Canter’s Miss Manners

Eating at Canter’s restaurant isn’t what it was 40 years go, when Muriel and her cohorts conspired to keep the kids in their place with a gruff and loving discipline.

We ate at Canter’s often. When dad and mom worked later than usual in the stationery store on the next block, we’d often walk up the street to Canter’s for a corned beef on rye, a bowl of split pea soup, or potato latkes with a kishke on the side. (These were the days before cholesterol was invented.)

Muriel patrolled the room with an unsmiling grace.

“Know whatcha want?” she’d ask.

Once my brother Sid had the temerity to say, “Hamburger.”

Muriel shot him a sideways glance and barked, “Whatsa matta, don’t you say ‘please’ any more?”

But the story my dad tells to this day happened one evening with the five of us seated around the Naugahyde banquette benches. He had ordered a bowl of soup. I reached over and, as had been common at the dinner table at home, filched a spoonful.

He said nothing, used to this behavior, but then whap! Down came the hand of Muriel on the back of my wrist as she said, “Don’t take from your fadda.” She scurried off and returned in seconds with a small cup of soup for me, and a comment: “You want soup? Ask me.”

At that second, my brother Sid reached out and grabbed one of my brother Fred’s French fries. Whap! “Don’t take from your brudda,” she barked, then returned a couple of minutes later with more fries for Sid.

The bill didn’t show a charge for either, but as we left the restaurant that evening, Muriel said to my mother: “We’ll teach them manners.”