At any minute, just at the Cambridge/Somerville line, Trina’s
Starlite Lounge will open. You can hop in for meatloaf, with a
pigs-in-a-blanket chaser, or get your cheese-ball appetizer and inhale the
fumes of an ultra-dry martini served slick in a missile-shaped shaker. You can
even “duck and cover”! Yes, you can party like it’s 1959. The question is, why
would you want to? What makes the late ’50s and early ’60s, the era of the Cold
War, so cool that it’s now hot?
Trina’s Starlite Lounge is a new project, brought to you courtesy
of Silvertone’s operators and alumni — Josh Childs and Beau and Trina Sturm.
The three tell us they’ll be doing everything from bartending to janitorial
service. (Who did you think changes the rolls of TP in the WC?) The redo is
cool: a powder blue and soft silver color scheme, with a very strong whiff of a
vintage V-8 Thunderbird; a “powder room” wallpapered in a collage of magazine
pages from the ’50s and ’60s; light-up beer signs and Machine Age cocktail
shakers. The trio took a scuzzy-ish Somerville lounge and occasional performance
venue — the Abbey Lounge — and transformed it into a kitschy, playful cocktail
lounge and gastro pub, heavy on great drinks and top-tier “comfort food.” Owner
Beau Sturm considers ’50s food “the original comfort food,” and his team is
using Betty Crocker’s Cookbook and Joy
of Cooking as their food bibles. But don’t underestimate the owners’
capacity for whimsy and irony, or their food skills. While the dishes sound
underwhelming, they’ll be delicious. Think fish sticks made with local striped
bass, chicken fingers from free-range chickens, mini-franks wrapped in puff
pastry, and cheese balls with cheddar from a little farmhouse in Vermont. You
get the idea: the food will be retro, but the quality will be this minute.
Childs says it’s a “locavore take on ‘processed’ food.”
All that said, I am still trying to get my head around the idea
that cuisine served and consumed by the generation that invented TV dinners and
Jell-O molds, and prepared them in a pre-microwave world, has become edgy and
therefore acceptable. It’s fascinating that an era that predates the social
norms we now treasure (e.g., equal status for women, green politics,
anti-racism, and nuclear non-proliferation) and elevated those strange food
groups Julia Child and others tried so hard to erase (e.g., squeezable Velveeta
and Twinkies) is now in vogue. Before Mad Men made them seem
chic last year, Cold War–era food, drink, and furnishings were sort of an
American embarrassment, relics of a not-so-cool time. As someone who actually
remembers begging my mother to buy a can of squeezable Velveeta, it’s cool to
see the rehabilitation of a decade. When I asked Beau Sturm what made the ’60s
cool, he described it as the era “of the Rat Pack, of men in suits being men,
cocktails at all hours, ‘martini living.’” Hmmm. Wonder what comes next? White
wine and Brie nostalgia?
