Miceli’s: A meal for the home blind
Friday night is “the filet of the weekend” in our house. Filet as in filet mignon–the tender cut, the one with the most promise, and ideally, the least effort.
Friday night, when not reserved for blockbusters, used to be neighborhood restaurant night. On Friday nights, my mother and her partner William rotated between the three New Jersey restaurants–a steakhouse, a tavern, and an Italian restaurant. The common denominator–a great martini.
My husband Matt and I have lived in the flats of Hollywood, CA for fifteen years. Our neighborhood pub used to be The Cat and Fiddle. It was where we went to feel like ourselves. The rent got too high, the pub closed, then re-opened a mile down the road. The space went to a chef who serves fancy takes on simple things. The Mercantile was another neighborhood spot, where I went to feel special. It was replaced by Gwen, a fancy restaurant we love, but can only afford once a year. There are precious few places to just show up, so neighborhood restaurant night slowly evolved into the Friday Night Postmates blowout. The couch always has a table, you know?
But there’s something about walking in the cool night air to a comfortable place where the food is good, where you feel like you belong, and you’re not stressed about dropping impossibly thin-stemmed wine glasses.
That’s how we found Miceli’s, Hollywood’s oldest Italian restaurant on Las Palmas, just below Hollywood Boulevard.
Matt explained, “I thought of Miceli’s because of the exquisite Italian meal we had for my birthday in Santa Monica. Every time I saw Miceli’s, I was curious. I wondered why we hadn’t tried it. It’s so close.”
A walk to Miceli’s is a walk back in time. We left our little wooden cottage, the kind of place movie studios would stash contract players back in the 1940's. The evening air was cool, a welcome relief in August. We cut through Crossroads of the World, built in 1936. We passed the First Baptist Church of Hollywood, rebuilt that same year after a fire.
Before we knew it, we opened the door to Miceli’s, and I was immediately engulfed by a deep ache of familiarity in place I’d never been and knew nothing about.
If you’ve ever been on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, you know it has a distinct and carefully cultivated smell —if it were a perfume it would be called Damp Memory Of Your Childhood.
It doesn’t smell like that at Miceli’s, but it feels like it should. The restaurant opened in 1949. My LA grandparents could have eaten there, and I bet it would have looked about the same. Exposed brick walls, stained-glass windows and ornate dark-stained wood beams. The place looks like a church with red-checkered table cloths. Seven decades of wicker-wrapped Chianti bottles hang from the ceiling. A grand portrait of a young 18th century boy hangs on one wall. There are chandeliers, Tiffany-style sconces and magenta theater lights. Little electric candles flicker on the tables. The cumulative effect is a colorful haze.
The restaurant has three distinct levels, like a small theater, as well as basement rec room for big parties. At the focal point of the restaurant, there’s grand piano, and at the keys, a genuine piano man. His name was Ryan, and he’s playing been at Miceli’s for a long time. He can hold a conversation while playing a tune, which for me is the equivalent of rubbing your belly and head in opposite directions while juggling plates.
Our waiter, Ian, was genuinely friendly person. That alone is a rare thing these days. At the fanciest Los Angeles restaurants, the front of house staff often has a nervous “oui chef” tick–they’re not here to make friends. At Miceli’s the staff felt like your friends from summer camp, who all happened to be working at the same restaurant.
Me, to Waiter Ian: “I can’t believe we’ve lived in Hollywood for fifteen years and never been to this restaurant!”
Ian: “That’s called home blindness. It’s when you’ve been somewhere so long, you don’t see what’s around you.”
Ian, as we would learn, is not your average waiter.
We ordered the standards–Caesar salad, fettuccine carbonara and lasagna. Other patrons ordered the standards from Piano Man Ryan. He played Disney anthems for the birthday girl, Sinatra for the elders, and Billy Joel for us younger elders. But he didn’t just play the songs. Each song was just the bowl for little snippets of other tunes. He tossed songs like salad, and the result was an impressive delight.
A waiter came up to the piano, took a wireless mic from the stand and began to sing. He’s good, I thought as I buttered a dinner roll.
A few minutes later a woman took the mic. She had a beautiful, professionally trained voice. It belatedly occurred to us that was a thing that the waiters here were hired to do, but the talent involved made it feel less like schtick, more like a talent show for theater kids–the ones who want to have fun along the way.
Waiter Ian brought our main course. Miceli’s serves the kind of Italian food that chefs who train in Michelin-starred restaurants leave to go make–the kind of food they grew up with. Perfectly structured lasagna and a carbonara so chock full of bacon it smelled like something that would make a cartoon dog float through the air.
The piano player played the opening chords of “Some Enchanted Evening” and Waiter Ian took the microphone. Let’s just say we were not prepared. The guy who had just served us lasagna unleashed an operatic baritone that immediately transported me out of the restaurant and straight into Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, a musical that opened in 1949–the same year as Miceli’s. It’s the story of two people who fall in love during World War II. Carmine Miceli, who opened the pizzeria, served in the European theater. There are layers here as rich as ricotta.
We were collectively floored, or gobsmacked or whatever word you want to use to describe people gaping at a performance with strings of gooey lasagna cheese hanging off their chins. There’s something about an opera-trained singer–they just get more out of every note.
“Uh, our waiter is too good for us,” Matt said. I nodded. We showered Ian with praise. It felt like we should have been clearing our own table. Dessert and espresso followed. We glowed. I guess it takes a restaurant this old to make us feel young.
We walked home under a bright moon, past the Baptist church, past Crossroads of the World, which if you didn’t know has its own lighthouse. We walked past a fancy organic Mexican food restaurant, opening soon. The interior is impeccably designed– an icy blue decor with a splashy neon signs that says a cheeky thing about tacos. Will this new place be open as long as Miceli’s? Check the corner of Sunset and Seward in 2088.
When we got home, I looked up the our new phrase.
Homeblindness — Derived from the Swedish word hemmablind, meaning the state of being when you no longer see the flaws (and strengths) of your home.
As I fell asleep I vowed to see my neighborhood, my home and maybe even my life with new eyes, starting with a hot coffee and leftover fettuccine carbonara with an egg on top.
