Thursday, October 1, 2020
So our elderly (I know you are but what am I) neighbor is away this week and she asked us to please take her newspaper off her front step every morning so “robbers won’t know I’m not home” and she told us we could keep the paper if we want or toss it.
Even though he hasn’t read a newspaper in 25 years, Gary can never turn down anything free.
Every morning this week he’s been reading me snippets of weird shit he learned from the Life section — like it was just National Dumpling Day — or Joe Montana having a crazy lady intruder who tried to kidnap his baby granddaughter.
Wut?
But yesterday, Gary came upon something so vexing he flew upstairs to tell me.
“Rob, Alfio Gaglianese died,” he said, waving the newspaper in front of my face.
“Who?”
Huh? Who the hell was that?
I had just gotten off the phone with the only client I hate and she stresses me out so I wasn’t fully listening.
“Rob! It’s Alfio! How many Alfios do we know?”
Uh, none?
Ohhhhh, wait a second. Are you kidding me? Wait, Alfio was still alive?
Well, until the other day he was, anyway.
But...but...wasn’t he like 80 in like 1972?
Apparently not.
But to two young teenagers, I guess it seemed like it.
So when Gary and I transitioned from kiddie pals to dating teenagers pretending to be adults, we loved to eat dinner out in trendy downtown Philadelphia restaurants. It was the beginning of the foodie revolution, and restaurant owner chefs were generally long haired hippies with far out concepts we adored.
Gary and I quickly learned they didn’t care about trivial stuff like asking for ID before they served two sixteen year olds unlimited alcohol.
Woo hoo, life became amazing.
Then after we explored the hip places, we got silly and tried out the food at the old school, stuffy restaurants like Bookbinders Seafood and Arthur’s Steakhouse.
They served us, too.
We sipped martinis with our crab stuffed mushrooms and oh my God, we even went through a Tom Collins and shrimp cocktail phase.
We were such dorks.
But we both had after school jobs and cocktails used to be $1.50. A bottle of Mateus was $6.00.
We soon had our favorite places.
The Pub Tiki at 18th and Walnut had an all you can eat Polynesian luau with pitchers of pina coladas for $5.45.
Hang on. I’m having a flashback.
Omg, when we had our first apartment at age 18, we would go to the Pub Tiki for dinner with our schoolbags (yes, we predate backpacks) and when no one was looking, we’d literally fill them to the top with greasy spare ribs and chicken we slipped off our overloaded plates from the buffet.
We’d have enough “takeout” to feed us for a week.
Ah, youth.
It was such a different era.
Frog on Sansom Street had $2.00 slices of towering spinach bacon quiches and $2.00 oversized goblets of chablis.
You could smoke a joint after your strawberry salad at Astral Plane and the waiters would look the other way.
If you had told me I would do that legally in a coffee shop in Amsterdam in 2015 I would have said What Utopia is This?
Actually, 2015 itself feels like utopia now, doesn’t it?
But I digress.
The Crooked Billet on Chancellor Street served $6.00 sizzling steaks in cast iron pans though we were there for the $1.00 beers.
Okay, Gary was there for the beers, I was there for the Peach Melba.
But our absolute favorite was DaVinci’s at 20th Street, now the home of the Irish Pub.
You’d walk in, go down a narrow staircase, and the dining room was basically a dark basement made to look like a cheesy wine cellar with fake stone walls.
There were red and white checkered table cloths and every table had a centerpiece of a Chianti bottle with a white, red or green candle stuck in its neck and colored wax dripping down its sides.
And huge carafes of house chianti for $4.00. And that’s why we were really there.
The food was basic Italian as pictured by Americans. Spaghetti and meatballs, ravioli, and lasagna. Veal piccata and chicken parmigiana.
Baskets of garlic bread.
Table side Caesar salad.
And that’s how we met Alfio.
He was head waiter, and he did the salad.
It was performance art.
We were two 16 year olds pretending to be 30, and Alfio played along. He put on spectacular culinary theatrics for us and treated us like royalty while we swilled cheap chianti like water.
He called us the lovers.
“It’s the lovers!” he would exclaim every time we reached the bottom of the stairs and peered into the dining room, hoping it wasn’t too crowded and Alfio was there, insuring we could order our wine and not get carded.
Alfio would bow before us, the pepper grinder under his dish towel draped arm, and start the show.
Omg that Caesar salad.
It’s literally the only time in my life Gary and I voluntarily ate anchovies.
In 1980, Alfio finally got his first 15 minutes of fame when he was interviewed in our local paper.
The art of the waiter, according to Alfio Gaglianese
“When you go into a restaurant and sit down, the waiter should be right there," Mr. Gaglianese said in 1980. "If you take out a cigarette, he should be there with a light. He should ask if anyone would like a drink. You don’t say something like, ‘Do you want anything from the bar?’ When you come with drinks, you should never say ‘Who ordered the martini?’ A good waiter has a good memory. He knows who ordered the martini. If you have five or six people at a table, you should remember them all. When I come out of the kitchen, I have the plates for the table already arranged in the order I will put them down. I always start with the lady. If there is no lady, you should start with the oldest man. You should know from your own experience every dish on the menu. If there is a special for that day you should go into the kitchen and taste it. If it is no good, you don’t have to say anything to the chef, but you should not recommend it. People will not come back if you recommend something bad. If someone does not like the food, you ask them what is wrong, then you get them something else. You never argue with a customer; you just replace the dish.”
Like I said, it was a different time.
We must have eaten at DaVinci’s once a month from the early seventies until they closed in 1983.
Alfio was always our waiter.
We always got the Caesar salad.
And then life really happened.
Gary couldn’t drink anymore.
And much to my shock, I wanted children.
The lovers abruptly stopped their decades long Philadelphia bar and restaurant hop and in a eerie tip of the hat to 2020, stayed the hell home.
And then came Julie and Eric.
And then we blinked and the kids were grown and scattered across the country.
And now we’re old and in a pandemic and wondering what the hell happened.
I haven’t thought of Alfio in almost 40 years.
And now he’s gone.
And it’s not like I’m crushed, he wasn’t anyone that close to me or anyone I ever thought of even looking up on the internet, my usual criteria for those in my past, i.e., are they google worthy?
But what Alfio’s death brought was another memory of being young and giddy and unafraid, with our lives ahead of us.
And I know not to go there, but this year has been one thing after another on top of reaching an age where we’re at a bittersweet crossroads and entering a scary, fragile time in our personal lives.
Oh, yuck.
See? This is Exhibit A of why you have to be present and not take too many trips down memory lane.
The Philadelphia Inquirer really did a fantastic article/obituary. I’m kinda bummed. Had I remembered to google him when I do my usual insomniac cyber stalking of my past life at 3:00 a.m., I would have learned that Alfio opened his own restaurant and even after he retired, he still showed up monthly at his daughter’s restaurant in the Philadelphia suburbs right up until he died.
Oh, man. Bummer. We probably would have gone had we known.
You know what’s really crazy? According to his obituary, Alfio was born in 1935.
That means he was 39 when we met him.
Omg, I really did think he was an old man back then. My memory of him is exactly as it appears in the photo.
That’s wild.
Anyway, thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with me.
As of now, I’m back in the present.
Speaking of dying...
Is you-know-who dead yet?
I’ve been busy writing this morning and I have music on so I haven’t had time to check.
He’s not?
Damn!
I’ll meditate harder.
Please do the same.
I think the universe is finally listening.
We could get lucky.
Unless God thought I said Caesar instead of Geezer 😫😫😫
C’mon God. You know you wanna do it.
They’re gonna blame the libs regardless so why not have some fun?
Hey, I figure it’s worth a try, right?
Right.
Happy Thursday!