Dear old Gus is gone, and along with him, our beloved noontime haunt. Known variously as “the alley,” “the Pavilion,” “Gus’s,” “the CozyCove Café” (Cook & Tell’s code name for it), it was the place for a good no-fuss sandwich, some fries, and a piece of Em’s homemade pie for lunch. It was open every summer from the Fourth of July to Columbus Day since Gus started working for his father at the age of eighteen around 1920. The place was the definition of low-key. This, the first article in a continuing series that kept the story going through the years, introduced readers of C&T around the world to a precious piece of Americana.

This is going to be an odd restaurant review. Not that the restaurant is odd, although it isn’t exactly ordinary, either. The odd thing about this review is that I’m not supposed to tell where the place is. It’s all right to come upon the place by accident, and a little word of mouth is tolerated. Gus never advertises. Even the reporter for the local weekly is under strict orders to avoid any mention of the place in her neighborhood news column. This a distinct hardship on the reporter, because a lot of neighborhood news is hashed over at Gus’s place.

The point is, artistry in sandwiches is his specialty, and he does not wish to sacrifice good service for the sake of a full house. Watch the furrow form over his eyebrows when nine people come in all at once. He can handle them, all right. It’s just that some of the artistry goes out of it when you become a pair of hands cranking out sandwiches. The menu is not extensive: hamburgers, hot dogs, BLTs, grilled cheese, the usual others. Sometimes we recognize the lettuce in a crabmeat roll, because we would bring it from our garden as often as possible. You’ll probably pay a different price each time you order a pickle to go with your sandwich, because the canny sandwich man sells them by the pound, not the piece.

For dessert, Gus’s wife Em makes apple, blueberry, and rhubarb pies that he cuts in sevenths. With a yardstick flailing the air he circumnavigates the pie, his thumb positioned somewhere between the three-and four-inch mark. Sixths or eighths would never do. Where’s the entertainment value in three or four swift whacks?

Gus’s place doesn’t even look like a restaurant. No sign identifies the old white clapboarded building set on pilings at the edge of one of the prettiest little harbors on the Maine Coast. It takes a minute to figure out where you are, once you get inside for the first time, too. There are two bowling lanes (with hand-set candlepins), a gleaming wooden counter with eight revolving stools, some wooden booths, and a few ice cream parlor chairs and tables, all original with the place.

The nostalgia down at Gus’s is not coy. The place is just so fetchingly out of step that it may actually be marching backwards. A platoon of regulars has been bringing up the rear every summer for well over fifty years, keeping their drums silent. So if Gus is suddenly swamped with new business and it gets out that I had anything to do with it, I will of course deny everything.

Watch for more stories from Gus’s, with his menu and favorite recipes….