The Town That Came to Dinner
by Gabrielle Hamilton from Saveur and reprinted in Best Food Writing 2001	You might expect an accomplished chef/writer like Gabrielle Hamilton (her popular restaurant Prune is in New York's East Village) to write wonderfully about food; her account of a hometown community dinner, however, offers even more-it really reads like a short story.

At 2 p.m. on the day of the Great American Spaghetti Supper in Lambertville, New Jersey, my hometown, I'm standing in the middle of Union Street, looking up. Clouds as dark as bruises hang overhead, and it sounds like wildcats and she-bears are pacing anxiously inside them. The tables where a thousand people will eat in a few hours still haven't been delivered; neither have the chairs or the burners, which we'll use to cook 250 pounds of pasta. Tableside. This huge outdoor party-our town's 150th birthday-is starting to look like the Great American Disappointment.

I cut down an alley behind Mitchell's Tavern, where we used to race bikes and eat shoplifted Kit Kat bars, and through the parking lot to St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church. I haven't lived here for 20 years, but that alley is as familiar as my own breath. On my way down the stairs to the church's basement cafeteria to see how the food prep is going, I pass my dad, Jim Hamilton, quietly sneaking out. "This whole thing was your idea, your inspiration, and you're splitting?" I mock-reprimand him. "Be careful down there," he replies, smiling. "It's all asses and elbows."

I descend to find those asses and elbows attached to a dozen beleaguered local restaurant people bent so far over banquet tables, feverishly assembling antipasto plates, that you can't see their heads. Helen Papa, who's 75 years old and caters all kinds of community events, steps out of the walk-in refrigerator and asks, "What're those eggs for? I got forty dozen eggs in there." She checks the menu. "Holy crow. Those eggs gotta be cooked." The problem-besides the fact that the tables haven't arrived and the rolling racks came from the rental company without trays and dinner's supposed to start in a few hours and it's about to rain wild beasts-is that hundreds of antipasto plates, egg- less, have already been taken out to the refrigerated truck. Nobody's sure exactly how many, though; they lost count a while ago.

Lambertville lies on the same stretch of the Delaware that George Washington so famously crossed on Christmas Eve in 1777 on his way to attack the British in Trenton, 17 miles south. The streets are tree-lined, and the houses close enough to each other for neighbors to talk from porch to porch. In the 1830s a canal was built here that made barge transportation possible; now, long after the advent of trains and trucks, it serves only to distinguish the landscape.

Our house was actually across the Delaware on the Pennsylvania side, in New Hope, but my tether to Lambertville is tight and strong. My grandfather, a country doctor, raised his family here. My father, who designed theater sets and lighting, had a shop here, where dusty, chain-smoking carpenters built mammoth sets to be trucked all over the country. He also opened, with my sister, Melissa (now director of the SAVEUR kitchen), a restaurant called Hamilton's Grill Room in Lambertville (it's still thriving 12 years later). My brothers rode minibikes here. And I took guitar lessons and a beating from a girl gang here.

When I was growing up, Lambertville was a tough town, with more grit and integrity than New Hope but less wealth. There were machine shops and lumberyards still, while New Hope had long since become a sort of dollhouse community of fudge kitchens, pewtersmiths, and Ye Olde Antiques Shoppes. The stuff a person actually needed-a dozen eggs, a package of undershirts-you had to get in Lambertville. We found our Buster Browns here, at Phil Pittore's shoe store---Phil was also mayor of the town at the time---and got new tires for our bikes at Mort's Sports Shop. We bought groceries at the Acme, where Donny Lewis, a man my dad's age who might have slipped through the cracks had he lived in a bigger city, would help load your bags into the trunk of your car.

But Lambertville, at 150, has changed. We still don't have fudge or scented candles, but Mort's is a cappuccino joint now, and the shoe store is a gallery. Art, Money, and Warm Frisee Salad have tucked themselves in right next to God, Family, and Country-and the two points of view don't always coexist comfortably. When you ask some of the old-timers what changes they've noticed in the past couple of decades, they usually just shrug and won't say anything more damning than "all the new people"-but I can't help wondering if they feel edged out of their own town. Or maybe it's just change itself that raises the bristles.

The idea for our dinner had been loitering-- leaning up against a lamppost having a smoke--in the back of my dad's mind for years. A party. Outdoors, at one long, uninterrupted, well-dressed table. My sister had a similar image in her head, from a photograph she'd seen of a sit-down feast, of tables set end to end through the ancient, winding streets of an Italian city, connecting neighbor with neighbor. But it wasn't until Lambertville's sesquicentennial that they could both let the idea unfurl-- all 1,000 seats of it.

Because my dad and my sister had been instrumental in planning so many other events in our town, they were charged with staging the birthday dinner. They shrewdly pulled together a well-balanced committee of brains and brawn and bean counters: restaurateurs, the fire chief, a public relations pro, trusted family members. We made lists and set up a phone tree. We ordered wineglasses etched with the anniversary logo and decided to serve spaghetti. Then we decided to serve penne instead because it's easier to dish up. For weeks there was a polite deadlock over how to cook the pasta: partially in advance, to be reheated; or just before dinner, on-site. Finally, Andrew Abruzzese--a restaurateur who's so charming it hurts and who grew up doing ravioli church suppers with his aunts-broke the deadlock by saying, "If anybody can convince me why I should cook it, haul it to the site weighing 1,000 pounds instead of 250 pounds when it was dry, reheat it, and then deliver an inferior-tasting product simply to save three minutes, then I'll do it." No one could.

Abruzzese made the tomato sauce, too, and got Vincent Giordano's market in Philadelphia to do thousands of tender meatballs. We tried to set a rain date, but Helen Papa, scrutinizing her pocket calendar, said, "I got to cook for a reunion, class of 1949, the next day and a family picnic after that, and then we're on the bus to Atlantic City." So we just decided it wouldn't rain.

Somewhere around five p.m. on this midsummer evening, the tables and chairs and burners finally arrive and a lively churning starts in the street as volunteers rush to arrange them. I find myself struggling to rollout reams of white butcher paper on the tables as early guests simultaneously try to decorate them (a prize will be given later for best table decor). A couple of kids buzz around in a golf cart distributing buckets of sauce and meatballs, boxes of kosher salt, and loaves of Italian bread, and the refrigerated truck inches up the street with a crew of waiters walking behind, doling out a thousand antipasto plates-not one missing its wedge of hard-boiled egg.

The table decorations are a horrible and wonderful array that reflects the unlikely but unquestionable harmony that is Lambertville. Carnations, dyed red, white, and blue and rigidly propped in kitschy plastic baskets, border plum-tomato cans spilling with bawdily gorgeous wildflowers. A simple, almost somber cluster of American flags sits serenely between a clothes- line hung with boxer shorts and a group of revelers in wigs of yellow yarn that resemble spaghetti. In the midst of it all stands a stunning arrangement of branches formed into natural candelabras, set with votives and twined with clusters of red grapes, made by a famous Manhattan floral designer who has a weekend house nearby. Beautiful as it is, it has nothing to do with the Lambertville I know.

Like cream that becomes butter during the last turns of the paddle, our party comes together only in the final moments. Former firemen and nurses and schoolteachers, some with walkers and many with hearing aids, arrive at precisely 6:30 and quietly chew their way from antipasto to cookies in the time it takes the younger crowd, boisterously calling for more red wine, to find their seats. The food is fresh and delicious: The antipasto has good genoa salami, crunchy celery, dark briny olives. The penne is hot and cooked perfectly-yielding, but not mushy-and the sauce is vibrant with tomato flavor. People pass their plates back for more.

I'm gratified to see that even though many of the old stores are gone, the people who ran them aren't. All around me, former shop-owners are having dinner with the very people who have turned their places into galleries and antiques stores. And even though the Acme has disappeared, Donny Lewis is still here, his ticket proudly and firmly in hand. If the way you verify your past, I start to think, is by having some markers of it, and if all the places I used to know are gone, then where is my past-- and where does that leave me? Choked up and very glad to see Donny Lewis, that's where. If he's here, then so is my Lambertville.

After dinner, we listen to a few speeches and a prayer for Phil Pittore's wife, who's had triple-bypass surgery. The decorating prize goes to a table with place mats made from historic photos of Lambertville. And then, as we're eating our slices of cake, the storm lets loose. Everyone runs for cover, and through the sheets of rain I see my dad short-cutting it down the alley I thought only I knew about. But the party continues down side streets, on porches, and under eaves, old-timers crouched next to newcomers. We drink the last of the red wine in the rain, eating soggy cake, reveling in our community.