Enjoy comfort food in Burbank at this comfy neighborhood restaurant

The menu for The New Deal — an affable neighborhood café on Magnolia Boulevard in Burbank — informs us that “FDR’s favorite sandwich of all time was a CHEESY, GOOEY, GRILLED CHEESE.”

That’s a bit of presidential trivia that appears adjacent to — what else? — that very sandwich, served on country white bread. It’s a sandwich that both describes the era in which FDR enjoyed it … and the restaurant itself. In both cases, it’s an exercise in soothing nostalgia that’s a balm for us in these hard times.

We’re told as well that Green Goddess dressing was invented in San Francisco as a tribute to the hit play of that name. And that the Cobb salad was created at the Brown Derby in Hollywood. Plus, the addition of spicy Italian sausage to Mama’s Meatloaf is a “trip down memory lane.”

The burgers are called The All American, The Blue Eagle and The Roosevelt. The soup, the essence of nostalgia, is Epic Tomato.

Tomato soup and white bread toast were the foods of my childhood. Which makes a meal at The New Deal a tasty stroll down memory lane — the whole point of the place, of course.

But it’s notable that this is not a self-conscious, somewhat kitschy return to yesteryear, in the style of the long defunct Ed Debevic’s chain, where the servers dressed as characters from way back when.

Rather, The New Deal is a café where the dominant motif is comfort, and comfort foods. And where the shelves are decorated with several garage sales worth of windup alarm clocks, AM radios and manual typewriters. There’s chocolate layer cake under glass. There are old school maps on the walls. But there are also vegan nachos, vegan burgers and veggie Sloppy Joe’s. The eggs are organic. The beers are from all over the world. Way back then, beer was just … beer. Now, like so much else, it’s a lot more.

And so are so many of the dishes. A restaurant drenched in buckets of retro wouldn’t be serving fried pickles with Sriracha mayo. Or, perhaps … they would.

Sriracha sauce was created back in the 1940s by a Thai woman named Thanom Chakkapak in the town of Sriracha. And she took the notion from Cantonese immigrants to Thailand back in the early 1900s, who popularized garlic and chili sauce.

Fried pickles are a newer notion, dating back to the early 1960s, when they were popularized by Bernell “Fatman” Austin at his Duchess Drive-Thru in Atkins, Arkansas. He used to serve it at the Picklefest in Atkins — and his original recipe is a secret to this day. His dipping sauce was ketchup. So, I guess there’s plenty of nostalgia there. But it’s not something FDR chewed with his melted cheese while creating the New Deal to help pull America out of the Great Depression.

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The menu meanders from dishes from back then, to dishes from here and now. The tomato soup (the very essence of rainy day dishes!), the Green Goddess salad, the farmers market wedge, the Brown Derby Cobb, the fried cod (with house-made tartar sauce), the cheesy mac and, of course, Mama’s Meatloaf — they all take us back on a journey through the years.

I didn’t grow up in a farmhouse — or even in rural America — but even in the urban chaos of my youth, these were dishes I knew well. Which I would eat when I got home for lunch from school. Which we’d have for Sunday night family meals. (If only the New Deal offered my mother’s wildly eccentric tater tot casseroles, I’d have fallen down the rabbit’s hole to a Formica-topped kitchen table atop a linoleum floor.)

But the year is 2024, and our eating habits have changed, evolved, hopefully become more … “mindful” … if not healthier. Thus, we have the sundry vegan and vegetarian dishes on the menu. (Back then, vegetarians were regarded as eccentrics with a vague patina of anti-American tendencies.)

But, there’s also an ahi tuna sandwich with wasabi mayo. There’s arugula with the cedar plank salmon. There’s sautéed kale. There are mahi mahi tacos. There are Buffalo chicken wings, and Buffalo cauliflower. And the roasted heirloom carrots come with burrata and pesto.

There are foods that were unknown in the 1930s, but are well known in the 2020s. The world has changed. The world has also remained the same. And comfort foods are something we’ll always need. During hard times and harder times, comfort foods are there to … comfort.

Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email mreats@aol.com.

The New Deal

• Rating: 2.5
• Address: 3501 Magnolia Blvd., Burbank
• Information: 818-861-7731, www.thenewdealrestaurant.com
• Cuisine: Cal-American
• When: Lunch and dinner, Tuesday through Sunday
• Details: Beer and wine; reservations not necessary
• Atmosphere: Cheerful neighborhood hang, popular with locals, with a sizable assortment of wine bar sips and snacks, and bits of New Deal-era ephemera on the walls.
• Prices: About $25 per person
• On the menu: 10 Appetizers ($7-$16), 4 Salads ($16-$21), 5 Burgers ($17-$19), 6 Sandwiches ($17-$19), 7 Entrees ($17-$32)
• Credit cards: MC, V
• What the stars mean: 4 (World class! Worth a trip from anywhere!), 3 (Most excellent, even exceptional. Worth a trip from anywhere in Southern California.), 2 (A good place to go for a meal. Worth a trip from anywhere in the neighborhood.) 1 (If you’re hungry, and it’s nearby, but don’t get stuck in traffic going.) 0 (Honestly, not worth writing about.