Audio By Carbonatix
Where I grew up, you had your fancy, expensive French restaurant that everyone’s parents went to for anniversaries, one good red-sauce Italian spot that neighbors whispered had some kind of “family” connections, a decent seafood place reserved for special-occasion lobster and coquilles St. Jacques, a pizza parlor, a couple of fast-food joints and a bar that served greasy fish sandwiches. That pretty much summed up the culinary offerings in our little slice of suburbia.
Except for Young’s.
Young’s was the best. It was our Friday night salvation, the place we’d go when Dad came home with bleary work eyes and Mom was out of food from the previous Saturday’s shopping. Young’s had oversized, blood-colored vinyl booths you’d sink into next to Formica-topped tables lit up by cheap plastic wall sconces and set with white scallop-edged paper placemats and cocktail napkins with bad jokes printed on them that we kids found hilarious. The real entertainment, though, was through the swinging door into the lounge, and my sister and I would crane our necks to catch glimpses of businessmen sucking down martinis and flirting with the waitresses, who wore red nail polish and too-tight black-and-white ensembles with vests. Although the waitresses called everyone “honey,” they were especially nice to children–which Young’s always had in abundance, because the place was casual enough to accommodate kids while still inspiring them to try out a few manners, and the food was inexpensive enough to lure penny-pinching families. I always had the hot roast beef sandwich–real, fatty roast beef, with glue-consistency gravy covering the mashed potatoes and white bread–and my father was usually so busy bitching to my mother about his day at the office that they never noticed that the cocktail waitress brought us about fifteen Cokes apiece during the meal.
I loved Young’s so much that when, at the age of eight, my next-door neighbor and I both broke into our piggy banks and ran away from home, we went straight to the restaurant and sat importantly in the booths waiting for our Cokes. The waitress brought them but said they were on her. So after our moms arrived about fifteen minutes later, we left all of our change as a tip.
The next time I need to run away, I’ll head straight to Gussie’s. Firmly entrenched in Westminster since 1978, this is a time-warp of an eatery–and one of the few restaurants where you’ll still see a cocktail waitress working the dining room. I kept her busy bringing Coke after Coke while I reveled in Gussie’s decor, an updated version of Young’s: These waitresses sport plaid bow ties along with their standard black-and-white outfits; the lighting is augmented by a chandelier; and the menu offers “light side” and “low cholesterol” dishes, both of which were unheard of in the early Seventies–and still are not the kind of food you want to eat in such a throwback to the days when people really drank at dinner.
For the most part, though, the entrees at Gussie’s are a smorgasbord of beef, veal, lamb and seafood dishes, many relying on the just-below-grade-A ingredients often found at restaurants trying to offer huge value, and most are cooked in time-honored methods: Oscar, scampi, marsala, stuffed. In addition to these traditional preparations, Gussie’s gussies up some selections with sauces–blue-cheese filet, chicken stuffed with prosciutto and Swiss in a cream sauce, and a few fruit concoctions that seem to be someone’s odd notion of how to bring Gussie’s into the Nineties. But in a place like this, such attempts ring false. The Brie Wellington appetizer ($4.95), for example, consisted of a small wheel of cheese encased in puff pastry, which had been baked until golden and then ambushed by a sauce purportedly made from strawberries and amaretto. Since amaretto is one of those liqueurs that overtakes anything it touches, I’m guessing it never even came close to this sauce, which tasted like ice cream topping.
But any appetizer was soon rendered obsolete by Gussie’s innovative, comes-with-your-entree soup-and-salad bar (a recent Best of Denver winner). This wasn’t one of those tired limp-lettuce-and-canned-peaches deals, but a real spread featuring unusual salads prepared by the kitchen and a few items rarely seen on restaurant menus, let alone in their salad bars. For instance, Gussie’s included red and black caviar–not Beluga, of course, but fish roe that was plenty delicious with the sour cream we wheedled out of the waitress along with some Melba toast (it’s almost as if they don’t want you to eat the stuff, because the salad bar displayed nothing that would serve as a suitable support system for the caviar). The lineup also boasted superior pickled herring, marinated mushrooms, a bow-tie pasta salad with fresh herbs and sun-dried tomatoes, a creamy mixture of summer squashes and a fiery jumble of jalapenos, olives and cherry peppers. And then there was the plethora of salad components–including fresh spinach, pickled beets and homemade croutons–along with just-baked poppyseed muffins, a plate of cheeses (which should have been kept chilled, since some of the cheeses were starting to sweat by the time we left) and not one, but three soups. Although both the cream of chicken with lemon and a sumptuous tomato with fresh, pureed tomatoes were worthy of attention, the best soup was the spicy Italian sausage, a beefy broth loaded with red and green bell peppers, onions and a sausage with real bite.
Given our overloaded soup-and-salad plates and the bottomless basket of Gussie’s soft, house-baked bread, the sides that came with our entrees seemed like overload–but once we saw the skimpiness of the meat portions of the meals, they made some sense. What looked like an entire potato had been transformed into the skin-on, deep-fried steak fries we’d picked to accompany the pork loin with raspberries ($15.95). Had we tried the Brie appetizer topping before we’d ordered, we would have avoided this dish, which featured another disappointing fruit sauce. Although it was billed as red currant, it tasted of nothing but raspberries; the three bland pork medallions didn’t even hint of the cherry brandy with which the meat had supposedly been seared. And a pile of raw red and green cabbage bits that were starting to turn brown around the edges didn’t help matters any. This unappetizing garnish also cozied up to the steak Oscar ($17.75), described on the menu as “tenderloin medallions” but appearing on the plate as one half-inch-thick piece of utterly tasteless meat, unidentifiable as to cut, swabbed with an overly buttery and somewhat floury bearnaise sauce, and topped by two white asparagus spears that flanked a nice helping of sweet, fresh lump crabmeat. After experiencing Gussie’s problems with sauces, a side of flawless fettuccine came as a welcome surprise. The mix of smooth, cheesy sauce and al dente pasta was so heavy and rich that I could have eaten a whole plateful as my entree. Too bad for the “light side” crowd–they got steamed broccoli with their dinners.
And they probably skipped dessert altogether, which means they missed out on the five-inch-high wedge of caramel deep-dish apple pie ($3.50) that was packed with fruit and flavor. More decadent was a slice of “Reese’s” peanut-butter pie ($3.75) that tasted just like the candy bar. Sweeter still was the white chocolate mousse with Irish Cream ($2.95): an odd blob of what tasted like sweetened whipped cream topped with more whipped cream.
But you don’t go to Gussie’s expecting four-star cuisine (although the soup-and-salad-bar alone comes close). You go to experience dining as it used to be–when service not only came with a smile, but brought along such thoughtful touches as little plastic half-and-half cups in frosty-chilled sherbet glasses and chocolate-covered candy sticks as after-dinner mints, and when a meal filled your stomach without emptying your wallet.
It’s enough to make you feel Young’s at heart all over again.
