The salad.

My father didn't cook but he made his special salad sometimes and it was huge and served in one of those fat rounded highly-polished blond-wood bowls that were big in the 1960s. The salad had tomato and celery and onion and a few other ingredients that I can't remember but it was sweet and acid and crunchy at the same time, and he said he got the recipe from somewhere, if you could call it a recipe, and I presumed it was from one of the cafes. He sold crockery to the hospitality industry but in those days it was mainly hotels; they had the bulk of the business, which is why on the backs of those 1960s hotel cups and saucers you often see the words 'vitrified hotel china' and sometimes the brand 'John Dynon & Sons'.

Years later I sat at the bar in Pellegrini's looking at the curling photographs either side of the yellowed mirror behind the waiters. It was 1976. A timber menu board with scalloped edges hung overhead at the end of the room and what was on it had never changed and it never would. In front of me behind the bar in the chilled display case were cakes; almond apple sponge and orange cake and butter cake and some kind of grainy chocolate cake, and further down the bar in another part of the chiller case there were salads, and there was the salad my father used to make. He got it from Pellegrini's when Leo Pellegrini was running the place. Leo had retired two years earlier and taking over was a showy young bloke sporting a cravat which was already out of date but worn by colourful individuals like Don Scott.

Another decade and a half went by. The city was still traversable. I crossed it daily dropping my oldest child at St Kevin's and then returning to the city for a coffee and cheese roll breakfast with the papers at Pellegrini's. It was a three-way order. I told the cravat-wearing waiter in English, he shouted it to the kitchen in Italian, the woman in the kitchen brought it out and repeated the order as a question, and I said yes and ate the cheese roll and had another coffee, and then I walked out the front to my car and drove away. Every day for three years.

Then another big jump in years, almost twenty. Two small boys sat either side of me in the same spot, maybe the same chair, and we looked at the curling photographs. See that bloke with the waiter, I said. Kevin Sheedy. Taken a few years ago. See that other bloke in the black and white photograph? Elvis Presley. It was around lunchtime. We had pasta and I had coffee and the boys had those frozen watermelon things, granita, but I finished them because they were not sweet enough. We had cake.

That was a few years ago, and that was the last time I saw the man with the cravat.

Thanks to Mark Knight for the image.