The Automat
My favorite restaurant as a child was Horn & Hardart’s Automat. They were big cafeterias, black and white décor; checkered tile floors. On my visits to them, my grandparents often took me to the Automat for lunch, an alternative to Schrafft’s or to Grandpa’s club at 200 Fifth Avenue.
There were two ways to eat in the Automat: you could go to the walls where there were little glass windows with food behind the glass. There were slots for coins in the brass frames that held the glass in each window. Also in the frames were descriptions of the food inside. You put your coins into the slots, opened the window, and removed your choice, which was usually on an off white heavy china plate with two concentric burgundy rules on it.
The food was generally placed on a paper doily. You could get all kinds of sandwiches, whole fruits like apples, a roll and butter, AND desserts. This was always a huge dilemma for me as I could never decide between blueberry pie, cherry pie or chocolate pudding. Sometimes I was told that if I finished one I could have a second. But I also knew, as my Grandparents were fond of telling me, that “my eyes were bigger than my stomach”, which meant that I would never have enough room for a second dessert. So I had to choose, knowing it would probably be my only one.
The main course was rarely a problem. I got that at the hot table, which was in the middle of the room. You took your tray, stood on line in front of the array of steaming foods. The servers, wearing hairnets and black and white uniforms, served you whatever you asked for. While the meatloaf and mashed potatoes with gravy were always tempting, 9 out of 10 times I chose a vegetable plate. There I was, from the time I was four, selecting peas and carrots, beets, spinach – creamed or otherwise - corn (off the cob), broccoli or cauliflower, sometimes mashed potatoes with no gravy, lima beans, green beans and the non-vegetable addition of applesauce. A whole plate full of pretty, colors. And some kind of bread or roll. To me, this was a sumptuous meal, accompanied by a glass of milk and followed by the dessert du jour.
Skip about 20 years: When I got married and was living in Manhattan, I used to meet Grandma for lunch every Tuesday. The Automats were long gone so now we went to Lord & Taylor’s for lunch as it was walkable from my office at Gralla Publications at 7 East 43rd Street, 3rd Floor. We went directly to the Bird Cage on the 7th floor. We always had the same thing: the salad bowl with their French dressing (which tasted like French’s 1890 dressing, my second favorite after homemade Russian made of ketchup and mayo) followed by the strawberry cream - a whipped kind of mousse - selected off the dessert cart. The only variation from this routine was the rare trip up to the 10th floor to the Soup Bar. There the chef, a huge male version of Hattie McDaniel who wore an immaculate white toque and apron, served only two things: bowls of scotch broth, which was a yummy, steamy soup ladled out of a huge brass caldron, and for dessert, apple pie with your choice of a slice of cheese or hard sauce on top. I always took the hard sauce which tasted like it was spiked with rum. We sat at the counter, the only seating there was, ate quickly, and left. Filling, but not as ladylike as the Bird Cage.
As I said, we seldom ate at the Soup Bar, and only when it was very cold outside, or the lines at The Bird Cage were too long. I preferred The Bird Cage for another very selfish reason: Lord & Taylor’s fabulous dress department was on the same floor. So after lunch, if there was time before I had to go back to work, we would saunter around looking at dresses. I would try on, prance around in front of Grandma, and we would each say yes or no. If we both said yes, sometimes she would buy it for me. I LOVED those dresses, including my all time favorite, a Pucci print. Wasn’t I lucky?
Strange epilogue: The Fifth Avenue doors into Lord & Taylor were the setting for an unforgettable dream I had years after those lunches stopped. I dreamed that Grandma, Grandpa and I had eaten lunch together at the Bird Cage (the threesome never actually happened as it was always just the two of us). We were exiting through the first set of glass doors into the vestibule. In my dream, Grandpa keeled over. Grandma screamed, “He’s dead! He’s dead! Sol is dead!” I said, “No Grandma, he’s not dead. He’s just stiff.”
The next morning I got a call that Grandpa had suffered a stroke in his sleep. It was true that he was not dead. He was paralyzed on his left side: stiff.
I’ve often wondered why my rem sleep chose Lord & Taylor as the site of this imagined terror. Maybe it was because I felt so safe and happy there that I knew that nothing PERMANENTLY horrible could happen there. Stiffness, perhaps. Certainly not death. My beloved Grandparents could never die in Lord & Taylor’s haven of a vestibule.
When they did die, I learned a way to keep them alive to this day.
I write about them.