Memories

(NOTE: All the pictures in this piece were taken by a friend at the end of the evening, and the finger sandwiches the next morning. The food brought by LaBella's looked great when it arrived.)

.Over the weekend there was a reunion of the grade school I attended back in the days when Vienna Sausages were a weekly Monday meal of my childhood. This would be the fourth one of these, going back thirty years. I much preferred the grade school ones to high school, because I liked my grade school and didn’t like high school. 

But the reunion was at Chapelle, that high school, and I was mildly curious to see my reaction to being on the campus again. It was warmer than I expected. The school has held up very well, looking very modern and so clean it actually gleamed. I looked into the windows of the cafeteria, the scene of the crime of hard-boiled eggs floating in red sauce during Lent. It was spotless and well-kept.

I often talked about expectations on the Food Show, because they really do play an outsized role in one’s impression of nearly every experience. For example, the first of these reunions wildly exceeded my expectations, so much so that I bite for every one I hear about, to dwindling degrees of satisfaction. This phenomenon is predicated upon the fact that with each subsequent reunion, the number of classmate attendees dwindles. Since I really liked my grade school classmates, each gathering pales in comparison to the previous one.  Only 14 people showed up for this one, but there were still hundreds of people there, spanning 20 years of classes.

It was BYOB, which doesn’t affect me at all as a non-drinker. But there were lots of ice chests and some elaborate selections. The caterer was LaBella’s, which is a place we frequented when they were located on Veteran’s Hwy. I have often said my family never ate out, which we didn’t, but we did get take-out a lot from LaBella’s and the nearby China Tower.

Back in my pre-Tom days, I loved LaBella’s. It was simple food for simple palates. And then Tom changed my food worldview. So I was curious to see how it would be. 

The answer to that is fine, just like 90% of everything we eat. The menu was simple. Lots of finger sandwiches, mini muffulettas, meatballs, creamy chicken pasta, and vegetable lasagna. The fried chicken wings were different. They were smaller than usual, which I like. And they seemed to be the most popular thing there. I am not a fan of bloated chicken where the drumettes are the size of chicken legs of yesteryear. These were great.

The meatballs were exactly as I remembered them. Good basic meatballs in a fine but not special marinara, they were not soft or hard. I liked the vegetable lasagna, where the most noticeable vegetable was eggplant, and the cheeses were nice but it was a little dry. The creamy chicken pasta was basic cream sauce, and what’s not to love about that? It was loaded with chicken.

Alongside this hot line were platters of cheeses and fruit that were displayed in the most mundane way it reminded me of a church potluck. The same is true for the dessert displays, which were mostly cupcakes. Huh? This is 2023!

By far the most interesting thing of all this was the cold sandwiches. Mini muffulettas were plentiful but ice cold. I wished they had been toasted, even as far back as the catering kitchen, and trucked over that way. To be fair, they were working out of a gym, but even a room temp toasted muffuletta would have been better than just the cold ones. Muffuletta bread should always be toasted, in my view. Tom has always campaigned for the room temp sandwich, feeling that heating a muffuletta ruined it, altering the dynamics of the sandwich by making the meats and cheeses greasy and the olive salad weird and too oily. 

It’s a pity these couldn’t have been great by toasting because they were stuffed and generous and otherwise very tasty.

But the star of LaBella’s output was the finger sandwiches. I have become somewhat obsessed with finger sandwiches after learning that they are unique to this area. You will not find them in Chicago or Los Angeles. I just assumed they were everywhere, a staple of catering. Who doesn’t love these hand food morsels? But there is a wide discrepancy in goodness with these. The LaBella’s version is the best I have encountered. The triangles seem larger somehow, so I don’t know if they are using a proprietary bread. They use only the classic three meats: ham, turkey, and roast beef, on wheat or white bread, and are light on the mayo, which is a negative for me. I feel that proper condiment distribution is essential to finger sandwiches. That said, the meats are very generous and this is the premier version of our local classic cold catered sandwich.

Several people mentioned to me that they wished the committee had spent more on food and eliminated a band because it would have been easier to visit. There is certainly a lot of catching up to be done with people you haven’t seen in 10, 20, or 30 years. And it was nice to catch up with LaBella's. Good memories all around.