Remembrance of a Restaurant: A Decameron of Dining
by Frank Palescandolo
Category: Biography & Autobiography

Everyone will agree, a great Coney Island restaurant, one of a kind, is a coveted core sample of the late historical past. Imagine table talk and social customs of a pulsing patronage encased now in the cruel aspic of time. May I place you at a favored table facing a proscenium populated by diners—cooks, scullions, waiters, musicians of the cafe chantant scullery maids, deadbeats—and the notable and notorious of the years 1915-1975; an inscape for the "livingness" of an era. I, too, am playing my role, only consciously by writing what I remember in this loving memoir of a gathering place, a showplace of human kindred at its mellowed best. Not a history pinched by spinsterish qualms, bigoted asides, shrivelled libidos, and dyspeptic frowns, for bitter lips make for bitter palates, and stingy tipping. No, rather a free spending largesse cuore a cuore of matching vignettes, anecdotes, profiles, tintypes, tales and tattles in full bodied appearances. Restaurants are marvelous core samples of the past. How wonderful if all the great restaurants of the past were written up so devotedly and grandly!