Always a midst where public living and dining have been both luxurious and important, Colorado's hotels, saloons, and eating places have been celebrated since the days when Silver Dollar Tabor imported a French chef to lend ton to his beloved Saddle Rock Saloon in Leadville, and the era when Harry Tammen, later famed as the co-publisher of the Denver Post, was chief barkeep at the legendary Windsor Hotel in Denver's Laramie Street.
The scene has, of course, changed since pioneer times when Jack Morrisey and Thomas F. Walsh, father of Evalyn Walsh McLean, were satraps of Ophir, Ouray, and Telluride, and when Louis de Puy's Café de Paris at Georgetown was rated the finest restaurant west of the Mississippi. Those were the spacious years when the best hangings in Durango had their origins in speedy justice in the front room of the Nose Paint Saloon and when the Mears Toll Gate House at Bear Creek Falls advertised its bill as including “Lunch, Apple Grove Whiskies, and Fine Cigars.” The Teller House at Central City was setting forth for the enchanted miners at Christmas dinner a spun-sugar dessert representing “The Teller House Illuminated With Central Gas,” and a few years later the famed Antlers of Colorado Springs amazed the world by letting it be known that there was no game course having its origins in the Western Hemisphere that its chefs were not prepared to produce at a moment's notice.
Colorado, as befitted the most opulent of bonanza communities, did its eating and drinking in style, and today there are still vestigial traces of grandeur, although they are implicit with confusions for persons who are accustomed to encountering de luxe hotel life, fine food, and the best wines and spirits, all on the same premises. The two most celebrated hotels in the commonwealth, for instance, are the wonderful Brown Palace in Denver and the late, very great Spencer Penrose's monument to immortality, the Broadmoor at Colorado Springs.
Despite their world reputations, however, neither of these two costly and fashionable establishments serves food that would attract favorable attention from the Wine and Food Society, and the menus of the Broadmoor are designed with such poverty of imagination and served in such mean portions as to verge on constituting a local scandal. At the same time the service and appointments of both hotels in every way transcend reproach, their bars and wine lists are on a par with the best in New York and San Francisco, and, indeed, the cellars of the Broadmoor are world famous. Knowing Coloradoans live, when occasion arises, and do their drinking on all occasions in the Brown and Broadmoor, but at the Springs they dine at the Antlers or Indian Grill, in Trinidad at the Columbian Hotel, in Leadville at the Golden Burro, and in Denver at the Cosmopolitan.
This paradox, particularly in the case of the Broadmoor, which is, save in its kitchens, admirably conducted by Jack Hawkins, sometime of New York's Knickerbocker Grill and the Whitehall at Palm Beach, naturally arouses comment and inquiry. Why should a house which carries sixty-year-old bonded bourbons as its regular, commercial bar whiskies and lists an 1858 Otard Cognac bottled for Park and Tilford as the veriest incidental on its brandy list, serve, literally, an item marked “Peanut Butter Sandwich—.40 cents” as, believe it or not, an entree on its formal dinner menu? The Broadmoor charges, gets, and deserves ＄75 a day for its celebrated lanai suites overlooking their incomparable view of the Rockies and Pikes Peak, while meat balls with spaghetti is the most formal and luxurious food available in its restaurants.
The answer to this folly seems to be that the Broadmoor is burdened with a chef de cuisine dating from an earlier regime whose respect for his patrons is approximately that of a crosstown bus driver in Manhattan and whose qualifications were never other than those of a short-order chef in a Broadway cafeteria. As soon as practicable Mr. Hawkins plans the rectification of this gastronomic street accident, and the Broadmoor's patrons can dine off something more imposing than meat balls and peanut butter amidst the beautiful and impressive surroundings which go with the Hotel's Ice Palace, artificial lake, spacious terraces, golf course, private zoo, carriage houses, and illimitable luxury devisings.
The cellars arrangement of the Broadmoor is unusual since its resources derive from the personal cellars of Senator Penrose, who seems to have bought up much of the best liquor in the United States prior to prohibition and stored it in one of the impregnable vaults under one of the artificial lakes at Broadmoor. Once or twice a year now the management of the hotel calls for Federal inspectors, opens the sealed vaults, and has revenue stamps affixed to what it estimates will be in requisition during the next few months. The convenience of this arrangement, not to mention the enormous savings in interest on liquor taxes, will at once be apparent. Almost all of Broadmoor preprohibition wines are gone, either through consumption or from extreme age, but some clue to the remaining spirits may be gained from the inclusion in the regular bar list of such ryes and bourbons as Old Lexington, distilled 1891, bottled 1914; Hannisville Rye, distilled December, 1911; Mt. Vernon Rye, distilled 1907, bottled 1921; A. Overholt & Co., Rye, distilled May, 1911.
From these casual jottings it will be seen that there is hardly anything wrong with the Broadmoor that a first-class revolution in the kitchen will not remedy.
One more Colorado note: to the effect that the old-time sort of wellworn hospitality is not confined alone to the great cities of the plains and foothills, but flourishes with amazing vitality way over in back of the mountains. There is, for example, the excellent Strator Hotel in the still-frontier town of Durango, a Victorian structure dating from before the turn of the century where jack boots in the lobby are the rule rather than the exception, and the individual porterhouse steaks tip the scales at four pounds each. The Strator, whose directing genius is “Miss Alice,” a considerable local power in a variety of circles, possesses a new wing of streamlined, air-conditioned, modern apartments whose taste and comfort would raise the eyebrows of Prince Serge Obolensky of the Plaza. Bonded bourbon in its bar is two bits for two ounces and there are some rooms whose view gives on the wonderful, narrow-gauge railroad yards of the all-powerful Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad. For some people the Strator is heaven and that includes this department.
Now that the shooting is over, and loyalty to God and country is no longer synonymous with a toleration of the infamous service and shabby merchandise so long excused by the phrase, “There's a war on,” it is possible to comment on some aspects of passenger travel by train during the years of the great hysteria. Quite aside from a preposterous military whimsy which sent the embattled personnel of the land on a sort of Cook's tour of the countryside and utilized most of the available passenger equipment to transport Texas cowboys to Kennebunkport and Minnesota farmers to Miami, not all the railroads came out of the war of the Pullmans with flying colors so far as the traveling public is concerned.
The food and dining-car service, generally speaking, alienated vast numbers of potential postwar patrons who were snatched on every hand by the flying machine companies which maintained a uniform courtesy and fed their passengers for free. Many railroads, and to name names, the Pennsy in exaggerated particular, indulged their virulent hatred of the demon passenger to a degree of insolence and starvation combined. Nor is there any validity in their argument that steaks and strawberries, pheasant and fine service were not available. It is disproved instanter by the railroads and trains which kept the faith and provided comfort and good food throughout a period of general abuse and imposition: The Baltimore and Ohio, the New Haven, the Twentieth Century Limited, and the City of San Francisco.
The most conspicuous example of train management which refused to be confounded by the idiocies of Washington fiat and throughout the entire war maintained unabated its excellent menus and glittering service was the Century. At no time did it lack steaks or butter, good whisky or the details of luxury which have always been associated with its name, and it was apparent that the executives of the New York Central System were determined that, come what might, they were going to maintain the decencies on one train at least.
By contrast the Pennsy's Broadway management indulged its almost pathological hatred of passengers to a point where its frankly inferior food was served in portions which would arouse protest in any municipal almshouse. This department was, upon one occasion, served as a dinner hors d'oeuvre on this pride of the road's luxury flyers, a single sardine and was assured by the steward that this was the regulation helping.
The railroads, generally speaking, are in a position where they are going to have to justify their existence as agencies of passenger travel in the face of the most luxurious imaginings on the part of the air lines. If they abandon the idea of making 1000 per cent profit on every sardine served and get together a good five-dollar dinner for seventy-five cents, they will be a long way toward holding their friends. This practice was common in the old days of cut-throat competition among the railroads themselves and its revival is plainly on the cards. By Federal enactment the rail-roads are prevented from giving away anything in the form of actual transportation but there is no law to prevent their serving fresh caviar, Scotch grouse, and flaming soufflés for a dollar and a quarter.
As this bulletin is rushed smoking to the compositors, it can be reported that the Manhattan theater season, to date inexpressibly in the dumps so far as new shows are concerned, has come to life with at least one new and uproarious attraction, the long-awaited State of the Union by the team of Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay. Produced by Leland Hayward and staged by Bretaigne Windust at the Hudson, the arrangement is the answer to a theatergoer's prayer for something new, valid, and tumultuous, and it is, of course, the flaming success of the Broadway moment. It is amusing to know that, already swollen beyond the pale of avarice with royalties on other sumptuous smash hits, the Messrs. Lindsay and Crouse rationed shares in the ownership of State of the Union to such of their friends and Broadway worthies as had not hitherto profited by being financially associated in Life with Father or Arsenic and Old Lace.
State of the Union, if you can bribe your way into it, is a screaming satire on the current political scene, the most obvious of whose impersonations is of the late Wendell Willkie, but in all of whose characters, some raffish, some pretentious, some farcical, are recognizable some of the best-known occupants of Washington's drawing rooms. The merits of the script lie in the circumstance that it spares nobody and that everyone, from Herbert Swope to Cissie Patterson, is somewhere caught in its ridiculous economy.
As its wealthy proprietors can well and deservedly afford, State of the Union is lavishly upholstered with such talent as Minor Watson, Ralph Bellamy, and Myron McCormick, and opulently staged at the Hudson. The whole setup is an admirable justification for the most capitalistic sort of theater as represented by its management and backers.
One other offering in recent weeks has been hailed as a nonesuch of the theater, at least by Damon Walker. It is a musical with an even more than usually meaningless title, Are You With It?, which is possessed of a not inconsiderable vitality and a great deal of brassy noise. Joan Roberts is its principal ornament and its plot concerns an insurance agent who leaves his job to join a carnival troupe. It will do until some better musical comes along.