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My father's family were in the restaurant business for many years. However, they were a bit quirky. All of them were Sicilian immigrants, but their specialty was and still is tamales. I think I was about 15 when I discovered that tamales were Mexican.

My father's father, Onofrio, came from Sicily to San Francisco, where a buddy had got him a job in a canning factory. He lived in a boarding house where most of the other residents were Mexican immigrants whose business was selling tamales on the streets. So what social life there was in the evenings happened around the kitchen table where the Mexicans were preparing their stock of tamales for the next day.

When Onofrio saved up enough money and had brought over his brother John, sisters Vinnie and Vita, and his parents, they all settled into a two-family house oh 41st Street at Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. By this time he'd also married my grandmother, the daughter of an orchard owner from San Jose he'd worked for one summer picking prunes and apricots.

Thus were founded the Garibaldi Tamale Company and the Golden West Restaurant. These went through several locations, but during my childhood were located on Telegraph Avenue near what is now the McArthur BART station. My second cousins, now incorporated as Maita Brothers, still run the tamale business out of a converted dairy plant out in Pleasant Hill. You can buy Garibaldi tamales in supermarket freezer cases around the Bay Area. They also supply schools and jails.

The main product is a really big tamale, one of which makes a meal. It probably weighs a pound all told, and takes 45 minutes in boiling water from frozen to table. It's plump and wrapped in a white wrapper with a sunset on it, and comes in chicken or beef flavors. Inside there are corn husks, an outer layer of masa, an inner layer of something more like polenta, and then a mild red chili sauce with a few big hunks of meat. One makes a meal. Ideally they are served with sweet black olives and a sprinkling of shredded jack cheese. (Also beer.)

My family's household goods are littered with cast-off from various restaurants. I have the coat tree, a standing ashtray that I sometimes use for a fern, and a large, gracious, white china pitcher with faded roses on it. My mom has a set of eight antique Thonet chairs that were also salvaged from some earlier operation.

When my father was due to be de-mobbed from WWII, he and his father made plans to open a restaurant of their own. Onofrio withdrew his share of the money from the family business and promptly died of a heart attack before my father was home from the army. My grandmother used the cash to buy a house in Berkeley where she lived for the rest of her life. My father went to Cal on the GI bill and after a checkered career going back to the Army and serving in the NSA (where he met my mother), he ended up his life teaching German at Berkeley High Scool.

Just about everyone in my father's family nurtures elaborate fantasies about the perfect restaurant they'd like to open some day, but so far nobody has been foolish enough to do it.