COMFORT FOOD. AND YET MY SOUL WOULD NOT BE COMFORTED. | When I worked on movies while living in New York City, I found cooking for myself nearly impossible. I had been struggling for years with the dreary grocery store task known as Shopping For One. Now I was finding that my daily schedule was longer than almost anyone else’s on shooting days. A production designer needs to be first on set, to make sure that the shooting crew has everything it will need to point a camera at. Most of the day is actually spent looking after tomorrow’s work, and the next day, and next week, but you need to time your day perfectly so that you can meet everyone at dailies, and then hang out for the discussion after dailies. In reality, this meant a 4:30am breakfast and an 11:30pm dinner for me, most days. Are there any more depressing times of the day to be staring at an un-dated, half-full container of pasta salad in your refrigerator? This is where the Greeks come in. When I lived in Manhattan, there were a lot of hard-won cliches involving business ownership and certain nationalities, and one of them had to do with diners and Greek immigrants. After sampling my neighborhood eateries, I felt that one of the two different Greek-owned diners was able to maintain a consistent quality in both breakfast-making and hamburger-making. Pricing was all over the map, but that’s a different story. For omelettes and cheeseburgers, these guys were it. And they were open 24 hours, so there was that. At the time, there seemed to be a palpable sense of pride in the Greek diner cliche, and it had to do with maintaining a certain standoffishness, a clever way to be friendly without actually smiling, to remember the food a customer usually orders without appearing to care. Now that I’m older, it seems the height of sanity -- to resist pretending to be better friends than we are. At the time it seemed relatively surly to me, but I chose to give them my twice-daily business whenever I was in production, which was a lot. I moved to Los Angeles eventually, and somehow seven years passed before I was in New York with some time to kill, wondering what my old neighborhood looked like. “Wondering what my old neighborhood looked like” is misleading. I wanted to know if the Greeks were still there. I suppose there is something to seeing certain faces at mealtime, for years on end, that creates an odd simulation of family. In the animal kingdom I think it’s called imprinting. So, there, I’ve said it. I was searching for my Greek family. The ones whose names I didn’t even know. There was Gruff Owner. There was Underappreciated Younger Brother. And there was Exuberant Cousin, who broke the rule about being standoffish and was kept in the kitchen, out of sight of most customers. He craved customer interaction, and spoke no English. Sometimes they let him wait tables in the middle of the night, and he was incredibly friendly. He could not remember more than a few syllables of English at a time, so placing an order with him was like something out of a Bunuel film. So there I was, seven years in L.A. now, returning to my neighborhood a little bit like an immigrant -- wide-eyed, a little bit lost, and full of hope. The first thing that struck me was that the travel agency next door to my little Greek diner was gone, and it had been subsumed by the diner. They were a success story! I entered and immediately saw Gruff Owner, his hair now all white, but there was no flicker of recognition. He thrust his chin at a table, and I sat down, humiliated. What was I expecting? This is New York! Sometimes my naivete is astounding, I thought. On a busy corner like this, their cumulative customer count must be close to a million at this point. Did I really expect a hug? A rousing “Opa!” Diet Cokes on the house? I ordered a cheeseburger, and it was just as I remembered it: tender, not overcooked, generous with tomatoes and lettuce, the smear of Thousand Island dressing a nostalgic touch. Comfort food. And yet my soul would not be comforted. Thirty minutes later I stood at the register, not thirty inches from Gruff Owner, my surrogate mother/father for so many years, and tried to remember what casual indifference looks like, so that I might, outwardly, appear less vulnerable than I felt. He handed me my change. As I turned my body slightly, counting out the embarrassingly generous tip I was going to put on the table, he said, still staring at the register, “Why you not come here for seven years.” I stared at him. “I moved to California,” I said, an idiotic grin spreading across my face. “Oh, California,” he said, nodding, and -- was that a smile? I was at a loss for words, no idea what to say next. “It’s bigger,” I blurted out, gesturing to the side of the restaurant where the travel agency used to be. He was still nodding. “California…” he murmured, with something that looked like approval. And then I understood. For seven years, my surrogate mother/father thought I’d been eating at his competitor’s diner, two blocks to the east and south. The blank look that I’d received when I walked in wasn’t blank at all, it was a special look reserved for the disloyal, the traitor, the ungrateful scum of the earth. I’d missed it. I said, “Efcharisto,” trying to put as much feeling into it as possible. It didn’t really work, it kind of sounded like I'd sneezed. I wanted to be better at navigating my surrogate Greek family dynamics. He nodded at me. “Good to see you,” he replied, absolutely killing it. |