My eating club

Nine months ago, the Annex Bar and Grill at 128 1/2 Nassau St. closed its doors after more than 70 years, without notice. All of a sudden, there was no place to go for a $7 lunch of grilled ham and cheddar and a $2 late-night gin and tonic. Sure, the food at the Annex wasn't very good and you had to steel yourself before gulping back the hock, but it was an institution, an inexpensive place that was a dive in the sense that day after day and night after night, high-powered faculty and University administrators, students, nostalgic alumni and locals dived down the neck-breaking stairs to greet and be greeted by the Carnevale family. The Annex was an honest place, as a restaurant with that old-fashioned "1/2" in its address should be, and for those of us who were regulars, its replacement, Sotto (that's Italian for "beneath"), has come as a shock, perhaps all the more so since it too is owned by the Carnevales. You just have to admire any menu that suggests "Jello (red)" without irony, as the Annex's did. But does Princeton really need yet another establishment where waiters bring out a dish of salted and herbed olive oil, where you can order "penne pasta" with some unlikely combination of hand-cured sausage, ricotta and squash blossoms and where the preposterous ritual of the grinding of the pepper is observed?

Thanks to Tim and Nina Zagat, everyone can be a dining critic (the New Jersey Restaurants Survey is open till Dec. 17, by the way), but it's hard to think of a more depressing day job than eating out all the time in the 08540 zip code. Of course Princeton does have some good restaurants and bars, though they certainly don't look like college-town locales or have college-town prices: Blue Point Grill is excellent, for example, which is hardly surprising since it is right next door to our town's best purveyor of comestibles, the Nassau Street Seafood Company; a number of the newer Japanese restaurants (e.g. Ajihei) deserve a couple of stars; and one of my little pleasures is enjoying a salad and a glass of wine while sitting at Mediterra's bar. But a well-heeled community with a few thousand students in its midst ought to be able to support both some truly inspired upscale restaurants and a couple of burger 'n' beer joints with character. Strangely, Princeton has neither.

Or perhaps undergraduates think differently. They, or at least the upperclassmen, have their characterful eating clubs, whose activities appear not to be confined to eating and very unfortunately once in a while turn to clubbing of a quite dangerous kind. (I don't mean this flippantly: two years on the Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline has shown me the darkest side of college life — and it is not funny.) Since students regularly show off their clubs to their professors, I am no stranger to lunch and dinner on the Street, but it's an odd feeling always to be treated deferentially in the Bicker clubs when it's clear enough that 15 years ago I would have been shunned as a nerd. (Note to readers: There is exactly one club to which I have never been invited. Can you guess which one it is?)

I am, of course, also no stranger to the dining halls of the residential colleges, especially that of Forbes, which is consistently said to have the best food and certainly has the best view. The company is good, too — both in general and on special occasions, like the dinnertime talks that bring students and faculty together to interact with interesting and distinguished visitors. This semester, for example, we've heard Daniel Mendelsohn GS '94 read from and discuss his remarkable new bestseller "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million"; we've listened to rabbinical student David Segal '03 muse on the conflict in America between fundamentalism and pluralism; and on Monday, Dec. 4, you are invited to join us for a behind-the-scenes look at the Institute for Advanced Study, the wondrous home of Einstein, Godel, Panofsky, Geertz and so many other brilliant minds. Peter Goddard, a leading string theorist and the current director of the Institute, will be our guest, and if you are lucky enough to be a Princeton student but not lucky enough to be a prox-carrying Forbesian, no matter: please come between 5:30 and 6 p.m. anyway, and your dinner will be on me.

No one knows what will happen with the rise of four-year residential colleges, but I hope and expect that they will serve decent food in an atmosphere congenial to all Princetonians, from freshmen to senior fellows. It is probably too much to ask for drink as well, but I will continue to ask. We do, after all, urgently need a replacement for my club, the Annex. Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics, Senior Fellow of Forbes College and the John Witherspoon Bicentennial Preceptor. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.