Mama's House

That meatloaf was excellent on the night I had dinner with my friend Jeanne and her two fussy daughters, despite an oddly tough crust that Jeanne preferred to slice off rather than eat. Alexandra thought the fried chicken salad, made with strips of the corny fried bird, was "totally delicious," but her older sister, a vegetable-phobic teenager, would only nibble on a grilled cheese sandwich. And both girls looked aghast when they saw the matzo ball soup that their mother and I ordered and quickly devoured.

"What's in that ball?" Alexandra asked, pointing to the fluffy dumpling floating in the cup of chicken broth. I think she half-expected a tiny alien to burst out of it.

I half-expected a not-so-tiny alien to burst out of me after I ended my gloriously fattening dinner with a slab of banana-split layer cake, sliced from a three-tiered confection that was nearly as big as a barrel. A local pastry chef bakes the cakes for the restaurant, based on Auerbach's concept: one layer of banana cake, one layer of strawberry cake and another of vanilla, all swathed in piles of sugary frosting. The chocolate cake was just as decadent, its devil's-food layers held together with thick, fudgy icing.

Breakfasts are even more fattening, if that's possible. I prefer starting them with a deep-fried cinnamon roll, as opposed to the "regular" cinnamon roll, an oversized, yeasty baked pastry blanketed with a tooth-jarringly sweet frosting. Patrons have to specify that they want the deep-fried version, which is probably as high in cholesterol as the Mama's Country Benedict, a variation on the traditional Benedict but with a hefty ladle of sausage gravy instead of hollandaise over the eggs and ham.

Once a month Auerbach does the real eggs Benedict, slathering it with his own hollandaise. "I use fifty egg yolks and cream cheese and cream to make it," he brags, though that sure sounds like a recipe for quadruple bypass to me. But don't tell Mama, because the customers love it, and as soon as Auerbach starts breaking the eggs, servers call up their regulars to tell them it's on the menu for one day only. Ditto when Auerbach pours Muscadet wine for his beef stroganoff sauce.

One snobby friend of mine won't eat dinner at Bell Street Mama's, arguing that there are so many more interesting choices for an evening meal on 39th Street. But he's a morning-shift devotee, ordering the exact same meal each time: the Biggie Breakfast, with three eggs, four strips of bacon, hash browns or grits (the cheese version bests the plain) and toast or a biscuit.

"Did you know there's an omelet on the menu made with a hot dog, onion and processed American cheese?" he once told me with a shudder. "I mean, how white trash can you get?"

Honey, I can't wait to order it. Pass the ketchup!