on my dad, Leonard Solomon, generosity, August Moon Restaurant, wine as your hobby, maybe a point of life

 My dad is the reason I care about this stuff, a lot of the time it doesn’t feel like a choice. When asked about what influences my style of service my dad is the first inspiration. His soft spoken generosity was a touchstone before the adage of anticipating the customer’s needs before they knew they had them. My dad’s values made Donnie Madia’s service lectures at Blackbird feel like second nature. And it’s not just me, my sister Jenny also uses food as an entry to her ideas. She is studying to be a dietitian. She’s also an excellent server, we spent three years working together. Sometimes I think it is the main thing our family values though I’m not sure why. Working in this industry, one that my Dad has  never worked in himself, I sometimes feel I’m working in his shadow. For someone who doesn’t often leave the house he casts a pretty big one. I think one of my friends who has never met my dad was asked, “How’s Doug?” when going to pick up food at In On Thai last year. Just because the two of us had eaten there together before.

Part of me is afraid this will be boring but I also know that there is a part of this story in everything I ever do. So I guess before I wrote anything ever again I wanted to talk to my dad about food and wine, how it became the thing of our family. It has never been clear to me because it’s not about sustaining a connection to his familial roots in what is now Lithuania or Russia but something more obscure to me. One thing I did know is that his mom, my Nana was not a good cook and my Papa did not really care either. To attempt to find the source I decided to make him dinner, one that was inspired by his cooking but done in a style more my own and serve him a bottle of wine I hoped that he would like. He’s not necessarily sold on natural wine. 

We sat down to a plate of roasted pork shoulder, beans, and red cabbage, a bottle of Riesling from Jean Ginglinger to accompany. He also doesn’t really talk a lot, like in a small circle he is famously short on words. I recorded the conversation and have listened to it a few times. It’s still a little hard to put a finger on but I will try.

in our backyard before some time between 1990 and 1998

My dad attributes his interest in food as beginning with taking a class called “Boy’s Cooking” in the 7th or 8th grade. Girls took shop and boys did this. Not long after he and his friend Richard would cook dinner for Richard’s family following a recipe in Gourmet Magazine. He cites the difficulty in finding quality ingredients at the time, "the produce section had cans of vegetables in it" however a specialty food shop had recently opened, Convito Italiano. He says they were able to find some exciting things there. This dinner is last major memory for him until after college, when my dad seeks a job with an accounting firm that promises to take him to Paris. He commutes from the city to an office in the suburbs for a while until given the opportunity to go to Paris. My mom and dad who are dating at the time celebrate his opportunity with a dinner at Le Francais.

As he was in Paris for work all of his meals out were taken care of by a cushy expense account, he and his colleagues would regularly go to restaurants with Michelin stars and not have to foot the bill. Things also seemed cheaper then, in my dad’s memory all of the wine was about $30, according to a quick google about $70 today. Coming home I think there was an idea that when you get together with food and wine something exciting happens and it becomes part of the adult life he is building with my mom. Upon his return they “moved to 2300 N Commonwealth which is at Commonwealth and Belden right behind something that at the time was called the Belden Deli Shopping Center. And there was a place in the Belden Deli Shopping Center called Armanetti’s Liquors, there was a guy there whose name was Leonard Solomon.” (this is a quote from my dad). Leonard is a really important person in my family, my dad said that he had a “major impact on a number of ways I learned to do things in life”. He goes on to say, “Leonard was incredibly generous, which I think is one of the more admirable qualities a human being could have and he was very passionate about food and wine.” I think he was partially/mostly/very responsible for the way my family considered socializing. He himself got into wine by working at his family’s drugstore, Solomon’s Drugs, which also sold alcohol. My dad thinks they sold fancy wine, maybe Romanée-Conti. Anyway, before Leonard was at Armanetti he owned a wine and gourmet food shop called Leonard Solomon’s Warehouse. It fell through due to a bad deal, so there he was at Armanetti near my parent’s house talking to them.

Leonard would recommend wines to my dad to buy and eventually they became friends, hanging out once a week. He referred my parents to become members of Les Nomades, a restaurant that at the time required the referral and yearly fee of $1 in order to secure a reservation. Leonard would also invite my dad to dinners hosted by a food and wine society he belonged to, kind of like the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin. You donned a suit and drank fine wines. One event they attended together was organized around sherry, which is acknowledged as being the most Frasier thing ever. But also an educating and eye opening experience. Leonard’s work in the industry also put him in proximity to winemakers and would introduce my dad when they came to town.

He also introduced my dad to some of his other friends interested in wine, principally Joel and Vivianne Pokorny, doctors at the University of Chicago studying color vision. The three households would meet maybe once a week to hang out and drink wine, mostly at August Moon restaurant. “The best restaurant ever” (also a quote from my dad). August Moon was run by Esther and Gary Wong and served Chinese and Indonesian food. They had two daughters, Shirley and Sandy who were about the same age as Joel and Vivianne’s kids and were also prominently featured in a portrait above the host stand. I looked at it a lot, they were older than me and beautiful, dressed up in beaded gowns for a pageant. Anyway, the adults would always bring wine around a theme. The theme was always “unfortunately” Bordeaux from a specific vintage, winery, or commune because Joel had a passion for wines from the region. I think Esther was empathetic to having kids in the restaurant having raised these girls so she would let us run everywhere while this was going on, even behind the host stand. She would walk us into the kitchen so we could see Gary cook.

Leonard worked also with his wife Sofia at their business, Tekla Inc, Leonard doing wine and Sofia organizing for the cheese and other fine foods since the 70s. They supplied Convito Italiano with cheese, the same shop my dad went to in the mid-70s. Their warehouse is a place in my memory similar to August Moon. I forgot to ask my dad but I would also traverse this space growing up while he was picking up some cheese for a dinner party or Rustichella d’Abruzzo pasta. A lot of my vision of that space is from after Leonard died in 2002. There's also a good article about Leonard and Sofia by Steve Dolinksy in the Reader, here.

Listening to him talk about Leonard helps me understand more why my dad used to walk around Cellar Door with a bottle of beer he was excited about, an opportunity to do something others have done for him. And the beer is exciting, but it’s also that excitement itself is contagious. Which is definitely why I do this. It’s hard to get something explicitly emotional from him, so maybe I’m stretching but it feels like an explanation enough to me. For now.

Some parting words from my dad, words I have trusted for a long time though they’ve been expressed differently almost each time I’ve heard them. The most recent iteration: “Whatever experience you’re having when you’re tasting wine is different from anyone else’s so nobody can talk to you about that it’s just not that complicated you just drink it.” And like I mentioned he doesn’t really like or understand natural wine but here is a list of wines I would serve him:

Jean-Pierre Robinot Les Années Folles $40

L'Octavin Pamina $75

Maison Valette Mâcon Chaintré $60

Jean Ginglinger BIHL-Steiner (again) $45

Jordi Llorens Blan 5.7 $24

Vini Viti Vinci Bourgogne Epineuil ' Vals Noirs' $33

drinking Cantina Giardino w/ my dad, cheers!

We are having another party with Motorshucker in 10 days, on November 20th, from 4-9 PM. We won’t be delivering that day but instead will be serving wine to accompany a paella devised by Mico and some oysters as well. Buen Viaje are returning to DJ and Mac is doing a set as well. Should be fun tickets are here. Also we have even more new wines in from the French south, by Axel Prüfer (Le Temps des Cerises) and Anne Marie and Pierre Lavaysse (Le Petit Domaine de Gimios). We look forward to these every year and feel lucky to have them. A couple hitters from Lazio as well and a new to us vintage of Coule de Source from Jérôme Lambert.