01/06: Saying goodbye to Mom & Pop

I wasn’t really all that surprised to hear that a restaurant I worked at long ago was finally closing its doors.  It had been hobbling along for the last few years and with the down turn in the economy ( and other more personal factors) the once favorite neighborhood eatery called it quits.  A local food critic lamented its passing and confessed to having abandoned it for more modern bright, shiny, hip places that served trendier “comfort” food.  Yes, he is fickle, not unlike many foodies in this town who obsessively tweet about finding the next great thing.  However, I have to say in his defense, it is his JOB to ferret out the yet to be discovered, to write about the hottest new restaurant.  Still, if he really cared about the sustainability of these treasured “Mom & Pop” institutions, he’d have devoted a little more print to praising their virtues while they were still alive, instead of giving a guilt-ridden eulogy.

While it was not always easy working in that cozy little space, filled with creaky lop-sided office chairs, leaking pipes, computers from the dark ages (we were STILL using Wordstar for God’s sake!), file cabinets stuffed to the brim with a decade of catering orders, and questionable ventilation, I can say that I learned practically everything I know about catering (not to mention Italian cuisine) from my time there.  I also honed in my talent for multi-tasking and thinking on my feet, because when you’re on a historical ship with no kitchen, a dwindling buffet with an endless line of hungry drunk wedding guests, and a sizeable chunk hacked off the wedding cake (no doubt from one of the drunken hungry guests), you pretty much have do a few “Hail Mary” moves to advert disaster.

Like many of the wonderful people I worked with, who to this day are great friends, I outgrew the place but I never really left it behind.  We, in fact, get together a couple times a year for mini reunions to catch up on the new and talk about the old.  Some of us are still in the food biz, some not.  What binds us together is not just the experience of working together but the shared memory of the place itself–everything from the storeroom filled with bottles of imported olive oils, balsamic vinegars, pasta, and ceramics, to the smell of chicken fat dripping off the rotisserie in the morning, piping hot plates of pasta alla norma coming off the line, and hazelnut meringue cake layered with fluffy whipped cream and apricot paste–all which is just that, a memory.  A very warm, tasty memory.

Posted January 6th, 2010

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