A Thanksgiving Feast Awaits You

It's just too delicious...

Circa 1960

Now well-ensconced in my eighth decade, I can recall many memorable Thanksgiving dinners, more than a few cooked up lovingly by yours truly. The best and most memorable, however, were rooted in the 1960s.

My father had moved the family out to Mill Valley, California, just north of the Golden Gate, in the gentle shadow of Mt. Tamalpais, so he could pursue his career as a baseball writer in the luminous shadow of the great Willie Mays. He covered the Giants for the Examiner, first at Seals Stadium in the Mission District, then — a couple of years later — at Candlestick Park in South San Francisco, perhaps history’s worst place to watch history’s greatest ballplayer.

In the offseason Dad worked as the Examiner’s Entertainment Editor, and it was in this capacity that he encountered Bob Grison, a great San Francisco restauranteur, proprietor and founder of Grison’s Steak and Chop House, all mahogany, white linen, and brass upholstery tacks, with an easy elegance that fit my father’s pedestrian ballpark sensibilities like an old brown shoe.

Everything about Grison’s — including the standard menu…

…was timeless, and it was here my family dined each Thanksgiving for several years in the early 1960s…

Bob Grison always greeted us at the table, and though my father always enjoyed a good meal, his greatest satisfaction was watching my mom’s eyes light up when a small army of uniformed waitstaff marched up to the table with a whole roast turkey on a platter, festooned with roast potatoes, carrots, and fresh parsley. “No I can’t,” she would say in girlish delight, as the waiter served her first — always. “It’s too delicious.” And that’s what I remember most about Thanksgiving dinner at Grison’s each year. I remember my mom’s smile. Like a debutante for the day.

She passed away from cancer in 1989 at the age of 62. By chance I was alone with her in the hospital room, holding her hand when she finally stopped breathing after several days of morphine-induced coma. “I know,” I told her. “Sometimes life is just too delicious.”

May your Thanksgiving, dear reader, be just delicious enough. I hope this Thanksgiving offers you and yours ample opportunity for cherished smiles and memories and — most important — the gratitude they evoke. Because it ain’t Thanksgiving without the thanks…