RIP: Empty tables, great memories

 We celebrated our 65th April 24 together with lunch at a neighborhood Italian restaurant. We have had flashier anniversaries of the night we met, but flash fades over time. We were talking about great restaurants we will never visit again.
 Not because of us.
 Because of time.
 Deacon Jim misses department stores. I miss restaurants.


 Charlie's Cafe Internationale in Minneapolis. Ate there once and swore I'd get back to Minneapolis just to do it again. It was replaced by a glass high rise in 1982. Seiple's in St. Petersburg, FL. Amazing cold raspberry soup, but once had to be enough. Chateaubriand, a neighborhood restaurant (our neighborhood!) with international pretensions. When you come out raving about the vegetables, you know they did everything right. But don't anymore. The Barbary Room in New York, gold utensils while you drank your cocktail. There for us on our honeymoon. No more.
 Speaking of New York, I told Faith Stewart-Gordon herself that I woudn't be moving to Miami, when I did, without knowing Air Florida could get me back to the Russian Tea Room, just to the left of Carnegie Hall, regularly. She said the Tea Room would be there. Soon Air Florida was gone. Then the RTR, although when I was checking my memory, I see that it has re-opened under new ownership. Anyhow, cold borscht in the summertime, Gorkis anytime, and that's where I learned what chicken Kiev is supposed to taste like.
 I can't tell if the Steamboat Cafe in Mystic, Connecticut, is back or not. It was there in the '70s when I had the lobster bisque for dinner and liked it so well we returned for breakfast, lunch and dinner the next day so I could have it three more times. We strongly recommended it to our daughter and her husband a few years later, and when they looked they couldn't find it. 
 Mike Gordon's in Miami, on the Intercoastal with pelicans perched outside waiting for the garbage. Only place to be, especially on a rainy day. The kids didn't want the hassle. It was no hassle for the patrons.
  In Milwaukee, John Ernst Cafe has given way to a Japanese sushi place up the street. Ernst had three kinds of schaum torte -- raspberry, chocolate and the standard strawberry -- and one afternoon my wife's brother-in-law and I had all three, in a row, for dessert. Schaum torte is something I do not believe is available once you get more than 40 miles away from Milwaukee in any direction.
 And, then there was Karl Ratzch's, with Empress Maria Theresa's glassware, and the string trio that missed the same note on "Happy Birthday" every Sunday, and the dumpling soup, and the roast duck and the sauerbraten und der schnitzel and the Mosel wines. And the schaum torte. It's where Dean J. L. O'Sullivan took the Marquette Tribune staff after we fell afoul of important university officials for reporting news. It's where we celebrated my graduation. It's the first place I paid a restaurant bill of $100. That was for a party of eight. Back in the '60s. It's also where, later, I interviewed the Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan, although I do not claim to understand a word of it. He was very patient. And it WAS one of two restaurants we always went to when we were back in Milwaukee.
 I won't tell you the name of the other one. Don't want to jinx it.
 As we were leaving the restaurant yesterday, we noticed a sign on the door that we missed when we came in. It's closing for good on April 30. I'll remember it as the place where the waiter, Fluvio, would address us as "Signor et Bella," speak only to "Bella"  and forget me until it was time for the check.