_Bob's Big Boy keeps coming up. A few years ago, it came up in a Bruce Springsteen song: “I met Wanda when she was employed, behind the counter at the route sixteen, Bob’s Big Boy.” When I was growing up in Illinois, it came up every time a little league team won a baseball game; it was close enough to be easy, and far enough to be special. Bob’s seemed special the day my older brother disappeared from the parking lot and reappeared on the roof, hugging the knees of a life-size statue of Big Boy. A bit of drama for which he was later punished. And it was at Bob’s, at age ten, that I passed into manhood by casting off the shackles of the child’s menu and ordering a very adult veal parmesan.

A few weeks ago, Big Boy came up again. A friend of mine had a book of coupons that were soon to expire and, in a near-death-like frenzy, began giving them away. Some people got free nachos, others extra pizza toppings, but I was awarded a two-for-one meal at Bob’s. “There are no Big Boy’s in Manhattan,” my friend said, tearing out the coupon. “To use this, you’ll have to do some work.” A list of obliging locations was printed on the back, and I soon found one near my Aunt Renee’s house on Long Island, just a few miles from my apartment in Manhattan. When I called her and explained my predicament, she agreed to do everything in her power to help.

The next morning, I left for Long Island with the coupon stashed in my wallet and a friend who appreciates, as well as a free meal, my feeling for Bob’s. The normally pleasant train trip was filled with apprehension; though supportive, my aunt enjoys taking a hammer to nonsense and I feared what comments my excursion would elicit from her. But when she picked us up at the Hicksville station, she was only encouraging. “Save what you can from childhood,” she said weaving through traffic. “It doesn’t matter if that’s a story, or a face, or a restaurant where you drank milk shakes. Save it. I, on the other hand, have a personal grudge with Big Boy. Once, when we stopped there on a road trip, your cousin Robert ordered the all-you-can-eat clams. Robert ate and ate and ate and then the manager came over and said he wasn’t allowed to eat anymore. You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”

My Uncle Ralph was waiting just inside the door of their house. He was eager to share his own thoughts on Bob’s. In the middle of the night, it seems, he craves French toast sticks and once ate hundreds of croutons at a Bob’s salad bar in North Carolina. Uncle Ralph’s reminiscence, a slow ramble, made me anxious to get on with it. Aunt Renee gave me the keys to her car and Uncle Ralph shook my hand.

Inside any Big Boy, I automatically compare it to others I have known: to the one on a bluff in South Carolina where sea air follows customers in the door; to the one in Washington, D.C. that’s set in the shadows of the Watergate office complex and thereby lent a sense of national deception; to the cinder-block structure in Northbrook, Illinois, where I ate meals even before my memory recorded them. The restaurant in Jericho, Long Island doesn’t stand up to those. It’s a nondescript structure flanked by a road motel and a gas station that looks as though a strong wind could have blown it together. It’s a place where formica and vinyl and stainless steel happen to meet.

The restaurant was crowded up front, so my friend and I took a booth in back, near the food island. A waitress strolled over and told us the breakfast bar was still available. “But to get your money’s worth, you’ll have to eat fast,” she said. “We’re switching to lunch in just a few minutes.”

“Is the lunch as good as the breakfast?” my friend asked.

“It’s much better,” she answered brightly. “All fried fish.”

My friend told me she wanted to wait for lunch and that’s when I explained the significance of the breakfast bar; how in college, my classmates spoke of staying out late enough to break eggs with “The Boy.” “If you’re up all night and still make it to the breakfast bar,” I said, “you’ve really accomplished something.” It’s like the balloon payment at the end of a long car financing plan.

She looked at me, then the waitress, and said, “Okay. Two for the breakfast bar.”

A few minutes later, we were up and circling plastic serving tubs loaded with runny eggs, mountains of bacon, grey-brown sausage logs, fried potatoes, liquid butter, and congealed syrup. Even then, I sensed the sickness that would follow and recalled the wisdom my brother imparted to me years earlier: “The breakfast bar’s a good deal,” he said, “but be prepared to invest ten hours: one to eat, nine to recover.” It all seemed like some insane challenge to dietary sanity; a trial I knew must be faced. In fact, when Franz Kafka said, “There’s a point at which there is no turning back, that is the point that must be reached,” he could have been thinking of Bob’s breakfast bar.

Everyone has his own breakfast bar chronology. Mine is eggs to pancakes to fruits to cereals. But my friend’s is different, so during the meal our paths hardly crossed. At most, I caught sight of her by the waffles or loitering near the fruit salad. Our styles are also at odds. I eat a little food off a plate, leave it, then go for a new one. My friend, on the other hand, eats her dish clean, then returns with it to the buffet. She’s a conscious consumer: conscious of vanishing resources, of the waste disposal crisis, of Bob’s finite silverware supply. In contrast, I’m a plate-wasting relic as threatening as leaded gasoline and styrofoam cups. The Big Boy mascot pictured on my place mat convinced me, however, that here my friend was the outsider. The jolly figure with his greasy pompadour, jowly cheeks, expansive girth, and beady eyes harks back to a time when prosperity was determined by waist-size. But today, the very challenge, “all-you-can-eat,” has a ring of irresponsibility. When my friend noticed the five plates scattered across my side of the table, I felt ashamed and looked down at the grinning place mat for reassurance but, nowadays, the Big Boy is just plain fat.

Back in Manhattan, the sense of disappointment lingered. Though the coupon was honored and the restaurant’s location was suburban and forlorn as I had hoped, it just seemed like a long way to go for bad meal. I later decided that it was bound to be a let-down, that Bob’s is best enjoyed as part of a larger quest, that making a restaurant a goal in itself is as risky as calling a highway the destination of a family vacation. Despite this, I’ve saved some souvenirs from the meal: a syrup-stained place mat, a crossword puzzle, a train ticket. But my favorite piece of memorabilia is a map my aunt sketched in a green flare-pen on a yellow post-it. It pictures roads that run as erratically as rivers, and at the end of the web is a box, drawn in relief and marked with the letters B.B. In one map, anyway, all roads lead to Bob’s.