BROOKDALE’S

When I was in high school, its safe to say that I did not always get along with my parents. My younger brother and I very rarely ate meals with them—tensions were that high.

Now there were still a few restaurants in New Jersey that we would still go out to eat together as a family: Sal and Lisa’s, a pizza joint in Glen Ridge, Hunan Garden in Lyndhurst, and a diner over in Bloomfield we knew as Brookdale’s. Viewers of The Sopranos would know it as “Holstein’s”, it was where the show’s enigmatic finale took place. From what I saw on the show, it hadn’t changed all that much.

Tony Soprano and his family were jammed into a crummy wooden booth with the individual jukebox for the table—a standard item for a Jersey diner. A typical playlist for these jukeboxes would run heavily towards Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel with some Journey, Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Pat Benatar, Foreigner, and Linda Ronstadt thrown in there as well.

My family( which at full strength constituted five kids and my parents) would usually sit in a corner booth in the back with padded seats, much roomier, and no jukebox. The menu was basic diner fare: burgers and sandwiches, some pasta dishes,  etc., but what made Brookdale’s unique was that they made their own chocolate candy and their own ice cream. If you ordered chocolate chip ice cream or mint chip (my personal favorite) the chips in the ice cream were large chunks of chocolate scraped right from the candy trays. Oh, man.

The other big attraction for us kids is that they sold licorice in yard-long strips, I’m not kidding. Being kids, we opted for red licorice. My dad, a traditionalist, was appalled by our crass choice. He would occasionally indulge himself in a black licorice strip. Three feet of licorice usually lasted the twenty-five-minute drive home.

The other thing I remember was that the waitresses were kind enough to serve me a chocolate sundae in a bowl instead of the standard  sundae glass. It used to drive me nuts as a kid that the fudge was at the bottom and the ice cream was at the top. Everything would overflow as I tried to scoop up the fudge from the bottom to mix with the ice cream up top. (I thought I was alone in this particular pet peeve of childhood until I saw Jerry Seinfeld reference it on an episode of his show where he’s in the first class section of an airplane, sharing a sundae with a supermodel while his buddy Elaine fumes in the back in coach .)

We lived in New Jersey but my dad worked in Manhattan as an editor. He used to ride the bus into the city with the New York Times restaurant critic, a friend of his who would tip him to all the great restaurants in New York and New Jersey.  My dad, being no dummy, would drop the guy’s name every chance he got and we would get terrific service in places in Chinatown and elsewhere.

My dad had started married life as a skinny little guy but was a fairly chubby man most of his adult life. He loved to eat and he loved to eat well. He came from a blue collar background in Jersey but went to Yale on a scholarship where he met my mother. Part of his job as an editor was wining and dining authors in Manhattan. Armed with restaurant tips from his buddy, my dad was a great host and a great raconteur. Not to mention a great customer.  It was not unusual, if you ate somewhere with my dad in Manhattan for the chef and the owner to come over and chat with him. But besides that, my dad would know every waiter and waitress in the place and their personal histories—and not just the fancy places in Midtown but at any of the grubby pizza joints and diners we frequented in Jersey.

As kids, we didn’t always appreciate that. My dad would be yukking it up with the waitress or the owner and I remember scowling self-consciously, thinking: Why is he always talking to these strangers? I don’t know these people and I don’t want to know them. ( I had no idea I would  eventually spend years working customer service in restaurants and stores, chatting up strangers, and being baffled by the aloof attitude of some customers. Kind of ironic. But I digress.)

So my brother and I are sullen teenagers and my parents are fairly sullen themselves when we head over to Brookdale’s one Sunday afternoon. The meal itself was not memorable. I’m sure it was fine, it’s what happened afterwards that makes this visit stand out.

Getting into our corny family car (as a classmate of mine had termed it) my dad was approached by three black biker chicks. They were lost and needed directions. Now that in itself is notable. I had never seen any bikers in person, let alone any women bikers, or black bikers and would never have guessed that black biker chicks even existed.

Essex County in New Jersey at that time (the 1970s, early ‘80s) was somewhat segregated. My hometown, Montclair was integrated (although hardly a poster child for racial harmony) but other towns were predominantly white or black. Livingston, Verona, Glen Ridge, were white. East Orange was black. West Orange was white. Newark was a large urban ghetto that had riots put down by the National Guard in the late Sixties ( although a federal investigation concluded that it was jumpy National Guardsmen that were primarily responsible for most of the violence).

Brookdale’s was in Bloomfield, predominantly white. The black biker chicks needed to get back to East Orange. My dad tells them just to follow him and he will lead them back to East Orange ( the city would later become famous as where Shaquille O’Neal and Whitney Houston grew up. The rap duo Naughty By Nature were also from there).

So off we go, in our corny family station wagon, driving down Bloomfield Ave. with an escort of three cool black chicks in their black leather jackets and sunglasses on motorcycles, wearing their colors (I’m sorry to say I do not remember their gang name).  My brother and I are bug-eyed. My dad has just gone from Angry Dad That We Resent to like, The Coolest Dad Ever, in a matter of minutes.

When we reach the outskirts of East Orange, my dad waves, they wave. They gun their engines into town and we head back home to Montclair. My brother and I were just open-mouthed and speechless.  Even in our turbulent adolescence, my dad still had the power to amaze. He wasn’t trying to be hip. He loved classical music and disdained jazz (we had to sneak rock’n roll into the house—in the 1970s!). He was just being neighborly, being a good guy—and that shouldn’t be remarkable, but it is.