Chop Suey

        

     We lived around the corner from the Chop Suey joint on Third Avenue immortalized by Edward Hopper in 1929.  What it was still doing there in 1962 is a mystery, but as with the ice-man and knife-grinder who still plied the block by pushcart, change across those decades came at a snail's pace in most of the old neighborhoods. It's possible that the man in the black satin toque who served Mr Hopper that afternoon as he sketched from a corner table was the father of the man who served us, and it's safe to say that the meal itself hadn't changed a bit. American Chop Suey and Chow Mein, the house specialties, were bland interpretations of their namesakes, based on what was often referred to as “hamburg” and dressed up with spaghetti and a bit of flaccid bean-sprout. On special occasions – after selling a painting; before a matinee - my mother would take us up the gloomy staircase tucked between the shoe-man and the saloon for an exotic plateful of the stuff, slurped up with abandon beneath the floating dust-motes caught in the window-shafts of sunlight.

   Mediocre might just be too grand a term for this fare but we loved it nearly as much as what we'd find behind the complicated little doors at Mom's alternative haunt, the Horn and Hardart's across town on 57^th. Pie was the thing at the Automat and although I'm sure we must have had other items from time to time – dry, curling bologna sandwich points, desiccated pickles and stale, rancid chips – it was the colloidal Boston Cream and glutinous berry pies, together with the complex mechanics of the coin-fed little cubbies that drew us in. The extra frisson served up by the ordinary, urban slice of life habituating this vast eatery seemed exciting and vaguely threatening, too, and it wasn't entirely unusual to find the seedy gentleman at the next table bent-up-double, dozing in his entre.

   At home, my mother began trying out some of the newer novelties: boxed, component pizza kits, Sara Lee cakes, pressurized cheese and cream and TV dinners. These were exciting if tasteless alternatives to the usual Sunday night, fast-food options of chipped beef or tuna fish, rice and peas and the fact that you had to push, pull or prod at the newfangled plastic packaging or process only added to the thrill. Often on these rushed and busy evenings Dad would order a pizza from Eduardo's over on Second Avenue by the bridge and there was nothing run-of-the-mill about these pies. Although I secretly preferred a Velveeta melt with a side of Sara Lee, walking through the dusky cacophony with my brother and father and waiting by the bar while Eduardo – a masterful, old-school fingersmith – deftly removed our belts, rings and wallets was pretty cool. That he'd present these purloined items, to our perpetual astonishment, together with the hot and steaming pizza was nearly as big a deal as a Swanson's.

   Just as the 1950's ushered in America's celebration of the ordinary, the 1960's, at least until we let our hair down, gave us all the opportunity to revel in mediocrity and save a bit of time in the kitchen that might better be devoted to sitting before the telly chortling at Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan and Topo Gigio between bites of processed cheese food, mock apple pie and turkey from a tube.