Let Them Eat Cake . . . And Chopped Liver Too

With the wedding date getting closer, I almost forgot that I have a birthday in April. April 12th to be exact.

I hadn’t really thought much about how I would like to celebrate said birthday, as my primary focus has been trained on things like minute variations of color in different species of rose, or chargers for our reception place settings. So when the time came to really figure something out, I initially thought I would request dinner at 160 Blue, a fantastic restaurant in Chicago at which many of my birthdays have been celebrated. But then 160 Blue just didn’t seem right, so I called my fiancé maybe 20 times suggesting different restaurants and finally begging him for help (he is particularly adept at choosing restaurants with the most delicious fare).

And then it dawned on me. Myron and Phil’s.

For those of you who are either Northsiders at heart, or grew up Jewish in the Chicagoland Area at any time during the last . . . let’s say . . . three or four decades, your mouth is probably already watering. The images of dim lighting and dark wood walls are already flooding your brain. You can recall dining chairs upholstered in chocolate brown leather with grommets running along the top and the incredibly tacky signed photographs of B and C List stars that have dined in this Chicago institution.

For those of you who are not Northsiders and didn’t grow up Jewish in the Chicagoland Area within the last three or four decades, Myron and Phil’s is an old Chicago steak house located on Devon where it intersects Crawford Avenue. At Myron and Phil’s they serve steak, seafood, steak, potatoes, steak, creamed spinach, steak, and chopped chicken livers with bits of hardboiled egg and raw onion. And THAT’S IT. If you aren’t satisfied by the menu at Myron and Phil’s, you are either a vegetarian or dead.

In any case, as soon as I thought of Myron and Phil’s, the phantom smell of skirt steak with burnt onions filled my nostrils. I called everyone involved. They were amenable to the suggestion.

My fiancé and I were the last to arrive at the restaurant, even after my maid of honor had taken some extra time to get lost and retrace her steps (I am beginning to suspect that this is actually her primary method of memorization when it comes to Chicago’s roadways). Everyone seemed to be in good spirits.

We had just barely gotten ourselves seated at our table when the waitress dropped off menus with a bowl of new pickles and pickled tomatillos, a bread basket filled with fresh challah rolls and two heaping scoops of chopped liver. My fiancé tore into the chopped liver like a wild animal, and as I watched the horrible carnage, I imagined him doing the exact same thing in 50 years. The strength of his affinity for chopped liver is outdone only by the oldest, most curmudgeonly Zayde (that’s Grandpa in Yiddish).

I perused the menu half-heartedly, already trying to decide between fried perch and one of the obscenely large broiled lobster tails I had only ever gazed upon longingly. I went with the perch. Don’t ask me why. Alright, because it’s a guilty pleasure. I love the crispy breading surrounding the flaky fish that just sort of melts away. And that tartar sauce with bits of gherkin mixed in? Gets me every time! On this particular night, the perch fillets were the size of butternut squash and deep fried to perfection.

If you are curious, my mother ordered whitefish, my maid of honor the fried perch, my fiancé a filet mignon, and my father ordered beef ribs that—we would all soon discover—were not really beef ribs at all but, instead, had clearly been ripped straight out of a wooly mammoth.

And while we waited for our food, my parents proceeded to tell the stories of my birth. And amidst tales of how my mother’s best friend--across town in a class--intuited the moment my mother started having contractions, and what a tiny and beautifully formed infant I was, my mother said—of the labor itself and my refusal to be born without a fight: everything was coming out of me but you!

It was magical. In my embellished fantasy of this moment, there was a record playing—something my grandmother would have sung in her lounge singing days—and it slammed to a screeching halt, leaving the dining room silent with my mother’s words ringing in the diners’ ears.

I fully expected my fiance to put down the chopped liver. He didn’t.

And while he and my father mused over whether my refusal to be born easily was an early sign of stubbornness or tenacity, our food finally arrived. And it was good. I felt like the long bike ride I had taken in our workout room earlier in the evening entitled me to really slather on the tartar sauce. So I did. And throughout the meal, I began to notice that everyone’s leftovers seemed to appear, all wrapped up in little doggie bags, in front of my fiance. When the waitress came by to drop off the obligatory free-of-charge mediocre chocolate desert with a pink candle shoved in its scoop of vanilla ice cream, she looked at my fiancé, laughed, and asked if she had fed him sufficiently.

That was when the mariachis appeared.

The sound of their blaring trumpets reverberated through Myron and Phil’s small dining room. I stared at my still lit birthday candle wide-eyed, fearing I had failed to eliminate the incriminating evidence in time. My head sank down into my neck as I watched the mariachis, in their gigantic sombreros and black pants with silver embroidery down the sides, cart their instruments toward our table. With each step they took in our direction, my heart beat louder and faster.

Imagine my relief when they passed right by our table and kept walking into the restaurant’s private party room.

Apparently, the mariachis had been hired to honor one of Myron and Phil’s kitchen staff who had just retired. We all smiled and clapped when the manager announced this, staring at each other from across the table with looks that clearly intimated: this can’t last all night, can it? For a 45 minute stretch, whenever anyone would utter a word, the mariachi music that had previously died down would suddenly start up again, the trumpets wailing so aggressively that they drowned out any other noise.

“So, how is work . . . WWWWAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH”

“It’s alright, the other day . . . WWWWAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH”

“So these two guys go to this costume party where you have to dress up as an emotion . . . WWWAAAAHHHHH”

But in the end, if you’re heading home with a stretched out belly and an entire carload of leftover beef ribs and chopped chicken livers, who cares what you were trying to say anyway?