Well, hurry that part over to K's Family Restaurant some evening and let yourself be young again. Here's the restaurant that everyone from Denny's to Debevic's is trying to re-create. But stripped of the large advertising budget, the carefully created ambiance, the cute kitsch and the relentless salesmanship of these other places, K's presents the homestyle concept's edible kernel of truth.
K's is nothing more than huge portions of decent mom-food served at incredibly reasonable prices. You don't get tony thematic atmosphere or fancy nouvelle-nursery food. What you get is a place where mom doesn't have to do the cooking and where it's fun, not a federal case, when little sister inevitably knocks over her Coke glass.
Upon arrival at K's, it will be readily apparent that this is no visit to Vincent's. Nestled amidst fast-food chains and discount shoe emporiums, the decade-old K's looks like it has been there for at least several hundred years. If Jaguar-packed parking lots leave you jaded and, conversely, a passel of rusted-out pickups gets your culinary motor revving, you just won't find a more appetizing embarkation point than this.
The salvage motif is continued inside the restaurant, which is done in an assortment of industrial-age brown plastic materials. Observant types will notice the de rigueur soda fountain counter, the short-order kitchen window, the dessert display case that is a living monument to polyurethane wrapping and the almost maniacally consistent tilt of every picture in the restaurant. Even fairly oblivious folk are likely to notice that they are freezing to death, and it is devoutly to be wished that the same people who wired the air conditioning in this place are available to do the job if Phoenix ever gets a domed stadium.
After you are seated, a waitress immediately appears with a pot of hot coffee. K's is the sort of restaurant where denial of this drink is looked upon as a vaguely un-American act. So let her pour you a cup which, even if you don't drink coffee, can be held to keep your hands warm while you look over the menu.
The menu itself is a guaranteed smile. Even though it's rather lengthy, you can probably recite most of it before you even look at it. Tuna melts, cheeseburgers, chicken-fried steak, meat loaf, fried shrimp, tacos and breakfasts (served 24 hours a day) are just a small sampling from this everybody's favorites bill of fare. There's an appealing list of "kiddie specials" and every evening features some sort of all-you-can-eat promotion like spaghetti (Monday/Thursday--$3.69) or fried chicken (Sunday--$4.59).
On a recent evening my party selects liver and onions, sirloin steak, veal parmesan, a tostada, a taco and a "kiddie" portion of spaghetti and meat sauce. The first three items come with soft dinner rolls and a choice of soup or salad bar. This evening the soup is a good homemade thick navy bean, pleasantly smoky and studded with bits of ham, celery and carrots.
As for the salad bar, it doesn't really quite feel comfortable in this place, although I suppose it's a necessary concession to modern times. In any event, it's the sort of salad bar that's light on fresh vegetables and loaded down with starchy salads like potato and macaroni. A shredded carrot salad with a creamy cinnamon dressing gets a nod of approval from my wife, who eats it off my plate before I can get a taste but swears her evaluation can be trusted. A special moment in this meal comes right before the arrival of our main courses when our waitress delivers an assortment of condiments to the table. Included are Hunt's ketchup, Heinz 57 Sauce, A.1. Steak Sauce and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire. This is exactly what you don't get from big corporations in which the accountants are running the show and extensive name-brand generosity strikes the financial vice president as ill-advised.
As it turns out, the sirloin steak and the liver are quite palatable even without the Worcestershire. The liver, in particular, is pounded nice and thin, cooked to a still-tender degree of well-doneness and dressed with a generous portion of sliced sauteed onions. I like it because it still has a little of that earthy liver flavor without being at all rank.
Both steak and liver come with generous sides of carrots and mashed potatoes, although the latter is one of the evening's disappointments. These are instant mashed, reconstituted with too much water and served with a tasteless grayish-brown gravy. Rather wonderfully, however, the restaurant gives the option of refusing potatoes whenever they are included in a meal in exchange for a fifty-cent menu price reduction.
A large side of spaghetti comes with the veal cutlet parmesan, a dish that is sort of a religious experience for me. During my own childhood, I would eat veal cutlets with tomato sauce whenever and wherever I could get them . . . at the Automat, in Chinese restaurants, even on one memorable occasion during a bus trip to Washington, D.C., that I won as a prize for an essay entitled "What the FBI Means to the United States." (Asked afterward to appear on an educational radio program to describe my trip to FBI headquarters, I spend my entire allotted five minutes talking about the watery quality of the tomato sauce served on the veal and, as it now turns out, foreshadowing my own professional destiny.)
Now please understand. We're talking chopped and formed veal, almost certainly a frozen product and not one of particularly high quality. But we are talking fork tender, thickly breaded, generously sauced and food enough to cover a plate and a half.
I'm sure that seven-year-old Kelly, sitting across from me at dinner, understands. Her "kiddie" portion of spaghetti and meat sauce could easily fill up a hungry weight lifter, and yet she relentlessly inhales it between bottom-of-the-straw slurps of Coca-Cola. Her nine-year-old sister, Casey, is in a similarly deep consumption-trance as she downs a large tostada, which she refuses to share with anyone, including the restaurant critic who is paying for the meal and who is forced to order a taco--a fine homestyle ground beef version with a nice chili kick--instead.
Since we've all done such a great job of cleaning our plates, we are of course entitled to dessert. The three adults at the table share a slice of cheesecake and a piece of lemon meringue pie, and we are disappointed with both. The cheesecake is sort of a bad knockoff of Sara Lee and the lemon custard in the pie seems mostly like food coloring and cornstarch.
Kelly and Casey fare much better. Kelly's slice of cherry pie is about twice as wide as her head and contains lots of tart cherries in a nice flaky crust. Casey's ice cream sundae similarly towers up from the table and looks first-rate, although I wouldn't know about its taste firsthand because I can't get anywhere near it. Once the dessert sugar starts to kick in, the conversational spirit soars into the stratosphere. We share bad knock-knock jokes, imitate tigers (with the help of two young boys at another table) and discuss the declining political fortunes of the Smurfs.
"Cartoon characters just can't run an island," laments Casey, although the observation causes us all to smile.
I smile again when I get the check. Despite our seemingly massive ingestion, the total bill comes to $28.61. What's even better, Kelly gets through her Coke with only one serious wobble, the glass remaining upright.
In short, no one gets soaked at K's. On this occasion, not even the seven- year-old.
(Note: There's more good news for fans of family dining. Ken Higginbotham, the owner of K's, has purchased the classic 5 & Diner restaurant on 16th Street and Colter, just north of Camelback. Now you can have liver and onions and atmosphere.)
It's funny that so many businesses, especially restaurants, are trying to cash in on nostalgia. After all, the essence of nostalgic appeal is the evocation of personal memories. How can such a thing be mass-merchandised?
The answer resides in the re-creation of obvious common denominators of experience. A restaurant like K's acknowledges that we all eat mashed potatoes when we are young. In a nostalgic sense, however, the true appeal of these potatoes is a function of how much they look, smell, feel and taste like the mashed potatoes of one's very own remembrances.
Ultimately, the purest and most powerful instances of nostalgia cannot be translated into universal terms. Nostalgic feelings are enmeshed in subjectivity. We are dealing with quality factors that are emotive, not objective.
Please forgive the preceding didacticism, but I don't know quite how else to explain why and how much I like Guido's Chicago Meat & Deli. Clearly, the appeal is not the name. And if I'm going to be honest (a healthy trait in a professional critic), it's not because the food at this little Italian deli is so overwhelmingly wonderful.
Not to create the wrong impression, the food is (objectively) quite good. From the submarine sandwiches to the heat-and-serve pasta dinners to the daily luncheon specials to the particularly impressive array of fresh deli salads, there's nothing here that strikes a false note. The appropriate pepper, garlic, herb, tomato, cheese and olive themes run throughout the dishes, and a caring hand in the kitchen obviously knows important stuff like how much breadcrumbs to put in a meatball (too little equals too tough).
Guido's also scores strongly in the specialty store department. There are lots of neat treats crammed into refrigerated display cases and onto densely packed shelves. Just as impressive as the fresh pastas, the assortment of olive oils, the homemade breadcrumbs, the Italian pastries, the impressive high-quality variety of deli meats and cheeses, et al., is the fact that this small square-footage store is immaculately clean and orderly.
But the really great thing about Guido's is that it smells exactly like my Aunt Florence Paladino's kitchen as I remember it as a boy. Suffice it to say that Aunt Florie is the first person who ever made for me a veal cutlet with tomato sauce. And anyone who can duplicate that smell can count on a few fond words here.
