Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (free biff chip and kipper ebooks txt) 📗

a French-Canadian butcher, and tell me to ask for the calves’ liver for the dog,” he says. “It was for us, of course.”

I ordered a rib steak coated with garlic and pepper, the house specialty. It was not as good as Vogel’s sirloin, which was as thick, tender, and beefy as any Manhattan sirloin strip. The food that had the most resonance for me was the tarts and pastries. These are filled with whipped cream so dense the kitchen must burn out blenders making it. When I told Franky I was amazed that the pastries were every bit as good as I remembered them, he said, “That’s because the same man has been doing the pastries for forty years—Giovanni from Naples.

He came a little after me.”

Vogel, unabashedly emotional about Moishe’s, says, “I’ll tell you something. As long as there’s a Moishe’s, there’ll always be a Montreal.” Restaurant critics are not supposed to be sentimental, but as William Neill, I always had a soft spot for Beautys, the best place in the city to start your day if your idea of breakfast isn’t feves au lard and cretons.

To appreciate Beautys, your idea of breakfast has to be an omelette containing hot dog, salami, green peppers, and fried onions. This is known as Beautys’ famous mishmash.

I didn’t know what to expect when I walked into the old place, a coffee shop on Mont-Royal, but I sure didn’t expect to find Hymie F O R K I T O V E R

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Skolnick at the cash register, precisely where he was when I left the city twenty years ago. “I’m still around,” said Hymie, who is seventy-five.

He seemed as happy to see me as I was to see him, and he lavished upon me the mishmash omelette (ahhh!), the sandwich of smoked salmon and cream cheese on a toasted sesame-seed bagel from the great Montreal Bagel Factory on Saint-Viateur Street (oh, my!), and homemade rice pudding so rich and raisiny that Marvin Hamlisch himself praised it from the stage of the Place des Arts not too long ago.

Everything looked the same, only better, including Hymie. The overly spacious orange booths are now overly spacious royal-blue booths, but I couldn’t see that anything else had changed. Hymie told me his customers are a little different because so many Jews have left Montreal—“the young people, not people my age.” Business was still good. He got a plug on French television, and now French tourists stop in all the time.

He cleared up a few questions I never bothered to ask him all those years ago. I asked how the place, officially the Bancroft Snack Bar, came to be known as Beautys. He said that Beauty was the nickname he got because he was such a good bowler. “I got a couple of cups, as a matter of fact,” he said. I asked him about the rumor that he walked onstage during one of Dean Martin’s shows in Las Vegas to collect money that Martin owed him. He said it was true that Martin ran up a tab in the forties and ignored it—“Every day a mishmash, a hot dog,” Hymie said—but he never went after the money, and Martin never paid up.

He said he had something to ask me.

“I forget your name,” he said.

I told him my name, the one my parents gave me.

He said, “I always thought it was O’Neill.” I told him it was good to be remembered, and it was good to be back.

GQ, may 1996

S L I C I N G U P N A P L E S

I ask little of the great cities of Italy, no more than the presence of a few admirable trattorias scattered among the unheated museums, crumbling amphitheaters, and heroic statues with no noses. I’m content if the polenta is creamy, the Gorgonzola pungent, the artichokes tiny and fried just right. Is it wrong for me to want tasty Bolognese sauce in Bologna or savory Genoa salami in Genoa?

Simple though these needs may be, in-town dining in Italy rarely works out for me. Whenever I’m there savoring a magnificent meal, I can usually look out the window of the restaurant and see an old farmer in a pilled cardigan chugging by on his tractor. A mule stumbling along under sacks of arborio rice won’t be far behind.

We all know Italian cuisine is the food of the home kitchen and, absent that, of the simple country restaurant with the wife at the stove and the husband out front, greeting guests and pretending he is the reason the place is doing so well. It is a cuisine of freshness and simplicity, which is seldom the strength of formal restaurants, yet that is not a satisfactory excuse for Italian food to suffer so acutely when exposed to the trappings of urbanity. After all, a restaurant owner has only to hire somebody with a fast car, of which there is no shortage in Italy, and instruct him to fill the trunk with ripe tomatoes, zucchini flowers, and artisanal sausages and drive in from the country once a day. He must also marry a stout woman who grew up in a household in which the mother cooked for the family, and there are plenty of those around, too.

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A L A N R I C H M A N

Now and then, I have enjoyed meals in Italian cities. I love the wines at Don Lisander in Milan, the fish at da Fiore in Venice, and everything at Cibreo in Florence (except the gelatinous calf ’s foot, and I don’t have to apologize for disliking that). I’ve spent a total of four to five months in Italy in my lifetime, and while I don’t wish to appear ungrateful for those travel opportunities, few of my dining experiences away from the countryside have been memorable. There is much to recommend about Milan, Florence, Venice, Rome, and Bologna, but