Keep Your 3-Way, Gimme a Batty Hattie

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 13, 2009

There is a restaurant in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood named Edward’s, where once a month the owner, Edward (naturally) Youkilis puts out a spread of food specialties from his native Cincinnati, Ohio. It is a popular event among other ex-Queen City-ers, most probably because Youkilis serves up heaping plates of Skyline Chili.

Youkilis, at 62, is older than I am, so I will avoid making any disrespectful remarks about him or his culinary offerings except to say I disagree with them completely. I understand Youkilis’ desire to bring the taste of his youth to those who have not had the chance to savor it, as well as to those who have had that opportunity and find the pleasure of digging into a heaping plate of Skyline Chili missing from their soul, like a cactus longing for a drop of rain in the desert.

But if you are a restaurant owner in Chester County and think that you will be able to entice me once a month to patronize your eatery by putting out a spread of foodstuffs from my hometown that includes heaping plates of Skyline Chili, here’s a note of caution: Don’t waste your time.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen’s remark to Dan Quayle about Jack Kennedy, I know Skyline Chili and -- no matter how much spirit Youkilis and his ilk put into recreating the Skyline experience -- that’s not Skyline Chili. It is not possible to transport a chili parlor to the East Coast, and believe me I‘ve tried. Perhaps later in life than I would care to admit, I have come to realize that there are incandescent pleasures in life you cannot recreate just because you find yourself missing them. Your first kiss, your first World Series championship, your first heaping plate of Skyline Chili -- all remain eternally unattainable a second time.

At heart, Youkilis recognizes this, I believe, although the impetus for his continued attempts to put together a Skyline Chili experience are apparent: he serves twice as many meals at his restaurant on a Monday Cincinnati Night than other Monday night of the month. The restaurant owner told a writer for The New Yorker magazine, where the tale of his adventures in Skylining appeared last week, that there were key details of a normal heaping plate of Skyline Chili that he just could not match.

“The authentic shredded cheese, which is a fluorescent yellow, travels poorly, so Edward’s must grate its own,” the story states. “The Skyline company also refuses to sell (Youkilis) the intentionally tasteless franks (to keep the focus on the chili) for (hot-dog, chili, and cheese) Coneys, so he buys a local substitute.” I might also add that you can’t find the right oval-shaped serving plates used at Skyline outside the Queen City, and the oyster-style crackers available east of Cleveland are more suited to clam chowder than a heaping plate of Skyline Chili.

Skyline Chili is available nationally in cans. I have two or three in the cupboard right now. But my attempts at recreating the Skyline Chili experience have fallen so far short of expectations that they serve only to make me want to jump on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and head straight for the parlor at Clifton and Ludlow avenues where I first tasted ambrosia with a grated cheese topping. It just doesn’t translate well, like former President George Bush’s syntax.

But it also strikes me that it is just plain wrong try to transfer our hometown treasures out of their natural element. Like putting an Eskimo in Florida, they are soon to shrivel and wilt.

An all-too-sad fact of 21st Century America is that there are fewer and fewer regional differences between where we grow up and where we live after we have grown up and moved away. I recently began thinking about television shows that I watched as a child in Cincinnati. There were TV hosts named Uncle Al and Skipper Ryle and Batty Hattie from Cincinnati and Bob Shreve and Nick “Father of George” Clooney. If you did not grow up in the area to which the broadcast signals of their home stations reached, you did not know who in the world they were. They were no better, probably worse, than the TV hosts in Chicago or New York City or Philadelphia, but they were yours and you loved them for the Cincinnati-ness.

My friends Trevor McVickar, age 9, and Emma McVickar, age 6, live in Chester Springs, and they love their TV heroes and savor the moments when they can watch SpongeBob Squarepants enter his pineapple home under the sea. But when they grow up and go away to college, they are not going to be able to regale their new comrades with strange tales of SpongeBob, because everyone they will meet already know who he is. He’s not Batty Hattie, he’s homogenous. He’s Wal-Mart, he’s Hostess Twinkies, he’s – dare I say it -- McDonald’s.

And no matter how tempting it may be, I never want to order a heaping plate of Skyline Chili at McDonalds.