Scenes from a family restaurant, free challah roles and all

Childhood, and adulthood, as seen from a family restaurant

There’s no lonelier feeling than dining by yourself at a family restaurant. Just now this booth feels like the most barren, lonely place in the world. The little girl at the table beside mine cranes her head over the back of her seat and enacts a puppet show for me with her Barbie doll. She is performing either out of pity or mockery; all the same, the show is more entertaining than the movie I’ve just come from: Deadpool.

When I was a child, our weekend family restaurant of choice was a place called The Brown Derby. We were a big group back then — a large family of uncles, aunts, great aunts, sonsin- law. The Derby was so crowded on Friday nights that you were guaranteed a half- hour wait, and it wasn’t even a line you waited in but a sort of holding cell at the entrance where we all stood shoulder- to- shoulder, becoming impossibly — ferociously — hungry, the waft of veal and kishka slowly driving us mad.

When it came our turn to enter, we were brought to one of the long tables in the back, by the bathrooms, and; once seated, too starved to wait for service, we started in on whatever was left over by the previous diners.

“They hardly even touched the challah rolls,” my mother would say, not a little judgmental in her tone, as she surveyed the table for leftover chopped liver to spread.

Once our paid- for meal was brought, it didn’t take us more than 20 minutes to devour our weight in boiled chickens, stewed chickens, chickens in baskets, flankan, kishka, and a spicy fat called “speck” that has since been made illegal. Then we were onto the next event: the cheque. We were not a family disposed to acts of athleticism, but the fight for the bill was, for us, a kind of spiritual-emotional sport.

“I swore on my life I’d pay,” my mother would say and, quick like a cat, she’d claw the bill from off the table and stick it down her blouse. Swearing upon her own life was a big move of my mother’s in those days. To her way of thinking, it allowed my grandfather to know in no uncertain terms that, should he pay, God would strike his daughter dead in the parking lot.

When the bill was settled, our belt buckles refastened, and my younger sister awoken from under the table, we commenced our walk to the door, my grandfather shaking hands as he went, my uncle handing out business cards for his carpeting business. And at the entrance, we smiled with compassion at the new crop of caged-in, ravenous patrons awaiting their turn.

Once in the parking lot, my father and uncles smoked cigars, chewed mints, jingled car keys, and got into political arguments that devolved into finger pointing and foot stomping. We enjoyed each other’s company and took our time parting. After all, it was only 5:30 and the whole night lay ahead.

I miss those days and hope the future holds more evenings filled with full booths. I close the book I’m reading and pick up the bill.

“I insist,” I mumble to myself.