Happy 98th, Chiefie

The Chief would have turned 98 today. New Year's Day was Birthday Day in the Plotnik family for more than 40 years and Chiefie, we're still thinking about you on your birthday. Please join us as we raise a virtual martini to you, wherever you are, and we sure hope they stock enough olives.

By the way, here's what some of the rest of us looked like on September 24, 2002, when Chiefie's picture was taken in our favorite restaurant in Stiletto City, The Caroussel.






Last night's New Year's Eve conversation around the dinner table at Chef Silent B's turned to the greatest steaks or prime ribs that anyone could remember. Duck remembered one late night in Overland Park, Kansas, outside of Kansas City, Bill and Mush thought of the place near Big Sur where they got married. Plotnik thought about the Chief -- and the dinners at Monty's Steak House in Encino.

Plot was still 14 when the Chief started coming around, and he knew how to woo two teenage boys -- with dinners at Monty's. Neither Plot nor his brother Shmeckl had ever been allowed to order whatever they wanted at a restaurant before, and when they discovered that steaks or prime ribs were not only legal but encouraged -- well. To this day Plot remembers making the waiter count out 30 pats of butter, one at a time from a silver dish with a silver fork, for his baked potato. And that outside cut of prime rib was the size of a Honda Prelude, before there were Honda Preludes. Yes, indeed.

It was wonderful to share New Year's with Silent B and Miss Mush, especially with a very welcome invitation coming at the last moment. BZ called from Brooklyn at 3am her time, midnight here, when the fireworks were going off in the thick fog over the bay, and PD texted from a dance club on Flatbush Avenue. Belly was home with a baby sitter. The Saab is far away.

So, with a spit over the shoulder to chase away the Evil Eye, we say the earth appears to be spinning as it should. As Pearl Pig says, sitting contentedly in the forest, in the glorious William Steig book "The Amazing Bone" that Plot has now gotten to read to his second generation of smiling children -- "I Love Everything."

Of course, she's about to meet the bone, and then the fox, who says "Why shouldn't I eat you? That's the way I am. I didn't make the world."

But we're not thinking about that. Everybody meets the fox. Pearl gets out of it. Why shouldn't we?

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