Jason Weiss
Rooms
Tinta regada
8, 2025
If there was a name to the restaurant, I didn’t see it. Down on Kingsley Street, one block over parallel to the beach, the locale was hardly distinctive: just another prewar apartment building. The area was familiar enough—Palace Amusements at the end of the street with Tillie’s grinning face painted on the wall and the dizzying funhouse inside, the boardwalk along Ocean Avenue where I liked to play miniature golf, even Asbury Lanes on a side street back when it was simply a bowling alley. But this place I wouldn’t have known until my parents found it. I must have been about eight or nine, and catching sight of the small sign hanging from the fire escape over the doorway, I announced what seemed to be the name of the establishment, “Rooms.”
But to say establishment is to lend an air of permanence, which was hardly the case. As I recall, the restaurant stayed in business for only one summer, maybe two, not off-season. I did express the desire to go back to eat at Rooms, so I’m sure we returned. My hundred-year-old mother remembers the place was one flight up, the walls painted blue, and the décor quite unadorned. What left more of an impression, it was the first time I’d heard of Armenians. Who were these people? To judge by their food, they were all right by me. Most important, though, I discovered lahmajan there, the small individual pizza with minced meat and vegetables. In all the decades since, I have remained on the lookout for that savory appetizer, and found it under different flags, with slightly different spellings and pronunciations. But tasting it each time, I recognized it as the same.
