Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

Anyplace where the meal is four dollars and fifty cents, what can they give you? A blintz is four-fifty. When I make a blintz, it costs more than that.

Debating my mother is slippery business. My father is more straightforward, but I’m afraid he orders too much bad veal parmigiana, the kind where the meat is chopped and the cheese solidified, to rate serious consideration as a food authority. However, he is something of a grassroots cultural anthropologist—that’s a nice way of saying he gossips around the pool. I’m fascinated by the depth of his Early Bird lore.

He tells me the Early Bird is a meal served before peak dinner hours, one at which patrons are rewarded with discounts or with complimentary courses. It is good for retirees who like to get dinner finished early so they can take advantage of community activities. It is good for elderly persons who have difficulty driving at night, because they can return home before sundown. Mostly, it’s a good deal. Early Bird devotees eat as much as they can, and then they take home everything left on the table. My father tells me they even clean out the bread basket, a suggestion that incenses my mother, who does not wish to be thought of as a character out of Les Misérables.

IDA: When have we ever taken bread home? Except at the Rascal House, of course.

NORMAN: Talk to Thelma. She’s always taking bread home.

IDA: Oh, her. She takes everything home.

Thelma isn’t her real name, by the way. Some journalists change names to protect the innocent. I’ve done it to protect the bridge club.

Between having to assign an alias to “Thelma” and surviving the bread blowup, I realize that probing my mother and father for Early Bird inside information might not be such a good idea. I decide I will wait until I F O R K I T O V E R

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return to New York to seek an answer to the most delicate question of all: Why are there always so many Jews at Early Birds? I eventually ask this of comedian Jackie Mason, a leading authority on Jewish folkways.

“It’s simple,” he says. “Jews have one thing on their mind: food. At five o’clock, when gentiles are thinking, ‘I want a drink,’ Jews are thinking, ‘I want to eat.’ Gentiles go to a bar. Jews go to an Early Bird Special. It’s the cocktail hour for Jews.” That’s a neat explanation of why Jews eat early. I think I already know why Jews eat cheap. It has to do with a historic fear of being overcharged.

Take my mother. Sometimes I tell her about my favorite foods in New York, like the chicken with whipped potatoes and sweet garlic sauce at Montrachet. The price is $24. She’s never had it, but according to her, you can find just as good in Florida for much less.

“We go to this kosher place, get a plate of soup, a half-chicken—

that’s half a kosher chicken—one vegetable, tea, four dollars and fifty cents.”

I reply, “I thought you said nothing for four-fifty could be any good.” She looks at me scornfully. “This is lunch. I’m talking about lunch.

Lunch is different.”

What can I do but apologize?

At this point, I shut up and let her take charge. I say we’ll go anywhere she wants to check out her Early Bird favorites, but lunches don’t count. Lunches aren’t Early Birds. I tell her that breakfast doesn’t count, either, even if you can get two eggs, a bagel, and coffee for ninety-nine cents at Ann & Vince’s Southgate Bagel & Deli, in North Lauderdale.

By the way, you’d think this would constitute the ultimate breakfast experience for my mother, but she is not as predictable as that. She prefers Bageland of Margate, even though the breakfast specials there start at $1.39.

“At Bageland,” she says, “I can send back the bagels to be toasted twice.”

“So send them back twice at Southgate,” I say.

“For ninety-nine cents, I haven’t got the nerve.” 1 0 2

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I ask her if we could please stop with the bagels and get on with business, the Early Bird dinners. This gets her a little miffed. She informs me the food won’t be fancy like I get at my big-shot New York restaurants. This is an important point. When you’re talking Early Bird, you’re not talking new wave Floribbean cuisine, the “seared citrus-crusted yellowfin tuna with a macedoine of papaya, mango and yellow pepper” we read about in Time magazine while I was down there. To be deprived of such dishes does not constitute a loss to my mother.

“I don’t eat anything seared,” she says.

The first stop on her restaurant itinerary is the Fifteenth Street Fisheries, in Fort Lauderdale, which offers an Early Bird from 5:00 p.m.

to 5:15 p.m., a dangerously narrow window of opportunity. My father tells me that just before 5:00 p.m., everybody lines up outside. When the doors open, they race for the dining room, up on the second floor.

It’s sort of a Geriatric Olympics, everybody hitting the stairs like an Edwin Moses with varicose veins. Alas, we go on a slow night, so I do not witness this spectacle.

The Early Bird here is simple: $5 off any entrée except specials. My mother, who rates the place “pretty good,” has harsh words for the salads, although I find them imaginative. “There isn’t even a tomato,” she says. “I wouldn’t call that a salad, no tomato.” I praise the intermezzo, a tiny dish of tropical-fruit sorbet.

“Very classy,” I say.

“My appetizer was one little piece of fish,” she says. “After that I need an intermezzo?”

Also scoring high with me is Kelly, the bread girl. A girl that cute, I wouldn’t take to an Early Bird. I don’t ask an opinion of my mother.

When the girl isn’t Jewish, you don’t bring her up.

Our next stop is a Margate seafood restaurant named Mr. G’s. I’m told it’s named for