A Non-Food Article That Ends in a Review of a Restaurant That is No Longer in Business

The trouble is, sometimes I don't feel all that spiritual about food. For more or less a month I have been sort of thinking about what I could write about that could go inside a food magazine. I get nada. I don't know anything about cooking: stirring browned hamburger into the Kraft macaroni and cheese is getting sort of cutting-edge frisky. (Wow. Tastes like a little cheeseburger in each bite!) And I'm no restaurant critic; usually, I'm just tickled pink if I don't get food poisoning. If the coffee's bad, and it sadly sometimes is, I easily revert to outdoor camping standards and ask only that there are no little sticks floating around in it, or a dead fly.

To me, I'm afraid, there is seldom such thing as a memorable meal, and if it is, it usually has more to do with something that happened coincidentally at the same time as the meal, like a space station part landing in the chocolate mousse, or Uncle Ray falling off of his folding chair. What we ate, what it tasted like, what kind of presentation, that sort of thing, I'm afraid I seldom commit to long-term memory.

OK, I do remember the spaghetti races my sister and I had at the table at my Grandpa's house when we were little kids. Who can make their strand of spaghetti slide into their mouth the fastest?  It was  a process enhanced by a grownup twisting your ear, as I recall. In that case, I remember the food was spaghetti. I also remember the zucchini cake, even though I don't want to.

Perhaps the most memorable thing about those meals was actually just before the meal: Grandpa would pick up the salt and pepper shakers--little ceramic figurines made to look like a comical Italian married couple--and move them around and make them talk, like puppets, to each other in Italian. We always laughed at that, and the grownups laughed a little louder, and the grownups who also understood Italian laughed the loudest, until Grandma would playfully slap Grandpa and tell him to stop that.

Which brings me to the incident at Italian Gardens, sadly closed for business now, (how long?) in downtown Kansas City. One summer afternoon five or six of us wandered in off the sidewalk looking pretty hot and bedraggled, hardly dressed for eating out, loud, and hungry for something sweet. It was slow, and as the owner himself came to seat us, I said, jokingly, that he would probably want to put us far back in a dark corner because of the way we looked. He laughed, patted me on the shoulder and insisted on seating us at a table right in the front window.

That was cheesecake. It was very good.