Playing Restaurant STORY BY RICHARD AREBALO
I have a very cherished food memory from when I was about ten years old. I’ve told it to folks many times over the years, but at a book signing recently, a local chef gave me a completely different perspective on it. had the great luck of being born into a family with terrific cooks – my mom’s food was amazing; even my grandfather and dad were pretty adept on a BBQ grill, but some of my best memories were of my grandmother Santos’s cooking. I grew up with excellent carne guisada, charro beans, deeply flavored with salt pork, and amazingly fragrant, garlicky Spanish rice, among many other dishes. But my grandmother was also particularly good at Southern cooking. She would prepare delicious pan-fried pork chops with mashed potatoes and pork gravy (served with a salad with French dressing,) her meatloaf recipe continues to make converts to this day, and she made an excellent fried chicken. But a dish I particularly loved was her chicken and dumplings. I liked that dish so much I wanted to share it. So one day I invited several friends from school, home to try it. Though we ate very well, my family was not into fancy food presentation – the good china gathered a lot of dust in the highest cabinets in the kitchen. For my friends though, I wanted everything to look special. I dug out some of the seldom-used china and set a nice table for them. I’ve always thought I was just doing what I saw on television, the fancy spread on all those family shows. When I told the story to the chef, he smiled
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widely and said, “you were playing restaurant!” I honestly felt bowled over. All my life, I thought I was just sharing good food. It never occurred to me that as a kid, I was already playing restauranteur. Fast forward a few decades, and I’m still “playing restaurant” for friends, but the difference is I get to have a lot more fun with the atmosphere, the table settings, and even the music. Together with the help of a few very talented cooks and an actual chef or two, I’ve had the pleasure of putting together some really memorable dinners. As a souvenir, I even have the printed menus for some sixty-five dinners hosted since the late 1990s. To put a little extra context to my food mania, I have a relatively large collection of fine and vintage cookbooks. The collection includes many works by Michelin-starred chefs, rare cookbooks from the Grand hotels of the last century, and books from the chefs of the great Atlantic Ocean Liners. A treasured find a few years back was a 1912 first edition of Auguste Escoffier menus. (Chef to
FRENCH TA B L E S E T T I N G.
S C A L LO P I N B LA C K T I E .
