My Italian grandmother, Lu Stubbs, was born in 1925 in New York City, and died in 2020 at the age of 94. I called her Nonnie.
Nonnie was a sculptor. Her favorite medium was bronze, and her biggest sculptures were more like statues: soaring, larger-than-life figures that graced public squares and streets in the Boston area. In 2001, Nonnie and Granddad retired to Northampton, moved in next door to my parents, and spent the last two decades of their lives here.
Nonnie donated two bronzes to the city of Northampton: a frog wearing sneakers in front of Hampshire County Courthouse; and a pregnant woman, twice life size, that stands in front of the old maternity ward at Cooley Dickinson Hospital. The model for the pregnant woman was my mom, 45 years ago, beaming up at the sun’s majesty. It’s hard to tell from her smooth bronze belly, but that’s me inside there.
Nonnie loved to cook and loved to eat. She made the best lasagna in the world. But when she went out to a restaurant, the only thing she would ever order — as long as it was on the menu — was the Reuben sandwich.
The Reuben was born around the same time as Nonnie, in the 1920s. Its geographical origins are less clear. Some claim the sandwich was born at Reuben’s of Madison Avenue, Manhattan, a few blocks from where Nonnie lived as a schoolgirl. Others trace it to the Blackstone Hotel of Omaha, Nebraska, or to the Hotel Cornhusker of Lincoln.
Either way, the recipe is as well defined across today’s America as it was a century ago: corned beef, sauerkraut, swiss cheese and Russian dressing griddled on rye.
You can get a world-class Reuben in our area. Here are three of my favorites.
I’ll start with Fitzwilly’s. It’s hard to imagine Northampton without this landmark tavern. Its quirky details, lush greenery, soaring brick walls, and hanging Prohibition-era copper stills have defined the Main Street experience since Fitzwilly’s opened in 1974. The kitchen turns out great fish and chips, sultry pulled pork, and the best French onion soup in town.
Even in the post-COVID era, Fitzwilly’s is still open for lunch and serves dinner later than almost anywhere else in town. The Toasted Owl Tavern next door, under the same ownership, serves the same delicious menu with more of a sports-bar vibe.
The Fitzwilly’s Reuben — the best-selling item on their menu — is an exemplary version, in part because of the proper buttering and crisping of the outsides of the top and bottom slices of marbled rye. The corned beef is thinly sliced, and dressings and cheesings ooze out from the moist middle of this excellent, beautifully plated sandwich.
Just as much of a Northampton institution is Packard’s, which opened at 11:30 a.m. on Nov. 22, 1977. The reputation of Packard’s as the “bar that never closes” was iced during the Great Blizzard of 1978, when the bar stayed open in defiance of feet of snow and prohibitive government orders, and the kitchen fed our brave service workers all night long. Not coincidentally, its street, Masonic, was the best-plowed road in town.
The distinguished Packard’s tradition of collecting retired signs from local businesses is one of the coolest and most unique décor concepts I’ve ever seen in a bar—and I’ll admit, I’ve seen a lot of bars. To scan the walls of Packard’s is to take a nostalgic trip through Pioneer Valley history and remember the restaurants and stores of yesteryear by their lovingly preserved and repurposed signage.
The timeless atmosphere carries on, but last year the Packard’s menu was reworked and refocused by a new culinary team. The improved kitchen is firing on all cylinders: buttermilk fried chicken is excellent, burgers are on point, and the New York strip is a gift to a city short on reasonably priced steak dinners.
I was interested to learn that at Packard’s, just like at Fitzwilly’s, the Reuben is easily the most popular item on the menu. The sandwich bread comes from Woodstar Bakery down the street, and the corned beef is cooked in-house and tossed with sauerkraut on the griddle to achieve just the right mix of textures. May Packard’s and its homage to our city’s past live on forever.
Friendly’s, the Northeastern ice-cream-and-burger legend, is hardly a darling in the latter-day media. For one thing, it’s a pretty big chain. At the apex of Friendly’s arc through New England history, the mini-empire included more than 800 restaurants in bright red-and-white houses.
Corporate contraction and changing consumer tastes took their toll in the early 2000s, but there are still more than 130 Friendly’s branches today, including our local branches in Florence and Hadley.
Friendly’s was founded in Springfield in 1935, when Nonnie was 10. Its co-founder, Prestley Blake, lived until 2021, when he died at the age of 106. Two years earlier, his brother Curtis Blake, the other co-founder, died young at 102. Whoever says ice cream and burgers kill you would be well advised to consult the data point of the Blake brothers.
Eighty-seven years later, the Friendly’s menu is relentlessly unfashionable. You won’t find any locally sourced pork belly here, no kale salad, no craft beer—just a doting staff that treats every customer like family. And the unsung kitchens of these humble establishments really know what they’re doing — not just with the great traditional ice cream but also with the burgers and expertly griddled melts.
The place is probably most beloved by seniors and young kids. These are hardly the core audiences for food writing. So you won’t find Mark Bittman waxing poetic about Friendly’s.
But to me there’s no greater food poetry than this restaurant, because there was nowhere I went more often with Nonnie — even in the twilight of her life, when we were rolling her around in a wheelchair and she didn’t say much.
Every time I walk into Friendly’s, she’s with me again. Out comes my freshly griddled Reuben SuperMelt (buttered and sauced just right!) and my big, thick vanilla Fribble, and there’s Nonnie, sitting on the other side of the booth, digging into her Reuben with a smile as wide as big as the Brooklyn Bridge, still sculpting every contour of my world.
Robin Goldstein is the author of “The Menu: Restaurant Guide to Northampton, Amherst, and the Five-College Area.” He serves remotely on the agricultural economics faculty of the University of California, Davis. He can be reached at rgoldstein@ucdavis.edu.