During the 1950s, it seemed that every Sunday afternoon my parents would hustle my brother and myself into the family Chevrolet—in 1957 there was a Buick for a year—and make the drive from our home in Redwood City to my father’s parent’s place in San Francisco. US101 was a two- and four-lane road with stop signs and signals in those days, not the multilane freeway it is today. I was too short to reach the bottom of the windows in the back seat so my view was mostly of tree tops.

My grandparents lived in a second-floor, one-bedroom apartment on the corner of Euclid and Commonwealth Avenues. One block north on Commonwealth was the old Hahnemann Hospital. (The hospital was named for the inventor of homeopathy, but by then I think only allopathic medicine was practiced there.) Just up California Street from the hospital was the Fantasia Bakery. It was common for us to stop at the bakery for a gift of cookies when my mother hadn’t had a chance to bake.

My grandfather was born in 1868 in Krefeld, a city in the Rhine province of Prussia. He came to San Francisco as a teenager traveling around the tip of South America in the 1889. My grandmother was born in 1875 in Frankenthal, part of Bavaria. She was 17 when she entered the United States in Charleston, South Carolina. She migrated across the country, staying with relatives in Tennessee, Texas, and Nevada before reaching San Francisco. In Tennessee, she worked in the household of her half sister to learn “American ways.” She learned these ways very well, and was a dyed-in-the-wool racist the rest of her life.

My grandparents met sometime between 1901 and 1905, when they were married. The were the stereotypical German-Jewish mercantile couple. I remember my grandfather as being short, bald, and trim. He had a “soup-strainer” mustache, and a cigar was never too far from his mouth. My grandmother was stout and slightly taller than her husband. Even in 1972, shortly before her death three days short of her 97th birthday, she still wore her hair in the same style as she had her entire life. To me, she always looked old-fashioned.

While my parents would visit with my grandparents and any other relatives that happened to drop by, my brother and I would ride up-and-down on the antique elevator or play cards. After a few hours, since my grandmother never learned how to cook, we’d all go out to dinner. Dinner was usually early enough so that we could get back to their apartment by eight to watch the Ed Sullivan Show. In later years, the Lawrence Welk Show may have been on at the same time—I seem to remember some channel switching back and forth at commercials.

During those years of eating out on Sunday nights, we probably hit all the major restaurants in the City—The Cliff House, out by Seal rocks, was a particular favorite of my grandfather. Another place we went on a regular basis was Grison’s, which was really two restaurants on the eastern corners of Van Ness Avenue at Pacific Street.

Bob Grison had opened Grison’s Steak and Chop House in 1936 and Grison’s Chicken House in 1938. Although the chicken place closed in the 1970s and the steak place was sold in 1984, in the 1950s, both restaurants were going strong. Although their names were different, their menus were similar, and they were similar to the other major restaurants of the city. They all served creamed spinach, shrimp cocktails, and some fish, usually rainbow trout or sole, besides their other dishes.

My standard order was the ground top sirloin steak, a large bun-less hamburger often served with brown gravy. At Grison’s, it was served with french fries, baked potato, or chili beans. Without my consultation, my mother always ordered the baked potato for me—I would have preferred the fries. The cost in 1955 was $2.65.

Once in a while, I was allowed to order a crab or shrimp cocktail. These sold for 85¢ and my preference was the shrimp. The “cocktail” was served in a special dish. It consisted of a large goblet with a silver frame on top that would support another glass bowl with the shrimp cocktail. In between the two glasses was a layer of crushed ice to keep the serving cold. In both cases, cocktail sauce dominated the seafood. I may have actually liked the crab better, but I didn’t like biting down on little pieces of shell so when given a choice, I’d ask for the shrimp. It wasn’t a complicated dish, just cooked “bay” shrimp in what was probably cocktail sauce that came from a No. 10 can.

Although I probably would not like those shrimp cocktails today, I still like the concept. At first I thought that I could just serve a spoonful as an amuse-bouche, but I decided that it would combine nicely with another staple of the 1950s, tomato aspic. So I prepared a tomato aspic, spiced it up like cocktail sauce, and molded with the shrimp as single bites.