Cleaning out a cabinet in the garage, I came upon a box labeled "Mother's Day cards." It shared a shelf with other boxes variously labeled "Valentine's Day cards," "Birthday cards" and "Holiday cards."
Neither my wife nor I have any notion why we keep cards from celebrations past. And yet, we do. While it makes me sound like a hoarder, I still couldn't bring myself to throw them out.
I don't imagine that future generations will sort through the cards looking for artifacts from an era long gone by. And yet, for me, they have a curious sentimental value. They're just cards from the drugstore, but they also carry as much meaning as finding a long-lost tomb in the Egyptian desert.
The history of the holiday card is unexpectedly recent. They date back to 1843, when Sir Henry Cole – who pushed through a bill lowering the cost of postage in Britain to a penny (the "Penny Post") – commissioned artist John Callcott Horsley to create a card in order to encourage greater use of the British postal service. The advent of cards worked wonders, as they became a standard for Christmas that year.
It took a long time for cards to be used for Mother's Day, simply because Mother's Day didn't exist until 1914 – not because no one had thought of it, but because our leaders at the time were largely opposed to the idea.
In 1908, the U.S. Congress rejected a proposal to make Mother's Day an official holiday. You read that right – Congress voted against motherhood. They thought the notion was a joke, and argued more than a little absurdly that it would lead to more holidays, like Mother-in-Law's Day. (You think we've got an obstructionist Congress now? Given the opportunity, they probably would have voted against the flag and apple pie as well!)
But thanks to the creator of Mother's Day – peace activist Anna Jarvis – in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson sidestepped Congress with a proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as a national holiday to honor motherhood.
So, who was Anna Jarvis? She had cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the Civil War, during which she created Mother's Day Work Clubs to deal with public health issues. And when her own mother died in 1905, she began a campaign to create a special day to honor motherhood.
She had the support of the growing women's rights movement, including suffragette Julia Ward Howe, who made a Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870. It took 44 years for that notion to finally be adopted – but only a decade for it to be turned into one of the biggest sales days of the year for greeting cards and also boxes of candy.
For the record, that upset Jarvis so much she organized boycotts of companies selling cards, and showed up to protest at a candymaker's convention in Philadelphia in 1923. She wanted the day kept pure and non-commercial, with mothers being thanked with hand-written letters. She even objected to the selling of flowers. How she would feel about the notion of taking mothers out for nice meals can only be imagined.
Ironically, the founder of Mother's Day never married, and had no children of her own.
Back to the notion of Mother's Day meals, I suspect Jarvis would have insisted you need to do the cooking yourself, giving mom a day off. But a massive culinary industry has grown over the years, with restaurants gifting moms with flowers, and family groups gathering around large tables to offer more boxes of See's candy than seems rational.
Growing up back east, fancier folks than I would take their moms to somewhat fussy, upscale restaurants with names like Patricia Murphy's Candlelight, and the fabled Tavern on the Green in New York's Central Park.
By contrast, nothing made my working-class mother happier than a mixed plate of brisket and corned beef from a local deli. My wife often opts for dim sum. My mother-in-law loves IHOP. So, my selection of restaurants below is a bit random, but they lean toward the nicer side.
I think the notion of handing mom a rose when she enters is a fine gesture. But then, I miss wearing ties too. Times change. And as my mother used to say: "Every day should be Mother's Day." Right she is.
Claire's at the Museum
Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach; 562-439-2119; www.lbma.org/claires
Is Claire's at the Museum the perfect brunch experience? Not to enthuse too much, but it would be hard to imagine a better brunch – especially with our weather warm and breezy, and the joys of outdoor dining remaining unabated.
Brunch at Claire's isn't just a fine late morning/early afternoon in the sun – it's also a meal enjoyed surrounded by art, adjacent to a remarkable space. It's a structure dating back to 1912, known as the Elizabeth Milbank Anderson House – a dramatic piece of architectural history in which to eat your eggs Benedict.
Claire's sits in the museum's Sculpture Garden, at the center of which are the curiously fragmented copper-and-glass works of artist Claire Falkenstein, three of them, which give the restaurant its name.
The café is very careful about not seating too many diners at one time, noting that tables are reserved for 90-minute "blocks." That may be a bit tough because by the time you're up to your second Bacon Bloody Mary, and settle into the warm comfort of the view of the distant Queen Mary, needing to return to what passes for our real world may be a wrenching experience.
Claire's is a hard act to follow, with a simple paper menu beginning with a section headed, "Eggs." There's an applewood bacon and sausage omelet, with cheddar and jack. A red pepper & spinach scramble, with avocado, parmesan and pepper jack. And a good ol' fashioned Country Breakfast of eggs any style, sausage and bacon – all served with roasted spuds, English muffins or wheat toast, or corn tortillas if you're gluten-free. (For a buck more, you can go egg white only, which I'm not a fan of. There's too much tasty goodness in the yolk to give it a pass. And anyway, new studies say it isn't the cholesterol bomb it used to be.)
The eggies continue under the "Classics" – a California avocado Benedict, a prosciutto eggs Benedict, a breakfast burrito with scrambled, bacon, sausage and cheese; a veggie burrito with eggs for those who are ovos.
There's also a crème brûlée French toast so iconic, it gets its own place in a box under the Classics – puffy Hawaiian bread, seasonal fruit topping, real maple syrup, with bacon, sausage, hash browns or roast potatoes if you want. And a pair of eggs, also if you want. That's gilding the lily if you ask me – why mess with perfection?
More Merrill Shindler: Also see, Where to find the best eggs Benedict in Long Beach
Ammatoli Mediterranean Bites
285 E. 3rd St., Long Beach; 562-435-0808, www.ammatoli.com
Ammatoli isn't just a place to go for "Mediterranean bites." The "bites" at Ammatoli add up to a full-service restaurant – with a sizable following among those who long for mujaddara and grilled halloumi. And some of the best rotisserie Chicken around.
In the same way that Middle Eastern restaurants have a way with rice that's nothing short of dazzling, there's a positive Zen wonder to what they do at Ammatoli with chicken. If you've ever been to any of the several branches of Zankou Chicken, you know that the birds emerging from their spinning grills are impossibly juicy, almost obscenely flavorful. This is the sort of chicken where, even if you've sworn off the skin for the sake of your health, you find yourself nibbling on a crispy bit here, a crunchy bit there. Life is short – dig in!
Getting a rotisserie chicken is certainly one of the easiest ways of ordering at Ammatoli. You have a choice of a quarter white or a quarter dark, a half, a whole, or a family chicken feast of two birds. The first options come with a choice of two side dishes; the last comes with four, drawn from crowd-pleasers like the hummus and the spicy hummus, the tahini salad and the tabbouleh, the grape leaves, the baba ghanoush and more.
There's a spicy, garlicky, lemony chicken as well, half a bird with rice and two sides, which may actually be even better than the standard-issue rotisserie chicken – though that does strain credibility. Or at least the capacity of my taste buds.
In terms of the menu, that's just the proverbial tip of the Middle Eastern iceberg – an appropriate image concerning how chill it was. Indeed, Ammatoli approaches the encyclopedic in terms of its selection of dishes.
One can, of course, as always, make a perfectly good meal out of nothing but the mezza – the small dishes – which come (if you want) as a six-dish combo, or a three-dish combo. … A meal of hummus, tabbouleh, grape leaves, fried lamb kibbeh, falafel – what's not to love?
I'm especially fond of the hummus variation, topped with a choice of meats and pine nuts – ground beef, shawarma beef or shawarma chicken. It doesn't matter much to me, for they're all good.
And I love the way the innate creaminess of the hummus plays off the semi-soft crunch of the pine nuts, and the salty-crispiness of the meats. It's sort of a celebration on your tongue.
Also, the fried cauliflower, tossed with scallions and parsley, makes cauliflower taste about as good as cauliflower can taste. But if you're in need of more, certainly the lamb, chicken, beef steak and ground beef kabobs are a source of much happiness.
If you want to get away from the familiar, try the dish called samkeh harra. It's a grilled fish filet marinated in an unexpectedly spicy habanero pepper sauce. … Habaneros? In the Middle East? Well, why not?
There's a Moroccan spiced salmon as well, sweetly described on the menu as "Your true hearty choice!!" – a true hearty odd turn of phrase, complete with double exclamation marks!
There are several soups, more salads, semi-pizzas like the jibneh man'ouche cheese melted on flatbread, and the za'atar man'ouche (a flatbread topped with that madcap spice blend called za'atar).
There's a Lebanese beer on the menu, along with two Armenian beers, and sundry Lebanese wines.
Desserts – the baklava, pistachio-baklava ice cream and the knafeh jibneh pastry filled with cheese – are very sweet, as Middle Eastern desserts always are.
The food is spiced and herbed, the desserts are honeyed – the end result is unabashedly pleasurable. This is Mediterranean cooking … with a bite.
Marino's
17126 Bellflower Blvd., Bellflower; 562-867-4225, www.marinositalianrestaurant.com
There are numerous reasons that Marino's Italian restaurant, which sits just a few feet north of the 91 Freeway on Bellflower Boulevard in Bellflower, makes me a very happy paisano. It is, first and foremost, very comfortably old school – a room filled with cozy booths, decorated with an uncountable number of photos of the Marino family.
You can tour the photos by strolling around the several rooms of Marino's, but it's going to take a while – there isn't a surface to be found that doesn't feature an array of family photos. There are family weddings, family picnics, family members posing in front of the Statue of Liberty, the family shoe repair shop and the family barber shop (there were several of both) – and of course, photos of ancestors in their kitchens.
I especially like a photo that appears on the menu, identified as, "Great-great-great grandmother baking bread outside in a brick oven in Sicily, 1872." Of course, she's wearing a long dark dress and a headscarf – right out of Central Casting.
It's also a great place to dine on the food so many of us grew up eating before the age of burrata and carpaccio, of risotto and long-aged balsamic. And not just the food, but food served in the old way – a full meal that includes garlic bread and a green salad, a tureen of minestrone soup and pasta with pretty much everything.
You even expect pasta to be served with the pasta – which in the case of several dishes isn't identified as anything other than "pasta." Is it spaghettini? fettuccine? angel hair? fusilli? Order it, and find out.
Before I get to the food, I do need to mention that the service here is wonderful. The servers are warm, charming, never rushed. They give the distinct – and increasingly rare – sense that they care. This is a family run restaurant with a family heart. Or perhaps, even more than that.
My family meals sometimes (often?) devolve into range wars. Here, all is rainbows and unicorns – or whatever the Italian equivalent might be. (Chianti and pomodoro, perhaps?)
The menu is so familiar, there really is a sense of being home again. Under the antipasto heading, there's fried mozzarella with meat sauce, a dish I love not wisely, and surely too well. There are pan-fried artichoke hearts topped with Romano cheese and a red sauce. There are sautéed mushrooms, and calamari in a red sauce, or pan-fried to crispness.
And it should be no surprise that there's an insalata antipasto of greens, roasted peppers, meats, cheese, olives, pepperoncini, artichoke hearts, garbanzos, kidney beans, Roma tomatoes, croutons and Italian dressing, served with garlic bread. That's a meal in itself, and then some.
But then, by ordering just the salad, you'd be missing the full Marino's Experience. The tureen of minestrone comes out, even for a solitary diner – a good vegetable and pasta soup, long cooked (perhaps too long) so that the ingredients are beginning to melt into each other. The green salad is just that, nothing more, nothing less, and perfectly enjoyable. And really, it's what follows that matters the most.
Going to Marino's is like going to a toy store that specializes in classic Southern Italian dishes. There are dishes here that have vanished from modernist Italian cooking – manicotti stuffed with ricotta and Romano, cannelloni filled with beef and pork, a lasagna thick as a brick (though far tastier), chicken cacciatore, chicken piccata, chicken marsala, veal parmigiana, eggplant parmigiana, sausage and peppers, veal scaloppini. It's a garden of red-sauced delights.
And, to complicate the mix, there's scampi and cioppino and linguine and clams, and more. There's pizza as well, though this is too nice a restaurant to be a pizzeria.
That said, the chicken parmigiana Siciliana pizza is a thing of wonder – a pizza nearly as thick as the lasagna, and perhaps even more filling. No doubt, you'll take some home. And you'll find it reheats very nicely – and makes a first-rate breakfast. And really, why not?
Chez Bacchus
743 E. 4th St., Long Beach; 562-336-1440, www.chezbacchus-lb.com
I'm old enough to remember when men wore a suit and a tie when going to better restaurants. You didn't dress for a burger, or a BLT. You didn't dress for a bowl of chili and a beer. But when you went to what we referred to as a "nice restaurant," you dressed for the occasion.
If you forgot your tie and/or jacket, the more upscale restaurants would direct you to their closet, where they kept a supply of size 48 madras jackets, and ties wide enough to pass as lobster bibs. You spent an evening dressed like that, you never forgot your tie and jacket again.
Those days are, for better or worse, long gone. Which is why I was fascinated, amazed and impressed to see not just numerous men in jackets at Chez Bacchus – but one well-coiffed fellow in a suit, a white shirt and a tie. He looked like he had stepped out of a Cary Grant movie from back in the day. He was … dazzling.
Luckily, I was wearing a jacket with a button-down shirt and a V-neck sweater. Not as proper, but at least suitably Ivy League – all of which is somewhat surprising, because Chez Bacchus doesn't have a dress code.
Chez Bacchus – named for the Roman god of wine and revelry – is all about dazzling dishes matched with exquisitely curated wines, served in an easy-going setting, with affable service – and old black & white movies showing on a screen against one wall. Bacchus would approve.
Before he was the Roman god Bacchus, this deity was the Greek god Dionysius, giving us the useful adjective "Dionysian." His name has always suggested an orgiastic way of life. And really, Chez Bacchus is far too civilized to be considered in the least a sub-set of "Animal House."
This is an admirably peaceful space, in which you can have a proper conversation with others at your table, without having to become an impromptu lip-reader. It's easy to spend hours here, and emerge without a migraine, well-fed and well-watered.
The menu at Chez Bacchus is built around the seasons, with an assortment of partner farms listed on the website. Which means, the dishes I tasted may not be what's available when you show up. But the cooking will be the same – which is to say Modern Californian at its best.
The menu is not large – there are restaurants in Long Beach that offer more appetizers than all the dishes at Bacchus combined. I like restaurants with smaller menus. For me, it suggests more focus on what they're making that day. I feel a bit … off to come upon a menu of dozens and dozens of dishes, wondering how the kitchen can possibly cook them all. Sometimes, as I've discovered the hard way, they can't.
It's always a good idea to begin with a plate of local breads. We live in an age of breads that are actually worth eating, a long way from the generic, dry, tasteless filler bread of yesteryear. In this case, it's a mix of ciabatta, sourdough and focaccia, served with extra virgin olive oil and 18-year-old balsamic vinegar. It's easy to eat too much.
Bread really is the staff of life. But then, eat too much bread, and you won't have room for the remarkable charred tako – some of the best octopus I've ever tasted. It was absurdly tender, served with sesame cabbage, pickled ginger, tempura flakes, togarashi pepper mix, furikake seasoning mix and more.
The salads are four, complex enough that you'll want to slow down, and consider, for instance, the butter lettuce, chicory, pomegranate, pecans, car acara oranges, goat cheese and orange balsamic – all of which are in there … somewhere … working in culinary harmony.
One of Bacchus' most notable suppliers is Long Beach Mushrooms in Signal Hill. They supply the unique and wondrous mushrooms in the LA Mushroom salad, along with the mushrooms in the duck confit. And the trumpet mushrooms served with the Santa Carota coulotte steak.
And indeed, as is often the case, there are sides I dream of – notably the black fried rice that came with the Maple Leaf duck breast. The duck was superb, but that rice – Bacchus have mercy!
Johnny Rebs' True South
4663 Long Beach Blvd., Long Beach; 562-423-7327, www.johnnyrebs.com
Grits are a porridge made from ground cornmeal that is, indeed, one of the most essential ingredients of the true Southern breakfast. Like sweet tea, it's little known to those of us from the North. But south of the Mason-Dixon Line, it's as essential as the ham and the eggs. And it's an ingredient found on the breakfast menu at Johnny Reb's, which is probably the truest Southern eatery in Long Beach, if not all of Southern California.
In the American South, breakfast is a meal of such substance, the desire to crawl back between the sheets afterwards is hard to avoid. (Which I remember doing after breakfast at Brennan's in New Orleans. As I recall, I nearly slept through lunch, but rallied just in time.)
The options for breakfast at Johnny Rebs' begin with Good Mornin' Southern Style. Talk about modest understatement! We begin with Pig Out – flapjacks, French toast or waffles, along with two eggs, and a choice of bacon, sausage or smoked ham. (Yankee Cheese Grits are a side dish, served on the plate, or in a bowl. It matters little – grits is grits!)
There are chicken and waffles as well (with hot pepper maple syrup!), followed by nine breakfast sandwiches (fried green tomatoes and bacon on biscuits! a Texas bacon and egg melt! and of course biscuits and gravy, with crumbled sausage or bacon!)
The sides also include Yankee Spuds, with cheddar, tomatoes, scallions, mushrooms, sour cream and avocado, which also come with the 13 Breakfast Plates: catfish and eggs! Southern-fried chicken and eggs! sausage and grits skillet! and a skillet of Yankee spuds! (There's avocado toast, too – which is Southern California, not the Confederacy.)
There used to be a lunch menu and a dinner menu. But now, they're one and the same – which makes this a substantial feed all day long, with dishes that travel home very well.
And since barbecue tastes great the next day, the basic meals at Johnny Rebs' are good for not one meal, but several. (Which doesn't work near as well with the breakfast dishes – pancakes are never quite as good as fresh from the griddle. And a day-old omelet is a strange notion.)
This is Southern cooking, much of it straight out of Dixie, with the occasional dish that comes West for a bit of a vacation. I suspect the selection of salads are more for our delicate SoCal tastebuds than the heartier dining habits of Georgia/Alabama/Mississippi/Louisiana and so forth.
Would they understand a Catfish Caesar salad down on the bayou? Or a Farmers Market Salad with mushrooms and avocado? Can't say for sure, but I suspect not. (Years ago, I went to one of the most upscale restaurants in Atlanta. There were many salads to choose from. Nearly everyone there was eating the fried chicken. It defines the South.)
For the most part, the menu at True South is … truly Southern. There's cornmeal fried catfish (described as "Pride of the South"!). There's a combo of "soul-satisfying" shrimp, blackened catfish and cheddar grits. Of course, there's Southern-fried chicken, crazy crisp and heavy with spice; you want fried chicken with waffles for dinner, they got it!
Me, I go for the beef ribs, and baby backs, served together on a barbecue plate of one, two or three meats, with cornbread, biscuits or hushpuppies. And even more than that, I love the Burnt Ends of Brisket – pan-seared in brown sugar and whiskey glaze, served over hot pepper grits.
To wash it down, there's sweet tea, which makes my teeth vibrate. There's beer, too. And wine. I drink beer with my 'que, and I always leave room for the banana pudding. Though the peach cobbler and key lime pie are sure tempting. Like it says on the menu, "Put some South in your mouth!"
Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email [email protected].
