Marshall Button: I'm pink, therefore I'm spam

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During the first few years of our marriage, the missus and I lived in a humble one-bedroom apartment in Fredericton. My parents were frequent visitors. During some of their visits, we made a restaurant pilgrimage.

Our destination was Perth Andover. It wasn’t a short drive back then. We didn’t have the four-lane, toll-free Trans Canada Highway that we have today.

But York’s Dining Room was well worth the long drive and the significant dump of carbon into the atmosphere. It stood on Aroostook Road facing the mighty Wolastoq/St. John River. I was never sure if it was located in the pre-amalgamated Perth, or its sister village, Andover. It mattered little, because as soon as you walked through the door of York’s Dining Room, you felt like you were transported to a magical land of milk and honey, or more precisely, a lavish land of limitless lobster and plentiful pork chops.

Dining at York’s was unlike any other restaurant experience. The meals were home-cooked and served in large portions. That was typical of many east coast eateries of the day, but York’s kicked it up a notch. The food was beyond delicious and the portions were nonsensically large. There was an unlimited supply of delicious corn bread (a half-hearted attempt to curb the appetites of big eaters like me), and scrumptious salads and soups. You didn’t waste time poring over a long menu, your genial, well-fed server told you your choices for your ‘main’ — steak, chicken, lobster, etc. Then you were asked what you wanted for your ‘side’.

If you ordered steak, you’d be served a ginormous piece of meat surrounded by a baked potato, fiddleheads and carrots. So what ‘side’ would accompany that? You could opt for another piece of steak half the size of your already too-large portion, or opt for half a lobster, which were of the two-pound variety.

I was an energetic eater, but after all of the appetizers, mains, sides, plus at least two homemade deserts, such as banana cream pie or chocolate cake with boiled icing, I felt like I needed to be wheeled out of the place singing, “Take me to Wolastoq, drop me in the water.” Walking from the restaurant to the car, I released a few more cubic feet of carbon into the atmosphere.

With such a bizarrely unique business model, it’s not hard to imagine why York’s is no longer in business. I’m amazed that they were able to stick around for as long as they did. It’s not that York’s wasn’t wildly popular. But when you give hungry people that much quality food for such reasonable prices, it’s unsustainable. It’s part of that bygone era when you tipped by emptying the change from your pockets .

Remembering York’s has me pondering the age-old question, “do we eat to live, or live to eat?” Our modern affluent society allows us to shop for any sort of food at any time of the year. When I was a kid, I would never have imagined being able to walk into a grocery store in January and purchase fresh strawberries, mangoes or blackberries. If I saw a blackberry back then, I would have thought it was a raspberry gone bad.

The current thinking is that one ought to eat to live, meaning you give your body the necessities to be able to function properly. If you live to eat, the conventional wisdom is that you’re overindulging and making bad food choices. When I look in the mirror after a shower, I feel like I’ve followed many fellow trend-setters in that latter category. Some mornings I feel like Pillsbury Dough Boy meets Chips Ahoy. Life is too short to deny the pleasures of fine food and drink. On the other hand, too much can make life even shorter. It might be time to stop ordering extra gravy at Dixie Lee.

I know I’m running the risk of food shaming. Sorry for being a product of my generation. I grew up in a mill town when unions were strong and skinny workers despised their fat-ass bosses. Nowadays the tables have turned. Only the high-paid bosses can afford to eat well and pay for gym memberships to give them bodies that look like the union members of the 1960s. Who’s kicking sand in whose face now?

When I was a lad, I learned to appreciate a good meal. My mother, grandmother and mother-in-law were wonderful cooks. And so were my dad and my father-in-law! Uncle Gilles fished lobster and cod for a living. Uncle Bruce left a secure job as service manager at Lounsbury’s to become a full-time vegetable farmer in Dalhousie Junction. We grew up eating locally-sourced, delicious food.

My dad taught me to enjoy every meal as though it were my last. He would declare, at least once a week, “Marsh, that’s the best meal I ever had in my life!” He also perfected the art of eating slowly. When my busy work life has me eating too quickly, I look to my brother Tracey for inspiration on how to pace myself and enjoy every bite. Zen and the art of slow chew.

Our family loves telling a story about Tracey when he was a teenager. My folks would buy a side of beef and store it in the deep freezer. One day Mom took out a big bag of steaks, thawed them, then cooked all ten, thinking they would provide meals for the family in the coming week.

Mom and Dad ate two of the T-bones and then went out for the evening. They returned a couple of hours later to find Tracey sitting at the kitchen table, holding his stomach and moaning, “Geez, Ma, why’d you have to make me so much?”

The Candy Man can ’cause he mixes it with love

And makes the world taste good

Marshall Button is a native of Dalhousie and the performer/playwright behind “Lucien,” a series of one-person plays. A member of the Order of New Brunswick, he writes a biweekly satirical column for Brunswick News.