I remember the worn Formica table, and not much else.
It was one of many such tables at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the kind with bare wooden chairs beside it, and brusque, Chinese-speaking waiters in white shirts and black vests who came by to take your order in a snap.
I was barely grammar school age then, possibly even younger.
I remember that place because my Dad would take me there. Just the two of us.
I’m not sure why my Mom and older brothers are absent from these memories. Maybe these father-daughter excursions happened when my Dad had days off from work. Maybe we’d end up picking up take-out for the rest of the family afterward. I wish I could recall.
What I do remember is how excited I always was whenever he brought me to this particular restaurant. You see, it wasn’t like any other restaurant in Chinatown. You could enjoy your standard Chinese food there, of course, but you also could order “American” food. At that age, that was a real treat to me then. And apparently to my Dad, as well.
My Dad would sometimes order a plate of Chinese beef stew, savoring the chewy tendon pieces most of all. Or he would sometimes have the same thing that I did. A creature of habit at that young age, I always went for the same dish: veal cutlet. It came with a gob of mashed potatoes, and a pile of those heated up, homogeneous looking frozen peas and carrots.
It was the cutlet I was most thrilled by, of course. There was just something special about that thin, tender slab, all perfectly crispy and golden brown sitting in the spotlight on that plate. I happily ate one fork-full after another, until it was all gone, and I’d have to wait until my Dad brought me back to that restaurant to enjoy it again. You see, it was the only place I ever ate that dish. My parents never cooked it at home. And I never ordered it anywhere else. Not even as an adult.
Then, a copy of “Relaxed Cooking with Curtis Stone” (Clarkson Potter) arrived in my mail. As I leafed through the cookbook by the host of TLC’s “Take Home Chef,” one photo in particular stopped me. There it was — a veal cutlet all crispy and golden looking like yesteryear.
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