“I despise formal restaurants. I find all of that formality to be very base and vile. I would much rather eat potato chips on the sidewalk.”
— Werner Herzog
There was this Italian place in a strip mall out on Ridge Pike where my mom used to take my brother and me sometimes. It had to be when she had a little extra cash, I think, but I don’t know where the loot came from. The joint was typical ‘80s suburban Philly Italian-America. Decent food (that I thought was spectacular), red hard plastic cups with super icy sodas, and a mural of gondolas and gondoliers doing their thing in a Venice canal.
I guess I knew the mural was fake, but I didn’t care. To me it was art. Big art. The kind of art that you could only experience if you were eating your dinner out. As in: I’m at a restaurant. While all the other low-brow schlubs back in the neighborhood were eating hot dogs sliced up in box mac-n-cheese, me and my brother and my mom, we were feasting on the real shit. Italian cuisine. Regional specialties like Pasta Primavera with shrimp. And ravioli with sausage. Veal Parm. Chicken Parm. Fucking eggplant parm, dude.
Relax / Don’t do it!
Don’t punch yourself in the face because it’s been so long since you had eggplant parm in a suburban strip mall in 1985.
That’s why I’m here. I want to take you there.
I want you to have that again one last time.
And I want you understand how that whole goddamn scene ruined a big part of my life too.
The exact reasons for my mom taking us out to eat on rare occasions were, and remain, unknown to me. But I do wonder. We had very little money, so obviously that’s a significant factor right there. Also, my mom worked full-time and so at least five days a week were more or less out of the question as far as dining out goes simply because she was tired as hell AND broke. I mean, those two things alone are more than enough to mean that kids like me and my brother were looking at a loaded deck of dinner choices to draw from if we had any kind of delusions about what social strata we were born into.
See, there was maybe one or two golden ticket GOING OUT TO EAT cards in the entire deck. And there were something like 500 other cards that directed our tired dirty young asses with boring shit like:
Make Microwave Meatballs.
Eat Leftover Pot Roast and Potatoes.
Or, my favorite…
Figure Something Out.
That last one, which, to its total credit, was one of the most vital lessons I ever learned as a kid. To make my own dinner. To fix me and my brother something, or for him to fix it for us. Boiling water. Using the toaster oven. Frying in the pan. Smoke alarms freaking out and the delicate Jedi work/study program of using fans and open windows (even in the heart of winter) to eliminate thick buttery pan fog while also climbing on tipsy kitchen chairs to de-9volt the smoke alarms. The smoke alarms, incidentally, that never actually saved our lives (or even came close), but did, in fact, instill in me some of the first speedball doses of tried and true anxiety that I ever experienced.
I don’t know for absolute certain if there was some mob’d-up company manufacturing fake Italian murals for low-to-mid grade East Coast restaurants in the 1980’s, but I mean, c’mon. There had to be, right? In Perth Amboy or Elizabeth, back in some cement-plant-looking industrial complex of warehouses and tall street lamps and chain link fences and signs with the red, white, and green of the Italian flag, there had to be at least a couple of places.
Bella Luna Graphics.
Atlantic Restaurant Decor & Supply.
Piscataway Stick-Ons.
These were places that I know must have existed because I can often clench my eyes shut and squeeze so tightly that small marbles with images of desolate loading docks and clattering metal gates and graffiti’d box trucks embedded in their glass literally roll out of my head and plink down onto the kitchen table or whatever. It’s almost as if I can take a vision/ any vision, man/ and make it real just by thinking about it so hard that it forms a physical version of itself, albeit just in a little marble.
I imagine it as a kind of grain-of-sand-becomes-a-pearl scenario.
If you drive through the Meadowlands or take the trains from North Jersey into the city, you will see these kinds of places. They are Broadway sets lost in the real world. Shadow box art so masterfully created that you will sigh at the very scope and brilliance of it all. The dumpster-ish detail. The perfect amount of true loneliness featuring slim dark-haired secretaries smoking cigarettes outside windowless doors. Gunmetal skies above cattail reeds in a swamp that edges up to a sad stack of pallets.
You can see the wind blowing trash and it looks like prairie dogs running for their lives.
In a hot flash of train window cinema: you can see a man, hundreds of yards away, walking away from a mint colored Cadillac towards a white stucco building where they might be making Venice murals for Italian joints all over the country.
I don’t know the ins-and-outs of this strange shady business, man, but I know it must exist. I know someone must be making these murals or mural kits or whatever. It’s not likely every suburb along the eastern seaboard has their own Venetian muralist, is it?
I have sat in the trains, decades after these meals, and I have still felt this weird deep possibility from back in the shadows as we rushed past. Something telling me that this is where that mural was from. The one from my youth. My summertime eggplant parm boy gondola scene. My teenage romance wall. My hot pepper flake stuck in my teeth art explosion.
Dig it.
We knew how to order from the other times my mom had brought us there. We didn’t order crazy shit. We didn’t order APPETIZERS. We didn’t order a plate of fried mushrooms for $2.50 or a shrimp cocktail for $2.75 even though I could have eaten both of those things back then and still climbed up a mountain of hot sauseech and burned it to the ground with my overgrown 13-year-old appetite.
We ordered strictly from the simple dinner plates/ the specials that weren’t really specials because they were always there. Steady dependable slabs of food laid out on a hot ass plate (Be careful, the plates are hot!).
Those meals came with the All-You-Can-Eat Salad Bar.
So yeah.
Look the fuck out.
This is where the rubber met the road, people.
All-you-can-eat is not a term that broke working-class people took lightly in the 1980s and we were no exception. I, especially, was no exception. As soon as the indifferent, sexy, Hubba Bubba chomping 17-year-old high school girl with tight white gym shorts and jet black hair piled up to the dropped ceiling tiles and massive Playboy cans took our orders, as soon as she said the magic words, it was on.
Life could begin anew.
A resurrection.
A brand new hot shit Jesus descending from the clouds and he was made of purple onion rings and shriveled-up dry mushroom slices and cherry tomatoes the size of the tumors that had probably killed the mother of the owner of the place years ago.
Okay, youse guys can help yourself to the salad bar when youse are ready.
And so I did. Circling the stage several times before I went in, there were these drawn-out patient loops of observation that defined my entrance to the arena. If other customers might have seen me executing these things- if they were paying attention to me (which they were, understandably, not)- they would have been seeing a husky kid/ standing underneath the Phillies on the TV up the wall/ sound down/ as he stalked the chilled plates of iceberg and shredded carrots like a majestic mama lion getting ready to take out a hyena or some shit.
My heart would be bashing up against my ribcage when I saw the green olives, straight out of an industrial sized can of them, probably like 3000 soft, mushy olives for like nine bucks back then from Anthony’s Kitchen Wholesale in Reading or whatever. They were lame olives by today’s standards, pale and uncrisp as if they had already lived in other people’s martinis somewhere else/ another place, another time. Veteran olives from the Christmas Eve front. Old soldiers who had once sat there in their own juices in long crystal dishes by explosively red poinsettias. Untouched by the masses/ unwanted by the holiday party people of lower Connecticut or The Bronx or wherever, they had been discreetly repurposed in an era when no one really frowned upon things they didn’t actually see happening.
I did not care.
These olives looked freshly picked off a stoutly branched olive tree from the heart of fucking Rome or wherever olives come from to me. Suspended from a cable attached to the ceiling, I began to float, effortlessly, up off of the floor as I ever-so-casually (by design!) lifted a small salad plate from the tower of them by the croutons and swam myself through the air to my celebratory starting point: mixed greens.
Sometimes I would bump shoulders with my mom or my brother as I tried to push my face against the sneeze guard glass while I reached, for dear life it appeared, to be able to scoop more tiny pink ham slivers down onto the bed of blue cheese dressing that I had already doused my creation in.
Bacon bits on a white cream sea like tiny sailors drowning in the frothing storm.
On my way back to the table, carefully holding my plate the same way I might have held a newborn baby if I had found one at the salad bar, a rush of effervescence would skim over me like that waitress in a silky mumu, teasing me, teasing the big kid with the buck teeth and braces, seducing me with a burst of air-conditioner spider web breeze just enough to whisper the thing.
The reminder.
The kiss from a goddess on the back of my summer dirt neck.
Don’t forget, Little Don Johnson. The salad bar is all-you-can-eat.
And then I would feel the world wrap her ever-loving arms around me, like a hot older Italian MILF. Her garlic breath on my ear lobe. Everything right in the world for once.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin. Once in a blue Muskie Moon, he backs away from the computer, straps on a guitar and plays some rock ’n’ roll with his brother Dave and their bandmates in Marah.
