Roots

“What we have inherited from our fathers and mothers is not all that walks in us.”

—HENRIK IBSEN, GHOSTS

Wherever i may have acquired my disposition toward gourmandise, it was not at my mother’s (or father’s) knee. I do owe to my parents the strong beginnings of my love for restaurants, because they ate out a lot and often took me along. But they used restaurants more for social than for gastronomic reasons. When they dined at Romanoffs, Chasen’s, Scandia, or some other sophisticated Los Angeles restaurant of the era, they ordered relatively unsophisticated fare—vichyssoise, shrimp cocktail, well-done beef, maybe chicken in some innocuous sauce. They may have had a cocktail or two before dinner, but with their food, I shudder to report, they mostly drank skim milk.