I hope the ghosts of these Arizona restaurants never stop haunting me

My friends and I used to eat at a Mexican joint in Phoenix called San Carlos Bay Seafood.

It was small, it was authentic (or certainly seemed to be to a hick from the mountains of Virginia) and the food was delicious. Just outstanding. The ceviche was great, but the best thing on the menu was octopus in garlic sauce. Which was pretty much what it sounds like, except that it was served with fries. Octopus doesn't soak up a lot of sauce, but boy, fries do. By the time you were done with your octopus (I’m a member of the one-food-at-a-time club), the fries were swollen with the garlic sauce, and eating one was like a little heavenly explosion of flavor.

I am probably downplaying it when I say we loved this dish. Because once my friend Abe Kwok — truly, one of my best friends and the most selfless person I’ve ever known — kept stealing the garlic-sauce-soaked fries off my plate. I finally grabbed my fork and held it like an ice pick or something and said, if you take one more fry from my plate I’m going to stab you in the hand.

I don’t think I really would have stabbed him over a french fry. But Abe and I both had covered the police beat, and knew that dumber crimes have been committed for less. He didn’t take any more.

San Carlos, as we called it (“Let’s eat at San Carlos”), is gone now. So is Abe. I miss them both, though not in equal measure. They’re ghosts, you might say, alive only in memory.

Restaurants, like people, can become ghosts

That french fry story makes me sound like a lunatic, but I tell it because it’s my most vivid memory of a restaurant that is now gone. (I have more vivid memories of Abe, in which I am not the villain.) It’s always struck me how a place that we loved, that we frequented, that we could always count on for a great meal, one day just disappears.

That’s life, I guess. You assume something or someone will be around forever, and it never turns out to be the case. But in the moments you spend together, you have to make yourself think that it is. Anything else is too dismal to contemplate.

A lot of the restaurants where I used to eat are gone. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten in some of them that it’s possible the food wasn’t as good as I remember it being. The nice part is, there’s no way to prove it, one way or the other. The food was great because I remember it being great, and it always will be.

As it turns out, I ate at a lot of those places with Abe — like the Long Wong’s in downtown Tempe, where bands like the Gin Blossoms cut their teeth, and was home to the greatest buffalo wings on the planet.

At least that’s how I remember them. Abe ate a boatload of wings in a contest we had there one time, winning easily.

That’s not surprising. Thin as a rail, Abe was still, in the parlance of the part of the country I grew up in, a good eater. Our mutual friend Jon Sidener — we met so long ago we were considered the young reporters at the paper — wrote movingly about Abe’s love of food, and its importance in his life.

You assume relationships with restaurants, and with people, will last forever

OK, this next story makes me sound not like a villain but the village idiot. Not long after we became friends, Abe and I were talking about our childhoods. Abe was born in Hong Kong and lived there a few years before his family moved to the United States. Wait a second, I asked him — did your family eat Chinese food every night?

Yes, he said. I was floored. Every night? He laughed. Yes. I mean, we are Chinese, he said.

Somehow, he put up with me.

You assume a permanence with meaningful relationships, and a meaningful relationship is certainly what you develop with a restaurant you like. Szechuan Garden was a Chinese restaurant a block from my house. Their food was brilliant and authentic — I know the latter was true because Abe gave it his seal of approval, something he didn’t bestow very often. My family ate there every Christmas Eve.

And one day it just up and closed. There’s another restaurant there now. I haven’t tried it yet, and I don’t much think I will. Again, though, that’s how it goes, right? Here one day, gone the next. It’s a reminder to enjoy it while you can.

The ghost that haunts me most is a different Chinese restaurant, the restaurant Abe’s parents owned and ran in Tucson.

Some ghosts you want to haunt you forever

Abe's dad was a printer, his mom a nurse, but when they came to the United States, they couldn’t find work and so they opened a restaurant. Whenever I was in Tucson, I stopped by. It was great, of course.

But the real memories are from Chinese New Year. Every year, whenever it occurred based on the lunar calendar, Abe’s parents closed the restaurant to customers at 8 p.m. and opened it to Abe’s friends. Then they cooked up a feast that was, to my palate, beyond exotic. Ever had brain soup?

Abe’s parents are gone. So, of course, is the restaurant. But the memories of the caravan that drove down from Phoenix every year to learn about a culture foreign to us and to hang around with friends and eat delicious food that we never would have an opportunity to eat any other time remain.

Probably some other restaurant is there now. Someone is making their own memories there, memories that one day, too, will become ghosts. What’s the saying, don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened? I suppose. But I want it to happen again. I want to eat another meal, not in whatever’s there now, but in Abe’s parents’ place.

And I want to eat it with Abe, and talk about the places we ate that are gone, the places that haunt us — places I hope will forever.

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