Yum Yum is Forever

My grandmother Alice owned a bar in Greenport, New York, for decades when it was still a small Long Island fishing village. Not a fancy place. You got a lot of sailors, fishermen, beat cops, and mailmen. She kept a wooden bat and a snub-nose revolver behind the bar, which for years had a carved wood sign above it reading: “In God We Trust. All Others, Pay Cash.”

But if you ordered a drink in her place, it came in a clean, solid glass. Plastic cups weren’t then the political or class signifiers they would become in pop country songs and hipster dive bars. They were cheap for cheap’s sake. Not the kind of thing she’d put before a paying customer.

There was food at Alice’s place—again, nothing fancy. Burgers. Fish and chips. A Reuben.

The last time I ate at my grandmother’s bar, I was probably 10 years old. She served me a burger and fries with a frosty can of Hawaiian Punch from the case she kept just for me in the walk-in fridge. As an adult, I’ve had meals in Michelin Star restaurants that could not touch this one. Couldn’t get near it. I’m sure the 80/20 ground beef and two thick slices of melted American cheese were objectively delicious. But more than anything, of course, it’s the love I had for Alice and that little place, the nostalgia welling up inside me over the last three decades, that makes that perfect burger a dragon I’m still chasing.

I was thinking about that recently as I sat outside Yum Yum Better Ice Cream on Spring Garden Street, enjoying a thoroughly unremarkable hot dog and feeling the last of summer slip away. Freshmen at UNCG were walking past in clusters, teenagers who met just weeks earlier. Soon they’ll be in each other’s weddings, I thought. They’ll have each other’s children calling them “uncle” and “auntie.” They’ll see each other through deaths and divorces, two or three career changes. But all of that was out before them, as it once was for me on that very street one fall 25 years ago.

When we were painfully young and comically broke, just forming our own lifelong friendships, my new friends and I would cross Spring Garden over to Yum Yum to have a hot dog or an ice cream cone. We’d sit outside and talk about Radiohead and Requiem for a Dream and if it really mattered whether Al Gore or George W. Bush became president (spoiler: It did). There was something about the simplicity of the place and the fare—dogs a hot pink color not found in nature, slathered in yellow mustard on steamed buns, a scoop melting down the cone and onto your arm in late summer. It was just perfect. Has been for generations—for 120 years. Still is today.

Like that little bar in Greenport, Yum Yum is a solid, simple place for solid, simple things. It’s changed so little because so little needs changing.

The word “nostalgia” comes from the Greek nostos, meaning to return home, and algos, meaning pain. The pain, as our own Thomas Wolfe taught us, comes from the fact you can’t go home again. Not really.

But that’s just fine with me. I remember getting mustard on the pages as I read Wolfe for the first time outside Yum Yum one fall, many years ago now. And I can—and will—go there again.