st Street and White Plains Road in the Bronx.   It was named Barney's and I still, to this day, don't know who Barney.   It was a bar in the front and a greasy griddle in the back with a history of hamburgers that probably went back to President Eisenhower.   As a result of the family connection, we started going there exclusively for the next few years.   

Bye, Patricia Murphy's.

So long, Red Coach Grill.

Ciao, Sorrento's.

The big selling point for me at Barney's was their rice pudding.   The creamiest that I have ever tasted.

Oddly enough, there's still an eating establishment there.   I doubt the rice pudding is still there.   The grease, I am sure, is likely intact.

Now look at all these places and you will 99% of the restaurants that my family frequented when I was a kid.   None of them more than a ten minute car ride away.   We lived in a comfortable cocoon.   And rarely strayed out of it.

You might note that there is never any mention of my grandparents in any of these eating stories, despite the fact that they lived in the same house with us.   Well, except for a wedding or funeral reception, I never remember Grandma or Grandpa eating outside of their kitchen.  And they had good reason.

"We make it just as good at home."

Probably the same thing that Phil Rosenthal heard up in Rockland County.

Dinner last night:  Had a big late breakfast at Dupar's in Pasadena.  Everything after that was a blur.  Stau tuned for the story.