My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants

by Colman Andrews

  WHEN WE DINED OUT at Chasen’s, we’d always dress up, Dad in a suit and tie, Mom in something bright and bold from Saks or Bullock’s, accessorized with fake gold and rubies and possibly a hat adorned with millinery foliage, Merry and I in our Sunday church clothes. Pulling up to the restaurant in our Buick sedan, Mom at the wheel (my father never learned to drive), we’d be welcomed by name by the parking attendants, then ushered into the vestibule. I remember vividly the scent of the fur coats, sometimes damp from the evening mist, in the coat check just inside the door, and I remember the strange painting that hung over it: a portrait of W. C. Fields as a grumpy-looking Queen Victoria. Then we’d pass into the dining room—I loved that moment of entering the place, that quick, seamless transition from real life to what I had come to see as a kind of fantasy world, where nothing but good things would be served—to be greeted effusively by the maître d’hôtel or by Dave Chasen himself or his glamorous Kentucky-born wife, Maude.

  Dave was short, about five-foot-six, with thick hair, big ears, and a prominent mole on his right cheek. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and smoked a pipe. I thought he looked like a garden gnome, but he was always animated and seemed warm and kind. He used to do magic tricks for me when we stopped by his office to say good-bye after our meal, sometimes making cards disappear or pulling nickels out of my ears. Maude was tall, slender, and dauntless, with a handsome face framed by golden hair, and she pretty much seemed to run the place. She doted on me. I recently came across a note from her, dated December 20, 1949—I would have been two months shy of my fifth birthday—reading, “This is a Christmas invitation. After the holidays, would you please be my guest for dinner at ‘Chasen’s’? You may bring your mother and father—as we will need them to chaperone us!”

  My favorite dinner as a youngster at Chasen’s was ground sirloin steak with a side of potatoes O’Brien, little cubes of fried potato tossed with minced onion and red and green bell pepper. If I was lucky, the meal concluded with a coupe snowball, which was simply a ball of vanilla ice cream coated in shredded toasted coconut, then generously anointed with Hershey’s chocolate syrup. As I grew older, I came to appreciate the vichyssoise, the Caesar salad (made tableside with many flourishes), the Maude salad (shredded romaine, iceberg, and chicory with diced tomato with a Roquefort dressing; I always asked them to leave off the chopped hard-cooked egg with which it was usually finished), the Dover sole meunière, the boneless squab with wild rice, and certainly the hobo steak. And every meal had to begin with an order of Parmesan cheese toast.

  In an L.A. restaurant guide that I wrote in 1982, I confessed that I had practically lived at Chasen’s as a child and that “I could no more critically analyze [it] . . . than I could review the interior decoration of the house I grew up in.” The truth is that as I gained experience of food and became an avid, and critical, restaurant goer on my own, I came to realize that Chasen’s was not a paragon of the culinary arts. But I also came to realize that that didn’t matter one bit—that a restaurant could please you, and even nourish you, in more ways than one.

  DAVE CHASEN DIED of cancer in 1973, but Maude kept the place going. One evening in 1981, at Maude’s invitation, I took my first wife to dinner there, the first time I’d been in probably a dozen years. We ate cheese toast, Maude salad, and hobo steak, with martinis first and red wine along the way, and Maude sat with us and reminisced. Afterward, by previous arrangement, she took us over to the house where I’d grown up, by then the property of one of her friends. My parents had sold off the roadside plot on which the tennis court stood just before we moved away, and another house now occupied the space. The deodar cedars were long gone. The playroom had been broken up into three or four smaller rooms. The kitchen had been moved. I couldn’t find a single room, in fact, that looked like anything I remembered. The exterior of the house was no longer Cape Cod Colonial but Generic McMansion in style. After looking around for half an hour or so, we thanked the owners and went back to Chasen’s for a nightcap, which I badly needed.

  Maude died in 2001, at the age of ninety-seven, but the restaurant had predeceased her. With increased competition from trendier establishments like Ma Maison, Spago, and the Ivy, Chasen’s lost business. The old-timers still went (Ronnie Reagan celebrated what was probably his last public birthday there), but it was considered too dressy by the younger crowd (jeans were frowned on), and the old-fashioned menu didn’t appeal to diners looking for goat cheese pizza and tuna tartare. Maude could no longer run the place, either. In her later years, though she still liked to dress up and work the room, she was forgetful and would nonplus longtime customers by failing to recognize them or sitting down with them and saying things like “You know, I used to run a restaurant.” Kay MacKay, Maude’s daughter from her first marriage, kept things going as long as she could, but in 1995 closed the restaurant for good. A new Chasen’s opened, with MacKay’s son as a partner, on Cañon Drive in Beverly Hills in 1997, but it closed three years later. The original Chasen’s building is now an upscale market called Bristol Farms; there are a few of the old Chasen’s booths in the market café, and Chasen’s chili is on the menu.

  I went back to Chasen’s a few times after my last dinner there with Maude, and had planned to have a farewell dinner there around Christmastime in 1994, just before I moved to the East Coast. We were short on time and money, though, and never made it. “We’ll come back next year and go for sure,” I told my wife. But by the time we made our next trip to L.A., Chasen’s was gone. I never did get to have dinner at Billy “Square Deal” Grady’s table.

  Chapter Two

  TRADER VIC’S,

  Beverly Hills (1955–2007)

  MY FORMAL EDUCATION BEGAN IN SEPTEMBER 1950, when Mom took me up a set of broad wooden steps into a bungalow at St. Paul the Apostle School in West Los Angeles for my first day of kindergarten. The teacher was Miss Clary, a bright-faced laywoman, but the school was run by an order of nuns called the Daughters of Mary and Joseph, and the mother superior who wrangled them was standing just inside the classroom door to welcome the new students. I took one look at this tall, hooded specter garbed in black and deep blue robes, her sharp face framed by a blindingly white starched wimple, her chest covered by a blindingly white starched bib, and started screaming. I’d been to Mass with my parents by that point and had seen priests and altar boys aplenty, but I don’t think I had ever seen a nun before, certainly not close up, and frankly I was terrified—inconsolable, in fact, to the extent that Mom apologized and turned around and took me home.

  I tried again the next day, and this time there was no nun in sight, and by the time I started seeing the good sisters again, crossing the playground, their veils flapping in the breeze, they no longer scared me. I went on to acquit myself well as a fledgling student—so well, in fact, that at the end of the school year, I was invited to be the valedictorian at my kindergarten graduation ceremony, complete with pale blue cap and gown. I’ve been getting up in front of crowds and blabbering about one thing or another ever since.

  I don’t remember much about my first couple of years of grade school, except that Mom would drive me to St. Paul’s each morning and pick me up each afternoon; that I’d find peanut-butter-and-jelly or American cheese sandwiches and raw carrots or an apple in my Hopalong Cassidy lunch box at noontime; and that I brought home good report cards. I got into trouble in third grade, though. I don’t know whether I was showing off for one of the cute girls I liked or whether I was just bored, but for some reason—I was, remember, a precocious wiseacre—I became the class clown, keeping up a running stream of jokes and comments at the expense of the nice young Irish nun who was attempting to imbue us with some rudimentary knowledge. I have no recollection at all of what I said, but I know that almost every time she opened her mouth, I’d make a wisecrack. My classmates loved it, and I kept them laughing all day long. There were time-outs and detentions, of course, and visits to Mother Superior’s office and conferences with my parents, but none of it did
any good. I liked the attention too much. When school let out in June 1953, I was asked not to return to St. Paul’s for fourth grade. In fact, Mother Superior suggested, a stint at one of the area’s military schools might instill in me a little respect for authority.

  For fourth grade and half of the fifth, then, I wore a flattop haircut and donned a gray flannel cadet’s uniform every weekday morning, riding the school bus to St. John’s Military Academy, on the fringes of downtown Los Angeles. I hated it—the drill-team exercises with make-believe carbines, the demerit system enforced with fearsome authority by the military washouts who patrolled our corridors and grounds, the Saturday detentions in which we were sadistically forced to do the very thing preadolescents are least capable of doing: sit still and be quiet for hours on end.

  I also had egg trouble at St. John’s: One day, when I was in fifth grade, we were served poached eggs for lunch, firm rubbery orbs that probably would have disgusted me even if I’d been an egg eater. I refused to touch them, and Major Scanlon, the squat martinet who ran the school, called me up in front of the entire cafeteria and forced me to choke them down. Needless to say, this did nothing to dispel my prejudice—but the incident did help convince my parents that it was time to send me back to a regular school. Fortunately, St. Paul’s agreed to readmit me halfway through the year.

  For the rest of my elementary school career, I think that I was probably more or less an average kid. There was no more acting up. I got okay grades, played catch during recess (not particularly well), got picked on by the class bully (Dave Wilson, where are you now?), read comic books surreptitiously in class, mooned over girls, played at friends’ houses after school—cowboys and Indians at first, later “war” (some of my classmates had older brothers who had been to Korea).

  At night, I did my homework, puzzling over math problems at our kitchen table, constructing 3-D maps for geography class on the playroom floor, writing book reports and diagramming sentences on lined binder paper at my little white desk. The only TV show Merry and I were allowed to watch on weeknights was Disneyland, on Wednesdays—the original Disney anthology series, which began before the first theme park of that name was built, and which launched the Davy Crockett craze (and, yes, I had a coonskin cap). I spent the rest of my spare time reading. I was particularly fond of the children’s history books in the American Landmarks series, works with titles like The Barbary Pirates, Kit Carson and the Wild Frontier, Gettysburg (written by MacKinlay Kantor, one of my father’s old colleagues at the Chicago Daily News), and Ben Franklin of Old Philadelphia. I would get lost in these, and daydream about finding myself at war (in a Confederate uniform; it seemed more romantic), or on a tall ship, or strolling through a Colonial-era city. I led a rich fantasy life. I had imaginary friends.

  When I was eight or nine, it occurred to me to wonder if my father was a spy. He had a great romantic fascination with the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent—the lands “east of Suez,” as he often said (he liked Somerset Maugham, whose line that was)—a fascination he ascribed to the fact that his own father had read Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads to him when he was young and living with the Arapaho in Oklahoma. As the old Hollywood studio system began to fall apart in the early fifties and Dad’s contract writing jobs became ever scarcer, he got his first chance to visit that part of the world: Somehow, improbably (I never did learn how it happened), he got hired by the United States Information Agency to write and produce three short documentaries about Pakistan’s armed forces.

  A man less military than my father would be difficult to imagine (he hadn’t served in World War II, another story I never got), but, uncertain what his professional future held, and quite possibly disillusioned by a changing Hollywood anyway, he took to the assignment with unusual enthusiasm. I have a faint recollection of sitting in the backseat of the Buick as Mom drove him to the original Los Angeles International Airport, across Sepulveda Boulevard from where it stands today, to start his arduous prop-plane journey across the Pacific, and I remember him talking with great animation about the fabled Khyber Pass, where he was ultimately headed. Once he got to Pakistan, he wrote back long letters on his little green Hermes portable, recounting his adventures—flying over the Himalayas in a DC-3 with a missing door; buying American cigarettes in the bazaar in Peshawar from merchants squatting on the ground next to disassembled machine guns spread out on threadbare carpets that should probably be hanging in a museum somewhere; drinking scotch with husky, bearded Pathans swaddled in turbans and armed with long daggers that had to “taste blood” once they were drawn.

  When he returned home, after a month or so, a man named Joe, wearing a conservative dark suit and big shoes whose soles extended far beyond their leather uppers, came over to our house and sat with him in our playroom for three or four hours, apparently asking him all manner of questions about what he’d witnessed on his trip. I say “apparently” because the doors were shut and my sister and I were warned sternly not to disturb the men—but I had no doubt that there was espionage afoot.

  Dad’s travels to Asia continued. He went back to Pakistan, and became a regular visitor to India, where he conceived the notion of writing a biographical film about Gautama Buddha—an ultimately fruitless project on which he was to expend enormous time and energy for the rest of his life. (I remember him meeting for hours one afternoon in the playroom with Marlon Brando and David Lean, pitching the film to them to no avail.) He traveled to Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon), Burma, and the Philippines, and even found his way to Egypt, where he wrote the screenplay for a historical epic called Wa Islamah, and to prerevolutionary Iran. And whenever he came home, Joe would drive over and sit with him for hours—debriefing him, I think it’s safe to say. I hope his observations did the world some good, in some small way, though given the political climate in America in those days, I tend to doubt it.

  ASIA DIDN’T INTEREST me much. My fantasies took me in a different direction. By the time I was in my early teens, I had gone mad for another part of the world: the South Pacific. I’d never been there, of course, but the whole idea of the place had hopelessly seduced me—thanks initially, I’m pretty sure, to a restaurant.

  When I was eight, a handsome six-story fifties-modern hotel called the Beverly Hilton arose on the prow of land that stuck out into the X-shaped intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards in Beverly Hills. At the tip of the prow was a restaurant called The Traders. It was obvious to me even from the outside, when we first drove by, that this was no ordinary eating place. The windowless exterior walls were textured with stylized geometric patterns. Along the Wilshire Boulevard side stood a quartet of dark brown wooden tikis, probably fifteen feet high, set on concrete pedestals. Banana trees, their wrinkly fronds akimbo, sprouted along the walls. The most remarkable thing about The Traders, though, was the savory siren smell, meaty and woody and sweet, that wafted out from the place. Every time we passed, I was surprised by it anew, and drawn to it. Then one evening, dressed up as if we were going to Chasen’s, we pulled into the parking lot and actually went inside. Half an hour later, I decided that I had found my new favorite restaurant—not just for the food, which I thought was wonderful, but for the world conjured up by the interior, an island world, floral, fragrant, foreign, beguiling.

  The South Seas were big in America in the fifties. In 1947, the Norwegian ethnographer and zoologist Thor Heyerdahl had sailed a balsa-wood raft, the Kon-Tiki, from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands in French Polynesia, in an attempt to prove that ancient peoples could have traveled great distances and influenced faraway cultures, and his chronicle of the voyage became a best-seller. The musical South Pacific—based on James Michener’s collection of war-in-the-Pacific stories, Tales of the South Pacific—had been a smash on Broadway and was made into a hit movie in 1958. Michener’s epic novel Hawaii was published the following year, and at more or less the same time a Michener-inspired TV series, Adventures in Paradise, started airing, starring Gardner McKay as the dashing cap
tain of the schooner Tiki III, who sailed from one Polynesian island to another in search of both paradise and adventures.

  Then there was the musical genre called “exotica,” a kind of light jazz involving unusual percussion instruments and birdcalls, apparently invented more or less by accident in Hawaii in 1954 and subsequently popularized nationwide by its creators, the pianist-bandleader Martin Denny and his vibraphonist, Arthur Lyman. Denny’s hit record, Quiet Village, released in 1957, is sometimes credited with having ignited the tiki-bar craze and its adjuncts—backyard luaus illuminated by tiki torches, knockoff aloha shirts, tropical-style cocktails even at the local bar and grill.

  I bought into it all. I read Michener and Heyerdahl, and any other book I could find about the South Pacific, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas to a volume, whose title I’ve long since forgotten, by a man who had packed up his family and cruised off to Tahiti with them for a couple of years—my dream. I saved my allowance to buy every new Denny and Lyman album as it came out. I was too young for cocktails, but I drank tropical fruit juices almost exclusively for a while. I learned to wrap a beach towel sarong-style around my waist, and made leis out of oleander flowers from the bushes by our swimming pool. When I was twelve, my parents let me move out of my bedroom into an unused bedroom in the back of the house, and decorate it any way I wanted to. I painted the walls turquoise, laid down grass matting on the floor, and hung a piece of genuine tapa cloth on the wall. I also extracted a promise from Mom and Dad that if I got straight A’s my first year in high school, they’d take me to Hawaii for summer vacation.