CLEVELAND, Ohio -- It's a time of year when we seek pleasure in today, look hopefully to the future, and think back on the past.
And during a season of memories, no wonder we reflect fondly on what certainly seem more innocent times.
No wonder then that the holiday celebrations back a generation or two feel so comfortable. Maybe a whole lot more comfortable than the comparative mania that swirls all around us today.
The food was "fancy" in a whole different way. Drinks were strong, and real. The only "plastic" found near the party table in most homes as was a vinyl LP on the hi-fi.
OK, there's no going back. But that doesn't mean we can't glance over our collective shoulder and remember how it once was done -- and maybe do it again, at least one more time.
Three Clevelanders who have a beam on the yuletides of yore got together to put together their take on a retro holiday bash. Granted, they couldn't help but put their own spin on things: a little mix-and-match in terms of decor... a couple of contemporary tweaks on the drinks... and an update, here and there, on the food.
Restaurateur Zack Bruell[1] , owner of six successful Cleveland restaurants and Chris Pusateri, bartender and general manager for one of the Bruell restaurants -- Parallax[2] , in Tremont -- spent the better part of a recent day at Eclectic Style Home Decor and Retail Shop in Middleburg Heights to stage a retro holiday party, and show what they'd serve.
Eclectic Style owner Kenneth Tekancic helped organize tableware, furnishings and art to create the backdrop for holiday gatherings that evoke mid-century America's lifestyle. Tekancic's shop, at 13397 Smith Road, in Southland Shopping Center South, specializes on home goods from the 1930s through 1970s.
"These days, everything is throwaway," Tekancic says. "Back in the Fifties and Sixties, when people entertained so much of that stuff wasn't around. True 'retro' uses vintage housewares and antiques -- china and crystal or just nice glasses, silver or silverplate flatware, fabric tablecloths.
"And it doesn't have to match, either," he adds. "You can mix-and-match anything; that's why we're called 'Eclectic Style.' Find four of these, three of those... Everything, and everyone, is individual. That's really a lot of what makes the party."
Consider the funky vibe that Mid-Century evokes and you also notice affordability is part of the deal. Once common furnishings and housewares like turquoise-and-brown chip-and-dip set, a funky Tiki bar, or a gaudy set of red-and-green emblazoned Christmas glassware feel like one of a kind bargains.
Durable ones, too. Recruit a few of your guests to lend a hand washing the dishes, and those collectibles -- ones your grandparents, or maybe a former Don Draper, used -- will be useful long after the Chinet and Solo cups face eternity in some landfill.
With "boomerang" tables and satellite wall hangings, Danish Modern and Industrial Tech styles all setting the backdrop, Zack Bruell brought his own era-appropriate ideas to the table.
FIRE UP THE CHAFING DISHES...
"Food, to me, is all about memories and memory associations," he says. At a certain point in your life it’s not just the taste of food; certain dishes evoke times gone by: people you were with, places you were at, the music you listened to. A different time from now.
"That, to me, is what the holidays can be all about," Bruell adds. "Personal memories."
Part of the menu the prolific restaurateur conjured are staples of the era -- devilled eggs, cheese-stuffed celery, bacon-wrapped dates, dips and dunks. Finger foods, once the province of the elite whose servants passed hors d'oeuvres on silver trays had, by mid-century, become trendy among the masses.
Other fare, while true vestiges of a couple of generations past, evoke fond recollections for the chef.
"When I see Lobster Newburg, I hear my grandmother's voice," Bruell says. Sophie Loeb, his mother's mother, lived with Bruell's family until she died in 1976. It was she who imparted her love of cooking on her grandson, and for years she prepared her elegant entree for the annual holiday family gathering.
"The Bruell boys, my cousins, would hang around the buffet table, and when this came out in a chafing dish -- while everyone else would be in the other room, getting their cocktails and getting snockered, the boys were smart enough to know that lobster was a real luxury," the chef recalls.
"They’d literally stand next to the table, filling up, until someone rousted them out and got ‘em out of there. I’d hang with them, but I knew to get the hell out of there before my father caught me."
Alongside the chafing dish of Newburg sat another enticing hot dish, Welsh Rarebit. Though considerably more modest in provenance -- really, little more than a glorified cheese sauce, a Gruyere- and Fontina-fortified bechamel, to be spooned over crisp toast -- a fine rarebit such as the one Bruell conjured for his retro menu is far more than the sum of its parts.
"Everyone has their own memories of those years -- their own childhoods," Bruell says, "and some of these dishes bring back the memories of those get-togethers. It’s not this food was 'earth-shattering.' Just the feel of that era.
AND JUST A GOOD, STIFF DRINK...
"The flip side is, you can take these dishes and update them, be modernized -- and it doesn’t take much to do that," Bruell adds. "They’re standards. Look at today's cocktail movement: they’ve brought back the classics, many of them from the 1920s. Just take them and add a twist to them."
That's what Chris Pusateri does.
"I look at [what he does] as 'classic cocktail'ing,' " he says. "All these drinks now are derivatives of the classics -- and all the ones that are popular now are based on the traditional."
Many of the mixed drinks Pusateri riffs on are nearly a century old, such as martinis, old-fashioneds and Manhattans. Not that he or many other bartenders hew to leather-bound tradition. Sure, there's the authentic originals -- but a thousand variations abound. One wonders whether they mightn't have been developed decades ago, if only the ingredients had existed or been readily available.
"Anyway," Pusateri adds, "I’d rather be a 'bartender' than a 'mixologist.' It’s kind of fun to take the classics and monkey around with them -- infusing syrups, flavoring vodkas, putting your personal touch on things. At the end of the night, when you’re throwing things together and people are laughing and enjoying themselves, that’s the fun of it."
Bruell says he's enjoying the whole "mid-century boom," as he calls it, for a simple reason.
"The Baby Boomers are now grandparents. And if you think about it, at all these holiday get-togethers we're thinking back on, the grandparents were always there too. They probably weren’t in as good shape as we are -- of course, when you’re a kid everyone old seems REALLY old -- but they were probably looking back on their earlier days, too," Bruell says.
Though he thinks that the cuisine of the 1940s, '50's and '60's may be enjoying a "last hurrah" with this current renaissance, Bruell hopes that a generation younger than his own won't discard a far greater legacy: home cooking.
"I'm concerned that people won't take the time to cook traditional stuff of any kind -- just eat out of bags," he says. "I really don’t think this food, what we're calling 'retro' today, will live on beyond our generation. In a way, these were the luxury foods of their time.
"Besides... what we eat today is going to be 'retro' for our grand kids," he adds.
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