“The steaks trailed smoke when they brought them out,” says Billy Joe Martin, who watched the sirloins emerge from the kitchen hissing and steaming, like a locomotive, a bovine train now transporting him to another time, another place.
Billy Joe and his father always sat at the bar at Steve’s Sizzling Steaks. Even the name comes out hissing. From his stool in that wood-paneled room in Carlstadt, N.J., on the Route 17 run-up to the George Washington Bridge, Billy Joe could look past the bartender to two framed photographs on the back wall: one of Babe Ruth and one of Billy Martin, the manager of the Yankees. There were other photographs, of other famous people, on other walls. “But behind the bar,” says Billy Joe, “there were just two: Babe Ruth and my dad.”
Courtesy of the Killebrew Family (Killebrew); Jim Kerlin/AP (Hodges); Courtesy of the Martin Family (Martin); Bettmann/Getty Images (Killebrew)
