THURSDAY THE LONG WAY: TOWNHOUSE DINER

Thursday highlights food from out of the way places, food memories that have formed the way I view food, both cooking and eating it. They may be inspired by recent meals, the food-media, or anything at all.

The Merrick Townhouse Diner-- scene of my most frequent restaurant meals throug the first eight years of my life. It's on the corner of Sunrise Highway and Frankel Blvd. (my street) in Merrick on Long Island about 45 minutes drive from Greenpoint, Brooklyn where I live now. It's where I learned about restaurant spaghetti and meatballs, greek salads, challah bread, rice pudding, whipped cream, Napoleons and eclairs.

Not only that, it's where I learned appropriate dinner table behavior via the two occasions my father carried me out over his shoulder after having promised me that if I didn't behave we were going to have a talk outside (not that this happened often but god bless my pop, kid's these days, I swear, parents let them get away with way too much). I didn't like these "talks," there wasn't much talking involved in them-- it was more like an eruption that scared you the hell back to the dinner table, quiet, hungry and business-like.

I didn't know it until this past weekend when I went out to visit my folks, but the diner, left behind a chain-link fence, is closed. My parents heard that the owner lost the place when he went into bankruptcy because of gambling debts. I couldn't even tell you if the food was any good before it closed because I hadn't been there to eat in ages. The current incarnation whose neon lights and reflecting mirrors resembles a D-movie UFO or a solar-powered satellite, was a renovation of the original I remember from childhood with mahogany-formica table-tops, 70's yellow-tinted water glasses, red fake-leather chairs with brass buttons and jukeboxes at every booth. The new floral patterns on the chairs and the big windows looking out on Sunrise highway made me feel like I was in a nursing home, not in the small-window world of the old diner, a protected, cozy place that only seemed to care about jello, belgian waffles and mints with liquorice inside them in a bowl where you paid the bill at the register, a bowl with a spoon which any kid could use to try and guess which white mint hid find his favorite flavored liquorice.

Probably my most fond memory of the Diner was dessert. After joining the "clean plate club" (who'm I kidding, I was a hungry kid-- my parents didn't need to use a club to get ME to finish dinner) I'd stroll over to the dessert display case to pick out my real meal. Three shelves of pastry and pudding, jello, cakes and pies behind a curved glass window at least eight feet long (it seemed endless). Farewell, Diner, old friend, my only regret is not ever having taken my folks there and picking up the tab.