Ballad of a Lost Cafe

The photograph above shows the Mea Kwan Thai restaurant in Chula Vista, CA, my home town.

It is not your imagination that this Thai restaurant has a slightly Bavarian look to it. In my youth this restaurant was called The House of Munich and featured German cuisine. The new owners changed the menu, but not the facade.

I shall refrain from making any obvious jokes about going in and ordering spring rolls with Wienerschnitzel.

Actually, the only reason I wanted to show you this facade is because I couldn't find a photo of the restaurant that this posting is actually going to be about, which, last I heard, had been closed and boarded up. It is, or was, a couple of blocks south of the Mea Kwan, on the other side of the street.

It's where I got the name for this blog, Red Wine with Fish. No; that wasn't the name of the place. It's what I usually had when I ate there.

It wasn't a particularly special place. The food wasn't even that good. But I'll always have a special place in my heart for Ernie's 50's Diner, which, if the truth be told, wasn't even much of a 50's diner. No old-fashioned counter with round stools or anything like that. Just regular tables. The 50's ambience was restricted to a few posters on the wall, people like Elvis, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe. Not even an old-fashioned jukebox, just a regular one with the same junk you'd hear almost anywhere. In fact when the music system was left in continuous-play mode, it had an annoying habit of pealing out Christmas tunes at any old time of year.

But for about two years more or less, Ernie's was "my place." It was a short walk from both home and work, the waitresses knew and liked me and it had an outside patio in back, nice for enjoying the California sunshine, January or July. Okay, the patio faced the alley and had a dumpster behind it, and the owner of the place, Carlos, was a real jerk, (who I think is hiding from the IRS at this moment) but Ernie's had style, (somewhat crummy style, I'll admit.) It had character. And it had me.

The saga of Ernie's begins way back. Now, I'm "old Chula Vista;" I grew up there, as did my mother before me. In my childhood Ernie's was a German delicatessen called Sausage King. (Yeah, German-themed eateries never seemed to do too well on Third Avenue. Is it because we were eight miles from Tijuana? I don't know.)I do remember that my mother used to occasionally go there on a Saturday and buy cold cuts and such.

Plenty of people have tried to make businesses run on that corner, usually restaurants. I don't know what the problem is. It's right downtown, not a bad location at all.

"Ernie" owned the place before my time. I guess when Carlos bought it he decided keeping the old name would be a better idea than calling a '50s diner "Carlos'." Either that or he was just too damn cheap to change the sign. If you knew Carlos at all, you wouldn't rule that out. This guy wasn't above watering the ketchup.

My association with Ernie's began when I was a reporter on the local weekly newspaper, the Star-News. My editor for most of my tenure there was a Briton named Michael Burgess. Thursday morning was our busiest time of the week because that was when we were actually putting the paper together. It went to press on Thursday afternoon and came out on Friday morning. Michael would be in his office furiously working away with QuarkXpress getting everything laid out. I'd be at my desk as often as not tapping out a last-minute editorial for Michael to put his name on. (I was a much faster writer than Michael, and often called upon to pinch-hit.) Then I'd be standing behind Michael's chair like Mr. Spock on the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, kibitizing: Michael and I often put heads together to decide what should go where or how a headline should read.

Usually, some time between noon and 1 p.m. the button would be pushed and the paper would go off to the printer up in Orange County somewhere, to be returned on trucks in the morning. That's when we could all breathe a sigh of relief and start thinking about the next week's issue.

On one of these fine Thursday afternoons, Michael put on his sportjacket (he always dressed up for work in jackets and ties) and suggested that we "nip over to Ernie's" for some lunch. Michael was a heavy smoker in those days (he has since quit). In the finest European tradition, he rolled his own cigarettes. He once tried to show me how to do it; I couldn't get the hang of it. But Michael liked Ernie's for precisely that reason: it had that outside patio where he could smoke. His smoking didn't bother me, in fact I was a pipe smoker myself in those days. Michael and I often took smoke breaks on a bench behind the office, facing the parking lot. My late younger sister drove by and saw us more than once. "So that's what you do all afternoon," she told me. "I saw you and Michael loafing on that bench."

"That was an editorial board meeting," I replied.

Michael's and my Thursday lunches at Ernie's soon became something of a tradition, part of Thursday. We put the paper together; we went to Ernie's. Michael always drank coffee and usually ordered the country breakfast for his lunch: eggs, sausage, hash browns. "It goes down easy," was his comment. I was trying to keep my carbohydrates in check, so I tended to steer away from sandwiches. One Thursday I ordered the grilled white fish, which came with fries but I'd usually just pick at them, and a salad. The grilled white fish eventually became my "usual," as the country breakfast was Michael's.

Then one Thursday I decided to get crazy and order some wine with my meal. What the heck, we were finished with the paper for that week; the afternoon was going to consist of nothing more brain-jamming than reading e-mail. So I went ahead and ordered a half-carafe of Carlos' cheap burgundy. (Yes, he didn't get a lot of requests for wine, so he only served the box type.)

And there you have it. Red wine with fish. That, too, got to be a "Thursday thing." The two waitresses, Timoko and Pamela, got to be friends of Michael's and mine, as they were seeing so much of us. Neither of them liked Carlos, and Pam in particular liked to spit in his coffee so to speak, to the point where she would sneak me extra glasses of wine when he wasn't looking. One more reason to keep going back.

Michael and I would have long philosophic discussions over our sunny lunches in back of Ernie's Diner. For example one day I asked him to explain to me what "bubble-and-squeak" was. On another occasion we discussed the root causes of World War I. Then there was the time I insulted the pastor of the Congregational Church next door, who happened to be sitting at a nearby table and heard me.

"Now, don't insult Dr. Freeman!" Michael said to me the next time we walked in.

And then there was the time I had lunch at Ernie's with my friend Charlie Berigan, and while we were sitting there eating, my car was stolen. At three O'clock in the afternoon.

When my fiancee Valerie flew out to California in 2005, I took her to Ernie's. She married me anyway.

After I left the Star-News, Ernie's sort of became my "office." When I was doing freelance work I would often tell people to meet me there for interviews. I'd take my laptop over there, order coffee, plug in and go to work. My friend J.D. Hawk sometimes joined me there. He would order wine in much greater quantities than I, but when Pam asked him if he wanted anything to eat, he'd never order anything but "frings," a nauseating combination of french fries and onion rings. Ditto my cartoonist friend Jennifer. I took her to Ernie's one afternoon.

"Frings," she ordered.

"Where do you keeping finding these people?" Pam asked me.

I had lunch one afternoon at Ernie's with Mary Salas, who is currently a member of the California State Assembly but was then on the Chula Vista City Council. I was quite fond of Mary, but she had what as far as I was concerned was a blind spot: she liked Congressman Bob Filner, God only knows why. He has all the endearing young charms of a dock strike. And for his trademark toothy grin, well, all I can say is that it's a good thing he's a Democrat, because that stupid grin makes him look, as my father used to say, "like a jackass eating shit in a briar patch." But Mary liked him, and after listening to me make cracks like that one for about 10 minutes she got up and walked out of the diner, leaving me to finish my meal alone.

It took me weeks to patch things up with Mary.

Ah, memories of Ernie's.

I was genuinely saddened last year when I got an e-mail from home informing me that Ernie's had been closed and boarded up. It shouldn't have come as a surprise, I guess. Carlos managed that place as if he were every bit as determined to crash and burn as Major League Baseball's owners. If I had been there, I would have tried to round up the gang and have a memorial service out on the patio. Michael, J.D., Jennifer, Brett Davis (who sat there and told me his life story for an autobiography I was going to ghost-write which never got written), Pam, Timoko, and the cavalcade of people with whom I sat at Ernie's and took notes while they were talking.

We'd have speeches, reminiscences, a eulogy by Dr. Freeman from the Congregational church next door, (where, by the way, my parents were married in 1950) and of course, for me, my "usual," one last time.

In the course of my life I've dined in some of the finest restaurants of Paris, Vienna, Brussels, Geneva, Munich, Moscow, Dubrovnik, Amsterdam and Rio de Janeiro, not to mention Baltimore, Washington and San Francisco. (I leave out New York because most of the places where I've eaten there are pretty low-rent.) But nowhere, nowhow will red wine with fish ever taste the same. It just ain't Ernie's.