FISH AND chicken.
Skinned chicken and grilled fish. That's what we sensible eaters
eat --- chickenfish. We're starting to lay eggs and grow fins,
which is why it's necessary to go back in time occasionally to a
place like the House of Prime Rib. Now, here is a place for
heavy-duty fressers in the old and perhaps tradition of
trencherpersons --- those who tuck a napkin under their triple
chins and eat with both hands, as though there were no tomorrow.
And if the dieticians, California kweezeeners and others of
their skinny ilk are correct, there will be no tomorrow for
these who still indulge à la Diamond Jim Brady. Diamond
Jim could eat three steaks at a sitting, and where is he today?
Colder than yesterday's fried potatoes. It's true he died in
1917, but if he had paid attention to his cholesterol count, he
might have been with us today, boring [the] hell out of
everybody with his latest diet.
* *
*
IN RETROSPECT,
it's amazing that my generation and a few other survived to this
day, when I remember what and how much we ingested. We thought
our arteries and tickers were indestructible, just as we
believed that smoking cigarettes merely cuts the wind." In
those days, being thin meant you were poor. The rich people
paraded around with pot bellies, known admiringly as
"corporations." In the army during World War II, we not only got
free cigarettes, to make sure we wouldn't lose the habit, we ate
practically nothing but greasy fried food, but we beat the Hun
anyway. Maybe because the Hun was gorging on sauerkraut and
sausages.
* *
*
THERE'S NO WAY to
calculate the calories and cholesterol our group absorbed
through the '30s and into the '70s, but it must be a
frightening number. I was going to say fatal, but everything is,
eventually, even if you eat nothing but oat bran. We thought we
were dieting when we confined our dinner to steak "with the fat
cut off" and creamed spinach. At 2 a.m., after getting off work,
we'd go to Tiny's Waffle Shop for a huge waffle smothered under
strawberry jam, whipped butter and syrup. Little pig sausages?
Why not? Not only did we turn up our toes at such daily excess,
we stayed thin. There may have been a fat man trying to get out
at the time, but he didn't emerge for decades.
* *
*
THE "CALIFORNIA
CUISINE" of our salad years, if I may use the term, was abalone
in batter, cracked crab with plenty of mayonnaise, garlic bread
dripping with butter, a Hangtown Fry (lots of eggs, bacon and
oysters), thick North Beach hamburgers bonded in butter to slabs
of sourdough, buckets of spaghetti, Southern fried chicken and
steaks and more steaks --- and this was just Saturday night. On
Sunday, we splurged, family-style, with those "All You Can Eat
Till You Drop Dead" specials.
* *
*
IT WAS FUN while
it lasted, and some of us lasted. Others keeled over without
warning after a mere dozen ersters, wedge of lettuce with
Thousand Island dressing, bowl of minestrone, fried filet of
soul ("Fish is brain food, really good for you, Al"),
porterhouse steak (eat it all, this before doggy bags) an
old-fashioned shortcake with heavy cream. We never said , "It
must have been something he et." We said he died happy, face
down in the finger bowl. On a Saturday night at Bo Grison's we
ran the gamut of
T-bone steaks, huge baked potatoes with maybe a pound of butter,
hot biscuits with honey, and a little salad to cut the grease,
aw we joked. Add a few drinks and a bottle of wine and you were
not about to leave the place feeling hungry an hour later.
* *
*
WELL, SOME PEOPLE
still eat like that, a lot of them at the House of Prime Rib. I
hadn't been there for years, and I was curious but not
disappointed. Nothing has changed. It is still run by
professionals, from manager Gus Stathis, the kind of old-timer
who keeps an eye on everything, to the terrific waiters, who mix
your salad while spinning the bowl on a bed of ice. The roast
beef is excellent, the spinach first-rate, the baked potato
perfect and "take all the butter you want." They don't make
better Yorkshire pudding in Yorkshire, and that's pudding it
mildly. The restaurant was jammed, with people waiting, a
condition I imagine obtains every night. And the service
couldn't be faster or more polished.
* *
*
I YIELD TO no one
in my admiration for Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, Bradley Ogden,
Joyce Goldstein and the others who have showed us the way to
longer living through sensible eating, but there is still an
audience for The Other Stuff. You don't take a doggy bag home
from places like Stars or Square One, but you do from House of
Prime Rib. And man the cold roast beef I took home tasted
sensational the next day on slices of white bread, heavy on the
mayo. You want to live forever?
__________
Caen, Herb.
"Pigs at the Trough." The San Francisco Chronicle.
_____.