There is no recipe for Croatian lamb on a spit.

My grandfather was a hard man, a hard worker who did not write, read, or tell stories. He did cook, beginning during his time in the Navy. His life was action and decision, plainly put–even down to the meals he prepared for his family.

Stories are like recipes; they change with the years, the hands that make them, and the table that they are served upon. It seems that the margins of both recipes and stories hold the secrets, and they’re only likely to offer themselves to you in small batches, a few at a time.

Horse

I have no idea how it happened. I know it was in the Croatian Dalmatian village of Sinj, which is famous for the yearly knights tournament called Sinjska Alka. In early August, the Alkari knights in traditional garb of black, gold, and red aim on horseback at a ring shaped target—the Alka—with their lances. It’s turned into a tourist attraction, but its purpose used to signify the marking of the victory over the attacking Turks by the people of Sinj and the surrounding Cetina district (the Cetina river flows through the village quietly and most unassumingly.) The winner of the tournament has his name etched in gold letters for all to see. The crowd is ordered to observe the winner’s name “for the coming generations to remember.” The people tried so hard with their rituals to never forget. There seems to be a sin in the forgetting.

Arambaši is a local version of ​sarma (stuffed cabbage), consisting of ground beef, pork, onions, garlic, parsley cooked in a tomato based sauce, with salt, pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and lemon zest. ​Arambaši are served at the Sinjska Alka tournament every year, and can also be served at Easter. I do not know if my grandfather ever saw the tournament as a child or young man every sun drenched August in Sinj.

Alternatively, the Sinjska Gospa, a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Sinj, occurred on the Assumption Day of August 15th, which is the birthdate of my grandfather’s eldest daughter, Rosemarie—my mother. She was born in Manhattan, a few hundred worlds away. The Arambaši dish was strangely also connected to August 15th. Food seemed to tie them all together.

As a child, I easily discerned my grandfather’s small, but fierce green eyes. He passed these eyes to my mother, though they did not make it to me. My grandfather had a sister. Barely two years younger, she had light brown hair and a gentle beauty. When she was 16, she fell from a horse. In my mind’s eye I picture the horse to be tawny coloured. Probably spooked. Nothing more dramatic than that. She broke her arm.

As my mother tells me, “there was no Penicillin in the village. Those things killed them.”

Those things killed my grandfather’s sister. She died of infection, which likely saddened his family but did not surprise them. Life could simply disguise itself out of sight and death could take you if its whims bent in your direction. They did not question it. Her name was Lucia, which became my middle name.

Overboard

There was no Ellis Island experience to look back upon, at least on this side of my family. Like other Croatians we knew, my grandfather “jumped ship,” according to my mother. This did not literally mean he went overboard, jostling with the sharks and the mobster dumped bodies in the New York harbor. He came to New York City on a ship, yes. In a much more pragmatic fashion befitting my grandfather’s demeanor, he simply got off the commercial boat, likely coming in from Toronto—a popular route—and did not get back on.

My grandfather, once Stipe Smoljo (known here as Steve Smolich, had worked as a busboy in various cafes and restaurants in and around Sinj, and learned to cook properly in the Navy. He was the ship’s cook. I wonder if the ship of Crotian seaman were all eating stuffed cabbage in the mess hall onboard, or if he just became really good at peeling potatoes and making some Croatian version of naval gruel.

Waterfront

The Italians ran the Brooklyn docks. The Irish ran Manhattan’s. By being a longshoreman, my grandfather found the means to take care of his New York born wife Mary and his two daughters: Rosemarie, my mother, looked more plainly Ukrainian with her sallow skin, curls, and strong jaw. Her sister Joan looked more like their mother, but she was different. Her dark brown eyes, jet black hair, and small stature made her look more Italian than anything else. There was a rumor that my mother now distrusts wherein the Sicilian postman was fond of her mother Mary. Steve and Mary were in a traditional, but not all that loving marriage. My grandfather came from a rigid place and remained so. He had to on the docks.

Sometimes, he’d arrive back to their two bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens, with the bathroom right off of the kitchen (because all facets of life were to be juxtaposed in America) with gifts including tins of Danish cookies and bottles of Irish whiskey. They came from crates that were “damaged” in transit, i.e. opened or broken into purposefully by the longshoreman.

My grandfather came to distrust personal ownership. He turned down the opportunity to purchase a house numerous times. He did spend his money on food and cooked for the family whenever he was not working. He enjoyed plucking recipes from the New York Times. We still use his recipe for gizzard infused Thanksgiving stuffing every year, along with various mid century modern roasts and stews.

He did have a penchant for exotic tastes where he was concerned. It may have come from his travels in the Navy. He would often go to the local butcher and purchase a slab of cow’s tongue and brains. My mother, her sister, and my grandmother did not partake, but my mother still shudders when she sees any shiny, mysteriously dotted grey-pink meat hiding out in the delicacies section of the butcher’s window.

Picnic

By the 1950’s, my grandfather’s work remained stable, but he never bought that car or that house. Sometimes my mother and her sister would be dropped off to their relations in Bayville, Long Island, where a bold teenage girl in shorts who was their godmother would babysit them, while my grandparents worked out their marital difficulties. They were truly becoming American in some ways.

Often, my grandparents, mother and aunt would take the train with all the other Croatians to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. It was vast and green, and fresh water ran over rocks that my mother remembers dipping their cups into for a drink of water. The centerpiece to these cultural outings—Croatian style lamb on a spit. This meant olive oil, garlic, rosemary, salt and pepper. There were no rules against this sort of old world cookout and they did not go about it in any small way.
I try to picture the surreal subway car as they packed in, the men carrying huge legs of lamb over their shoulders, along with six foot sharpened sticks, firewood, shovels; the woman sacks of potatoes, herbs, bread, wine. They would dig a hole in the dirt about a foot deep just next to the spit to slow roast the meat. At least during these holidays, my grandfather’s ideology remained intact—everybody shared, no one was left out. Comrades all in food, feast, and the great American outdoors.

When my mother married my father John (born Ivan), my grandfather Steve referred to him as a “gambler.” My father hailed from the Dalmatian village of Drnis in the principality of Ruzic, not 20 miles from tourist-friendly Sinj. He was everything my grandfather was not: dark eyed, lanky, but strong, gentle and romantic. He rode horses bareback in his village as a teenager, but other than being kicked in the nose by a cow as a child, he came to America in one piece—on a commercial airplane in 1959. My father proceeded to buy land in Westchester and build his own version of an American dream in the form of a house on a hill.

More than twenty years after my grandmother died during a routine hospital stay, my grandfather was knocked down by a van in Astoria, Queens. By the early 1980’s, he came to live with us in the big house and began to suffer from dementia. As a little girl, I remember sitting at the white plastic table and chairs out on the patio by the pool, watching my father turn the leg of lamb slowly—using a hollow steel pipe as the spit—as my grandfather would sit, his body more square with age and decline, and crudely suggest alternative techniques. Still, the ideological machinations between men that rang in the ears of their children did not lessen the sweet taste of the red wine that flowed plentifully, the home roasted meat, the more casual fields we owned, or the late August sunshine that watched over us. We had our own picnics for years to come.

Easter

In 1986, my grandfather resided in a rest home in Florida. My parents had moved us to Florida, because my father had bigger dream houses to build. We had replaced our world of familiars with the destiny of something further away, as-yet-unlived, something closer to the sun.
The last time I saw my grandfather, I could see his health had deteriorated some. His dementia was at a constant incline. He usually didn’t recognize who we were and, even after my mother would remind him, he would still call us by another name, or ask what year it was, or where he sister was, noting that she was born in 1902, a mere year after him. In the wilderness of old age, facts escape like water; the mere remembering of them creates a safety net, at least for awhile. History happens how we assemble it to. Meals are forgotten, then recalled. Horses. Cabbage. Cafe. Ships. The Docks. Lamb. Van Cortlandt Park. Memory. The lack of. Recipes not written down.

Easter Sunday–evening. In a small, temporary rental house, my family’s bellies are full with colourful tin foil chocolates and wine. There is no real backyard to speak of, just a small patch of sand with man made grass laid on top. There are no hills; there is no lamb on a spit. A lamb had been roasted in the oven. My father has laid down. My mother sits at the head of the dining room table that we transported to Florida, the same one around which my grandfather, parents, uncle, aunt, cousins, brother and I yelped loudly over many meals about the names of countries, governments, land, ownership.

In her tan and white dress and slippers, her legs neatly crossed, my mother, without speaking, holds her hand to her forehead, her other arm supporting the first by the elbow. An Easter lamb cake sits half eaten on the table. The crudely shaped eyes made from oversized gum drops look at my mother. Next to the lamb cake are endless handwritten notebooks of recipes, many of which came from my grandfather: stuffed cabbage, Thanksgiving stuffing and turkey, Croatian roast. The dessert recipes were my mother’s doing alone. She always had a sweet tooth.

On the phone just now, word has come down that my grandfather, hardlined and healed from the broken bones, rituals, and kingdoms of his youth, has died at age 85. My mother’s green eyes behind glasses are cast down in remembrance, in thought, in defense, in consideration. She does not cry.

After graduating from NYU’s Tisch and Trinity College Dublin, Maryana worked in film, television, and publishing. She then had an early midlife crisis, becoming a massage therapist addicted to the free breakfasts at Google. Maryana received her MFA in Creative Writing (Nonfiction) at The New School in 2017, where she interviewed NBCC Nonfiction finalists, contributed to The Inquisitive Eater, worked with the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, and published in Vice (Tonic). Maryana is now a food writer, home cook/baker, and memoirist, writing mostly about her Croatian culinary heritage, food history, and a love of the immigrant meal

Prufrock measured his life in coffee spoons. I measure mine in greasy spoons. And diners and coffee shops. I love them. Always have, at least from the time I could choose where I wanted to eat.  

Sam’s

My first taste of dining independence came when I was eleven or twelve. Beginning in sixth grade, students at the suburban Cincinnati school that I went to could eat where we wanted. Most kids ate in the cafeteria: some brought their lunches; others ate the liverwurst sandwiches or tuna noodle casserole and canned green beans that the cafeteria ladies dished up. Some kids walked home for lunch. But some of us crossed Harrison Ave. and walked a block down Compton Rd. to Mt. Healthy’s business district, where, along with a couple drug stores and a bowling alley that served lunch, there was my favorite at the time, the Mt. Healthy Coffee Shop—or Sam’s, as we knew it. There, from about 11:20 ‘til about 12:30 every school day, fifty 12-14 year olds jammed into the narrow space between the counter and the wall like bees swarming, waiting for one of the 21 seats.  If there were maximum occupancy laws in Ohio in the late 1950s, nobody was enforcing them.

Mary worked the counter and got the drinks, an old man ran the grill and the deep fryer, and a second man ran the register by the door. Mary wore a pale blue waitress dress, sweat stains under the arms, old and new food stains dotting the front. She was probably somewhere between 20 and 65; I don’t know, I was 12. I knew her name was Mary, though, because everybody called her Mary. I knew the cook was an old man because he always looked unshaven. The cashier’s breath stank. All three of them had cigarettes in their mouths.

Every several seconds, the screen door slammed, either announcing a new group of arrivals or a couple open seats at the counter that were grabbed practically before the last kid got up. I was a drummer in the jr. high band and kind of liked those screen door slams: bam… bam… bam-bam… bam.

The standard order was hamburger, fries, and a Coke. The hamburgers were thin, greasy, and tough; the buns thin, greasy, and soft. In between were pickles, minced onions, and a glob of ketchup; they were greasy, too, either from absorbing the burger and bun grease or from just spending time in the restaurant. No one complained. The fries were limp and greasy and salty. No one cared. The Cokes came in those little Coke shaped glasses, full of ice and very fizzy, probably because the carbonated water was so much cheaper than the Coke syrup. In short, it was one of the most delicious meals I’ve ever had. And I had it almost five days a week for at least two years.

The floor had random stepped-on French fries, some with ketchup, that kids had dropped or thrown. The counter was uneven from the dried French fry or burger crumbs that no one had bothered to wipe off; it was sticky from the dried, spilled Coke puddles that no one had bothered to wipe off. The plates wobbled or stuck. Neither the customers nor the staff seemed to care.

When we were finished eating—usually about seven minutes after we’d arrived–some of us would wait patiently in line to pay. Others meant to wait but were less patient and eventually just drifted out without paying. And a few were chronic dine-and-dashers. Occasionally, the cashier looked up, seeing someone race out the door, and yelled, “Hey, you, come back here,” but the door always slammed shut before he got the sentence out, and he knew that if he ran after the kid, ten more would leave before he got back to the register. Maybe he was Sam; maybe Sam died 30 years earlier; maybe there was no Sam and we junior high kids were the only ones that called it that.

As an adult, I can only begin to imagine how filthy the place was, how many years of grease and smoke coated the griddle, the pop machine, the register, the counter, the walls.  

But it was the good old days, the days when parents told their kids to “be home for dinner” but otherwise let them wander unsupervised, the days before schools had locked doors and metal detectors, the days before cholesterol and obesity, the days when 12- and 13-year old boys were starting to feel grown up, the days of burgers, fries, and Cokes.  

Izzy’s

“Corned beef and swiss, please,” I said, first time I went to Izzy’s, sitting down at the counter after standing in a crush of business suits, coveralls, and work uniforms. “You can’t have swiss!” the cashier yelled at me from 20 feet away. “You never been in a kosher restaurant before?”  Oh, I thought to myself: all those Jewish delis that I’ve been eating in all my life were kosher style; this place is the real thing.

This place was Izzy’s on Elm between 8^th and 9^th Streets. I’d heard about it for years but hadn’t been there until that summer in the mid-60s between my sophomore and junior years in college when I worked as a stock boy a couple blocks away at Shillito’s, one of Cincinnati’s three remaining big department stores. The restaurant looked like it’d been there forever; in fact, it had only recently moved there, its third location since Izzy’s father started the deli in 1901. That summer, I was a regular.

“How much is the sandwich?” I asked the waitress that first day. There were no prices on the menu board above the counter.

“He’ll tell you when you pay,” she said, cocking her head toward the cashier.

The cashier was Izzy Kadetz himself.  The waitress, the only waitress, was his wife Rose.  The first time I ate there, I was afraid I’d walked in on the dissolution of their marriage, they were yelling at each other so much. “What do you mean you forgot her birthday,” Rose yelled across the restaurant as she threw a handful of potato chips onto a plate. “I mean I forgot her birthday that’s what I mean are you deaf?” Izzy yelled back as he rung up a customer. But that was Izzy and Rose. For as long as anyone could remember, he’d run the register, she’d run the counter, and they’d constantly bickered.

If Rose liked you, she’d put an extra pickle or two on your plate. She seemed to be a lovely person so long as you weren’t her husband.  

That first sandwich and all the ones that followed that summer were perfect, warm, extra lean corned beef with brown mustard on soft, almost gooey Rubel’s rye bread.

Afterwards, I stood in line to pay. In front of me were two men, one in a three-piece suit, the other in coveralls. 

“What’d you have?” Izzy asks the first one. “Corned beef and a Coke.” “$2.50,” Izzy says.  

“What’d you have?” he asks the second man. “Corned beef and a Coke.” “$1.75,” Izzy says. 

“What’d you have?” he asks me. “Corned beef sandwich and a Coke,” I say, reaching into my pocket to pay. He looks me over, looks at my khakis, my polo shirt, and my age and says, “two bucks.” As I pocket my change, the man behind me in a blazer and grey slacks forks over $2.50 for his corned beef sandwich and Coke.

 “Hurry back,” Izzy yelled after me as the door is about to slam shut, “we got rent to pay.”  

Hinkle’s

We used to take the kids to Hinkle’s for breakfast, occasionally.  It meant getting them up and moving a little earlier, but they were always excited to go, to sit at the counter, to spin on the stools, so it wasn’t a problem.  My wife and I would drive both cars from our house in Hanover, Indiana down the hill to Madison so that after breakfast, she could continue down Main St. and across the Ohio River bridge to Carroll County Middle School, where she taught English, and I could drive the kids back up the hill to Southwestern Elementary with time to grade a few papers before I taught my 10:00 speech class at the college.

Hinkle’s didn’t have fancy neon outlining or signs; it didn’t have stainless steel. It didn’t have framed pictures of James Dean and ’56 Chevys. It didn’t have a jukebox. It just had a 16-seat counter and a radio playing WORX-AM; usually we got there just in time to hear the hog futures report, something I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now. The smell of old coffee and old grease was embedded in the walls and the stools’ torn vinyl upholstery.  It was the real deal, Hinkles. I don’t remember the waitress, except that she was one of those middle-aged women that had probably been waitressing since high school. 

I do, though, remember Tuffy.

Tuffy was the cook. 

He stood at the griddle facing the window almost all the time, rarely looking back at the customers or the waitress. If the front window weren’t so greasy and fogged over, you could have seen him better from outside than inside. He had a beer belly and old Navy tattoos on his biceps and a cigarette with a long ash stuck to his lip. His greying crewcut was short enough that you could see the folds of skin on the back of his trapezoidal head. Even though he wore a different tee shirt every day—he seemed to have an endless supply that people had given him to promote various local high school, college, and municipal events—it and his baggy jeans were always sweaty and dirty and stained. He looked like a caricature of a short order cook. 

Tuffy didn’t talk much and seemed to concentrate intensely on his job. His job, most of the time when I was there, was frying and scrambling eggs, cooking bacon, sausage, and ham, flipping pancakes, and occasionally turning the big pile of home fries at the back of the griddle.

Despite its seeming like he’d been standing there cooking eggs much of his life, he wasn’t very good at it. My standard order was bacon and eggs—over medium—and home fries. The bacon and home fries weren’t a problem, but the eggs, another story entirely. The plate always looked great: a couple slices of bacon, a pile of potatoes, and two perfectly cooked over-medium fried eggs. Sometimes, though, there was a third egg, overcooked or whose yolk had broken. That less than perfect egg was always under the other two. Sometimes there were four eggs, two perfectly cooked, over medium, on top of two that were overcooked or broken. Once, my plate had five eggs on it. It reminded me of a child who thinks that if he puts a magazine over the pieces of the broken vase, no one will notice.  Often, when he messed up my eggs, Tuffy would add an extra slice or two of bacon to my plate, as well.  

We’d finish our breakfast. Sometimes I’d leave the extra eggs and bacon, knowing—even then—that more of that kind of cooking really wasn’t good for me. Sometimes I’d take it home for later. And too often, I’d eat it all, knowing I’d have a grease-induced stomach ache for the next couple hours. My wife would kiss the kids and me and drive across the bridge to her day of Kentucky middle schoolers. The kids and I would drive back up the hill to their school and to mine. Tuffy never looked up from his griddle, concentrating as hard as he could on cooking the next egg right.  

The New Wyman Park Restaurant    

The New Wyman Park Restaurant is at the corner of 25^th and Howard, across from a gas station and a car dealer’s service department and a couple doors down from the local American Transit Union office. It’s been there since the 1940s, as have some of the customers, by the look of them. The clientele represents a cross-section of Baltimore if you don’t count people with money, people who dress well, artists, and women. In fact, the regulars are mostly African American men with a respectable smattering of white men thrown in. In that sense, I guess it does reflect Baltimore’s racial proportions. Based on the way they’re dressed, they’re blue collar workers, laborers, white collar workers that have jobs in the neighborhood, and retirees, plus the occasional copse of cops. I seemed to be the rare customer from another part of town, stopping in maybe once a month or so on my way to the University of Baltimore, where I was a teacher and administrator. 

The New Wyman Park opened at six in the morning and closed at 3:00, so they did lunch, too:  grilled cheese, ham and Swiss, egg salad, tuna salad, fried fish, veal parm, BLT, meatloaf, burgers. It was all right there on the brown menu board over the grill. And they had fried chicken and pork chop platters, and even liver and onions. But I only went there for breakfast.

I saw several of the same people every time I went; I assume that they didn’t coincidentally just show up when I was there but that they were regulars. The waitresses called them Mr. James, Mr. John, Mr. Lonnie, Mr. Cletus, and the ubiquitous “hon.”  “How ya doin’ today, Mr. Lonnie,” Karen would say, plopping a big ceramic mug of coffee in front of him as the elderly Black man carefully laid his cane along the foot rail and sat down at the counter. “Well,” he’d answer back slowly, “I’m just blessed to be here with you.” “You just blessed to be anywhere outside the cemetery,” the man next to him said, and three or four of them nodded their heads and laughed. When one of the regulars walked in, Peggy or Karen would say, “Mornin,’ hon; you want the usual?” 

It wasn’t like the Dutch Valley in Sarasota, where a few days a week, my Uncle Jimmy would sit down and say to the waitress, “the usual,” knowing very well that she’d only worked there since 2:00 the day before and had no idea who he was. Peggy and Karen have been at the New Wyman Park as long as or longer than a lot of the regulars, Peggy for 23 years and Karen for 14. 

Sometimes Peggy and Karen didn’t even have to take the order, much less write it down.  Sometimes the cook would glance over when the bell over the door rang, see who it was, and pour some batter onto the waffle iron or crack a couple more eggs onto the griddle.

The cook’s a tall, slim but solid Black guy; he looks to be in his 60s. He’s bald, but you wouldn’t know it because he’s always wearing an Orioles cap except occasionally when he lifts it up to wipe his head with the handkerchief from his back pocket. The New Wyman Park is clearly his place; by that, I don’t mean that he’s the owner—although he may be, I have no idea—but he’s the person in charge, not only cooking, but telling the busboy he needs more plates or another loaf of white sandwich bread, telling the assistant cook to butter that toast that just popped up, making sure that Karen knows that Cletus needs more coffee, and all the while, his back to the counter, flipping eggs and pancakes at just the right second and keeping up a steady stream of banter with the regulars: “How ‘bout them O’s last night,” “Tell me about it,” “They just gotta admit Flacco’s gettin’ old and come up with a new plan,” “You can say that again, brother,” “That Donald Trump’s gonna be the death of all of us!” The cook looks like Cal Ripken in the 2001 All-Star game, snagging the bacon, throwing it onto the griddle to heat it up, and then lobbing it onto the plate with some pancakes or eggs, sometimes setting Peggy or Karen up to deliver it, sometimes spinning and sliding the plate down the counter, unassisted, to Mr. Keith or Mr. Cletus or me. 

The assistant cook doesn’t wear a cap, never makes eye contact, never says anything.  

Occasionally, I’m there on Bacon-Cooking Day. Bacon Cooking Day is the day that the assistant cook stands at the secondary griddle cooking bacon. And cooking bacon. And cooking bacon. Slabs and slabs and slabs of bacon. A couple days a week, it turns out, they pre-cook three days’ worth of bacon, refrigerate it, and then use it to refill one of those rectangular stainless steel bins as the cook’s supply gets low.  

I said earlier that I stop by the New Wyman Park about once a month. I used to. That was back when I ate bacon and sausage and real eggs pretty regularly, back before my triple bypass.  I still eat eggs but much less often. And I can’t remember the last time I ate bacon, although occasionally, I’ll get turkey sausage with my Egg Beaters. I mention this only because the Wyman Park doesn’t do turkey sausage. They don’t do Egg Beaters. I ordered egg whites once, and Peggy gave me a “where do you think you are, the Ritz Carlton?” look. When I asked if they had any “um non-dairy, you know, non-actual-butter stuff to um put on my toast,” the cook turned around and gave me The Eye, as if to say, “This is the New Wyman Park Restaurant. We ain’t no gourmet restaurant or health food store, but we still got our pride, and we sure as hell don’t got no margarine.” I still go every few months and get a couple eggs over medium and grits and wheat toast—dry—and coffee. The food’s always great, but without the bacon and the home fries and the butter and the grease, it never feels like the real thing anymore.   

The Big Generic Greek Diner

There was a time when I’d stop at Pete’s Grille on my way to work or on Saturdays on the way home from the Waverly Farmer’s Market, but once Michael Phelps started winning Olympic medals and people found out he ate breakfast at Pete’s after practice, it got more and more crowded with celebrity seekers. Phelps not only ate there a lot; he ate a lot there.  His standard breakfast was a few egg sandwiches, a three-to-five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast, and three chocolate chip pancakes.  The food and the service at Pete’s were great, but not good enough to make up for the increasingly long waits for one of their 28 stools.

There was also a period when I went to the Double-T Diner on Rte. 40 between Baltimore and Ellicott City, usually on Sunday mornings.  We’d drop the kids at Sunday School and then hang out, eating, reading the Sunday Times, and grading papers ‘til it was time to pick them up.  The Double-T was one of these big Mid-Atlantic diners that causes culture shock if you’re from the Ohio Valley. The host always has a strong Greek accent, as do the cashier, most of the waitresses—they’re virtually always waitresses and not waiters—and often the busboys.  The reason for that, I guess, is that at least in Baltimore, these diners all seem to be owned by Greeks:  the Kourtsounises own the Towson Diner; the Korologos family, the Double-T; the Vasiliades family, the Sip’n’Bite in Canton; Marc Tsakiris owns the Boulevard Diner in Dundalk; George Kavourakis, the Broadway Diner in Middle River; Jimmy Filipidis, the eponymous Jimmy’s in Fell’s Point; and Ted Efstathiou owns the Nautilus Diner in Timonium.

Lately, I’m spending more of my diner breakfast time at the Nautilus. Timonium’s a nice middle class Baltimore suburb, too Republican and vanilla for my taste, but the Nautilus is convenient, efficient, and a good place to go when you have a bunch of people and need to scoot tables together—like when my son and his wife are in town, and they and my daughter and her husband and kids and we all meet for breakfast. There’s always a respectable number of people at the Nautilus, but except for Sunday mornings, it’s never so crowded that you can’t linger, whether to continue a business meeting, visit longer with the family, or in my case, now that I’m retired, spend a little longer reading the paper or that library book that’s almost due. And it’s relatively quiet, unlike so many restaurants, where even with my hearing aids, I can’t follow the conversation. At some point, those kinds of considerations became just as important to me as the funkiness of counter diners.

And then there’s the food. One of the reasons people spend more time at the Nautilus than at the smaller diners, I think, especially if they’re new to the place, is to read the menu, 11 pages spiral-bound. The breakfast section alone is four pages. Categories include Pancakes and French Toast, Waffles, Farm Fresh Eggs, Around the Clock Omelettes, Cereals, Bunnery, Breakfast Wraps, Breakfast Sandwiches, Other Breakfast Items (where else, after all, would you put creamed chipped beef, sausage gravy and biscuits, and cheese blintzes?), Side Orders, and Beverages. The waffles section offers—among other things—malted waffle with ham, bacon, sausage, or scrapple; Canadian bacon; strawberry, blueberry, or cherry preserves; two scoops of ice cream; fresh strawberries; or apple-cinnamon-raisin compote. And for people more fully awake, there’s the Soups and Appetizers section, the Sandwiches section, the Salads and Diet Delights section, the Saute and Pasta Specialties section, the Entrees section, the Desserts section, the Senior Citizen menu, the Children’s menu, and the Beer, Wine, and Spirits list. At the Nautilus, there’s always somebody there to refill your coffee cup or water glass. The floors are always clean, the tables always wiped, the bowl of complementary individually-wrapped mints at the cashier’s station always full.

Truth be told, it’s healthier, too.  The other reason I go there more these days is that I can order Egg Beaters or egg whites. I can order Egg Beater omelets. I can order veggie Egg Beater omelets with low-fat cheese. I can order my eggs poached and my potatoes with no extra salt. I can get tomatoes instead of potatoes. I can order multigrain toast. And I can order any or all of those things without feeling like I just stepped off the bus from Why-the-hell-did-you-bother-to-come-to-a-diner-ville.  

That, unfortunately, is the new, old, post-heart-surgery me. I’m thinking more about what my doctor will say about my blood pressure. I’m reading more and more about the “obesity epidemic” in America and am aware that I can’t shovel it away like I used to and not put on even more weight. Some days, I think I’d rather be eating greasy spoon bacon and eggs and home fries for breakfast every day and cheeseburgers and fries for lunch, just like the good old days, and resent the egg whites and tomatoes on my breakfast plate, the turkey burger and side salad for lunch, when people all around me are wolfing down 12-oz burgers with bleu cheese and bacon, duck fat fries, and a large Coke. I find that most of the time now, when I “break over,” as my Weight Watcher friends used to say, and order what I really want, my food just tastes greasy and heavy, and afterwards, I don’t feel so well.  

There are, though, those rare occasions when I just throw caution, arteries, and waistline to the wind and order the Hercules Omelette (three eggs with beef and lamb gyro meat and feta) or just my usual—two eggs over medium, bacon, and home fries, all swimming in grease, white toast dripping with butter, and coffee—and think, “Ah, life doesn’t get any better than this.” 

Jon Shorr has written for the Discovery Channel, JMore, Tricycle, Today’s Education, Social Education, and more. His fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in Passager, Defenestration, Stories That Need to Be Told, Joe, Welter, Bluntly, Psychopoetica, The Baltimore Sun, and elsewhere. He’s a Professor Emeritus of English and Communications at the University of Baltimore