The Jolly
The ear-splitting feedback from a dining room full of octogenarian’s hearing aids, louder by far than Jimi playing “Machine Gun” at the Fillmore, is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of The Jolly.
How bad was the hearing aid feedback at The Jolly? Go to :42 of this clip and multiply it by 100.The Jolly. That is, the Jolly Fisherman, was a sturdy suburban surf and turf restaurant in the village of Roslyn, on New York’s Long Island. The restaurant, now of blessed memory, could not survive Covid. Nor could a good percentage of its ancient patrons, for that matter.
The restaurant was the stuff of family folklore for my wife’s family. It became part of my life as well, from the mid-70s into the start of the new millennium.
It was a place for celebration. My wife’s family went to The Jolly for birthdays. Anniversaries. Holidays. Family get-togethers. Back when I first became enmeshed in my wife’s family activities, she and I — and her wisenheimer little sister — scoffed at the stodgy decor, decrepit waitstaff, and aged customers.
It was a clubby, white table cloth place abutting the town’s cute duck pond and the food was decent enough.

But it wasn’t cool. It wasn’t Arizona 206, Montrachet, Al di La, Odeon, Babbo, Florent, or Chelsea Place. Our careers were on the ascendant and we sniffed out the latest hot restaurants with fervor starting in the Ford-to-City: Drop Dead” years, through the “there you go again” Reagan era and on into the “that depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is” Clinton epoch.
The Jolly did not cater to the boldfaced names of the day. It catered to bougie bastions of middle-aged suburbanites of the type skewered by Mad Magazine back when we were smart-ass tweens. It was a cardigan crowd. In their minds, they’d made it. Out of the outer boroughs of The Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, and into the world of onamental front lawns, Oldmobile Toronados, Garcia y Vega cigars, and Bally slip-ons.
“Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics, Ben.”So it became, for us young-ins, far more than a restaurant. It was a family joke.
“Where are we going for ma’s birthday?”
Younger generation, in unison: “THE JOLLY!!!!!”
Then, “Yeah, but The Jolly sucks.”
“We know, we know, already. But they LOVE it there.”
My MIL, her husband, her second husband, her boy toy (“the fly-boy”, who was a tail-gun Charley in WWII), uncles and aunts, all loved The Jolly.
“Oh! Their walnut bread is to die for,” they would qvell. They had their favorite waiter, Bob, who knew their names, their drink orders, their “don’t forget — dressing on the SIDE!” special instructions.
They loved the very thing we despised: the dulling sameness. Same decor, same waiters and valet boys, same patrons. Most of all, they loved the fact that, after surviving the Great Depression and World War II, they now had a few bucks and could relax in relative peace and comfort.
“Is it spicy?” my MIL would ask Bob, should a rare “new item” find its way onto the menu. Bob would shake his head “no, don’t” and my MIL would order her usual. Green salad, dressing on the side. Filet of sole. Chocolate cake. (The woman had a major sweet tooth and could inhale a brick of marble-pistachio halvah in one sitting.)
The Jolly was safe, as safe as Johnny Carson. Life may be like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolate (“you never know what you’re gonna get”), but here, as with The Tonight Show, there were — thankfully, for them — NO surprises. Ever.
Time has taught me many lessons. What I know for sure is that, as The Grateful Dead sang, “when life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door.”
Yup, indeedy do. “Like the morning sun you come, and like the wind you go.”
“Well the first days are the hardest days, don’t you worry anymore…”My brother in law, a promising suburban physician with a wife and two rugrats, died in 1980. Two years later, my father in law pulled a Fred Sanford (myocardial infarction) and died. After his son’s death, he never was the same, although a three-pack-a-day smoking habit sure didn’t help things.
My MIL, though, was a tough bird. It took Covid-19 to take her out, along with my mother, my son’s bestie, and so many millions of others.
Then Covid — you know, “the hoax” — took out The Jolly. The restaurant business model was forever altered and stodgy old places that didn’t deliver were DOA, along with their patrons.
But you know what they say. “You live as long as the last person who remembers you remains alive.”
We will soon be in the Days of Awe, the Jewish High Holy Days. These holidays are a time of introspection, celebration, and prayer, with Rosh Hashanah marking the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur being the Day of Atonement. We wonder: who will be inscribed in the Book of Life? That is, who will live another year? Who will perish?
I guess that is why I think of this now, of a once-vibrant surf and turf restaurant in a little Long Island town, populated by first- and second-generation descendants of shetl dwellers and Holocaust survivors. They were immigrants to a new land with a new language and customs, and they elbowed up society’s ladder one slippery rung at a time, finally finding solace in sturdy suburban restaurants like The Jolly Fisherman.
So many of them are gone now. But not forgotten. No yet, anyway. We’ll see what happens in a couple of weeks when it is determined whose names shall be written in the Book of Life.
May we all be inscribed in the Book of Life.Meantime, I’ll think I’ll make a reservation at Enzo’s, my go-to restaurant on Williamsbridge Road. I know just what I’m going to get: fried calamari, the heritage pork chop with hot cherry peppers and the potato croquetta, and the tortufa for dessert.
I get that all the time. It’s to die for.
