Heilman's Beachcomber and its younger brother, Bobby's Bistro, share the same parking lot and the same 80,000-bottle wine cellar. What they don't share is the same century. At Bobby's, the year is 2001. But inside the Beachcomber, I'm deep in the previous century. A generation that learned sophistication by watching Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin is sitting at the bar sipping gin martinis, comfortable in a room whose design seems untouched since Jackie Gleason bellowed "G'night everybody!" from a black-and-white TV. The women, their cheeks rouged to apple redness, their white hair teased and sprayed into cotton-candy memories of Dinah Shore, tip their heads coquettishly as they chat with the men, so pale beside them. Soon, they'll head for the dining room, and that archetypal American pleasure — a good, old-fashioned, fried chicken dinner. Watching them, I have a piercing sense of fragility, as if the scene around me were made of cobwebs that might shudder, and break apart if I breathe too hard. All this, the food, the atmosphere, the culture, has already passed from the world at large. Everything on the table, so comfortable and familiar to the other diners, is to me a page right out of history. In fact, the only experience I have with this kind of food is from browsing through the ancient pages of a stack of Gourmet magazines I found at a flea market. All of the food pictured there had an eerie greenish cast to it, whether from the poor color reproduction of the times, or the aging of the print, I could not tell, but in those lime-tinted pages I learned about the high cuisine of the '50s and '60s. It is only thanks to their tutoring that I understand what the waitress has set on our table.
It is a silver serving tray with four bowls. One contains homemade cottage cheese. One holds apple butter. Another holds a relish of corn kernels and red peppers. The last holds cranberry relish. A bowl of cellophane-wrapped crackers is served. My dinner companion looks it over. "Why would we want cottage cheese before dinner?" he asks. "Why would we want apple butter?" "Hush," I tell him. "It's something they used to do. I've seen it in a magazine."
The waitress asks if we would "like more time" with the relish tray, still untouched, before salads are served, then delivers plates of red and yellow beefsteak tomatoes, and a bread basket containing two white dinner rolls, banana bread and ginger bread. The last two, fine in texture, aromatic in scent and flavor, seem an oddity, accustomed as we are to lavosh and focaccia. And when my companion's delicately flavored snow crab au gratin arrives, garnished with toast points whose edges have been dipped in chopped parsley, I gasp and point to them.
Outside, in the real world, people are checking their Palm Pilots while they eat tuna tartar with wasabi vinaigrette. The food is stacked. The plates are painted. I have never seen parsley-dipped toast points in real life. And now, here they are, not as an affectation, nor as camp, as if I prepared them. Here they are because here they have always been. The waitress pauses, watching as I pick up a toast point and turn it over in my hands. It is a fly in amber. She shrugs her shoulders. "Tourists," she's thinking.
A moment later my chicken is served. Heilman's is famous for its chicken dinner, pan-fried in the true Southern manner. They have prepared and served it in exactly the same way since the mid-'40s; some say earlier than that. Great pan-fried chicken takes a lot of time and attention. You will wait 35 minutes for your dinner to be prepared. A half-chicken is cut into four sections, breast, thigh, leg and wing, dusted with flour and pan-fried in a mixture of butter and shortening. The kitchen uses black iron skillets, 20 inches in diameter. One order is fried in each pan. Crowd the chicken and it sweats. The crust gets soggy. Turn your back on the chicken, and it overcooks, losing juice and flavor. But do it as Heilman's does, perfectly, and the result is a crisp, golden, buttery crust that crackles as you bite into it, then breaks away, revealing tender, juicy, flavorful chicken. It is served with homemade mashed potatoes, homemade chicken gravy, homemade Parker House rolls, and today, okra, gently dusted and fried.
The diners around me are talking, but not about the chicken. They grew up on pan-fried chicken. To them, it is no novelty. But I grew up on abominations like Kentucky Fried Chicken and microwave chicken fingers, so for me, this meal is remarkable, both for the immediate, visceral pleasure of its mouth feel and flavor, and because, like so much else at Heilman's, it is the last of its kind. Pan-fried chicken, perhaps the quintessential dish of all-American cuisine, has gone the way of the dodo, requiring too much time and effort for today's grab-and-go world. Gone too are the old-fashioned soups made with thick, creamy stocks; high, chiffon-like pies, topped with meringue; and ultra-soft breadstuffs.
The food at Heilman's is delicious, but it is not the trendy food of today. It is the food of the elderly men and women dining around me, laughing together, ordering drinks and eating as if everything were normal, as if they did not sit on the very precipice of extinction with the bedrock crumbling beneath them. It's an awesome thing to see this generation passing. They shaped the world I live in, and I cannot imagine how it can be without them. So it pleases me, this Sunday, to sit in their restaurant, eat their food, and let Heilman's lull me, as it does them, into thinking time has been made to stand still in its tracks by the magic of a simple, delicious chicken dinner.
.
This article appears in Jun 5-11, 2002.