Choosiest and most bedizened of attire and ceremonial of all eating and guzzling posses in the United States is probably a learned gathering of tosspots and mousse-munchers known as the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin which regularly meets in ceremonial robe in one of New York's or Washington's tonier taverns to toast itself in the best Burgundies and vilify lesser vintages.
The Chevaliers du Tastevin lay claim to a noble lineage and are, in fact, a semiofficial French order of knighthood whose membership and guest lists are resonant with the names of French officialdom, ministers, ambassadors, and other functionaries, but which in the United States embraces the merest handful of super snooty members, most of whom are professionally involved in the wine or allied trades. As a vintner's guild there is nothing on earth so eclectic in its tastes, so formidable in the prestige carried by its endorsements, or so terrible in denunciation of dubious bottlings.
Two or three times a year the Chevaliers hoist themselves into white ties and tailcoats, since dinner jackets are not tolerated at their chapter meetings, adjust their military and foreign decoration ribbons, hang a silver wine-taster's cup around their necks on a crimson sash, and sit down to eight or ten courses prepared by chefs at the Waldorf, St. Regis, or Ritz Carlton, who fumble at their beads and cross themselves piously before undertaking such an assignment in transcendental gastronomy.
The favorite chef of the Chevaliers, if repeated command performances are any index, is slim, laughing, and far from austere Gabriel Lugot of the Waldorf, a witty and eloquent man of the world who makes as ready an after-dinner speech as the Grand Master himself and knows most of the members personally. At their most recent Victory Chapter, a few weeks ago, Chef Lugot ran up for the beribboned eat-alls seven succulent courses, served on the Waldorf's gold plate of state and washed down by five wines of distinction or controversial merit and an assortment of after-dinner spirits. The big moments were a wonderful salmon served “sailor fashion,” in court-bouillon, an exquisite saddle of spring lamb entirely devoid of the conventional American mint sauce which wine drinkers view with horrified dismay as a confusion of flavors, the first authentic Strasbourg foie gras to be seen at a large dinner since the wars, a variety of Camemberts and “cousin cheeses,” and a dessert consisting of entire Hawaiian pineapples filled with pineapple milk sherbet and upholstered in spun confectioner's sugar.
The wines were more or less conventional until the enchanted Chevaliers encountered the noblest vintage of the evening, a magnificent Musigny of 1934 bottled by the Comte de Vogüé, and from then on the wine butlers in their gold chains of office operated at a double scurry around the perimeter of the Waldorf's Jansen Suite. For the initiation ceremonies which followed, a huge silver flagon of Richebourg Domaine de la Romanée Conti 1933 was used, and between the Richebourg and the Musigny and a number of bottles of Hines An- tique Cognac which made their appearances from time to time, everyone was able to endure the speaking.
The Chevaliers trace their antecedents back to the first Grand Master of the order, François Rabelais, and the society has flourished, like mushrooms, underground in the cellars of Burgundy since the twelfth century. Originally conceived as an annual conclave of the more noted vintners and wine merchants of Burgundy, who met among the casks and racked bottles of their wares and celebrated with prodigious feats of subterranean drinking, the Order has now elevated itself to a status of international importance in the wine trade, and its ranks are ornamented by names mighty and ponderous in the cooper's yards of the world.
Its chapters are nothing if not stately, at least up until an advanced hour when smudges of Burgundian origin begin to stain the shirt bosoms of the members. The Grand Officer, Jules Bohy, wears a robe of watered crimson silk fringed with ermine, and his mace of office is a root from the vineyards of Romanée Conti. Initiations are conducted before an altar of wine barrels, and a great deal of the ritual of the dinners is in the heavily Latinate lingua franca of the Middle Ages. Menus are printed in four colors with gold leaf, and each course is formally announced before its service by the Grand Officer. By the time Chef Lugot came up from his kitchens to make a bow and hoist a ceremonial beaker of Richebourg with the “convives,” the singing was not exactly in French nor precisely in English.
There is not a French hand laundry in New York that can't tell from next day's crop of dappled dress shirts when the Chevaliers du Tastevin have been riding their way through the Park Avenue night.
The chances are that Manhattan's most exclusively masculine club, since even the University and similar onetime butch tongs have admitted ladies to the premises, is the Turkish Bath at the Biltmore where, of an afternoon, the mighty and the witty foregather to stew and slenderize themselves in the hot room and holler murder under the ice showers. Not so long ago Al Smith was admittedly the dean of the Turkish towel brigade, and now the race for senatorial honors is between James A. Farley and Mr. Stettinius, both of whom are regulars in good standing. Other aficionados of the hot rooms are Gene Tunney, John Ringling North, and Steve Hannagan, handiest of all press agents when it comes to big-time promotion. Louis Bromfield adds literary flavor when he is on the town, a truant from agricultural pursuits in Ohio; Iles Brody, the viveur, occasionally rids himself of a pound or two of good living in its steamy premises; Bill Wister, son of the lettered Owen Wister, gets a now-and-then scrubbing; and Ben Sonenberg, whose hallmarks of distinction are the last four-button suits in town and an amazing pair of handlebar mustaches, fascinates beholders by imitating a somnolent seal as he paddles across the plunge. Turkish bathing may not have the same hold on masculine fashion that it did in the eighties and nineties when everything was Turkish from carpets and tobacco to coffee and candies, but the lazy man's exercise still has its followers.
Because, by the time this report on the current pulse and fever chart of Broadway makes its appearance, the Old Vic Company will have, Arab-like, folded its tents and departed for its native London, and because, too, its skirmishes with the Muse have been so widely and comprehensively reported already, this department will make no detailed report of the many talents of the British tarriers at the Century Theater.
Overcoming the disadvantage of being housed in New York's most preposterously uncomfortable and evilly maintained playhouse, where the nightly battles between the patrons and the house staff transcend in fury and uncouth exchanges anything witnessed by the English knights at Crécy or Harfleur, the visiting English hung up such a record for sustained triumphs that any reappearance in future years is assured the status of a national institution. His appearance here in the opening stanzas of Shakespeare's English historical cycle, which will presumably continue into Henry VIII and its conclusion at some later date, combined with the release of his stupendous film of Henry V, probably have achieved for Laurence Olivier the position of ranking living Shakespearean.
Briefly: if, as, and when the Old Vic troupers return to these shores, Americans will be well advised to put them down as an absolute “must” in their book of expected futures.
By the time this issue of GOURMET achieves public utterance there will have been made available to filmgoers what has already been widely publicized in advance by Time and other agencies as one of the authentically great motion pictures of the era. The Theater Guild's presentation of Laurence Olivier's Henry V has already caused a great deal of trepidation in Hollywood and is certain to cause even more grief and local soul-searching when it is popularly released, if for no other reason than that the technique of its photography so far transcends anything ever done in color in this country as to make American color films by comparison the merest off-register comic supplements held up to the finest Powers color plates. Whether it is the patience of English genius, a photogenic quality of the Irish sunlight in which the battle scenes of Henry V were filmed, or chemical processes as yet unknown to the laboratories of Rochester and Los Angeles, this department does not pretend to know. The fact stands that never to date has any motion picture, American or foreign, been possessed of the richness, fidelity, and opulence of tone values which Henry V brings to the filming of the depiction of the Battle of Agincourt, the French court of the period, the Globe Theater of Shakespeare's London, or the entire tapestry of Middle Ages chivalry represented by the story.
Henry V was conceived by Mr. Olivier and the British authorities in the height of the wars as a noble and moving fragment of Commonwealth propaganda, a sort of spiritual oriflammed for the rallying of English loyalties everywhere in the tradition of an earlier Noel Coward Cavalcade. Released and witnessed in times of comparative peace, it is still the most authentic Shakespeare ever to have been filmed and a document of incomparable chivalry and beauty.
There is no opportunity here for any reviewing of the entirety of this most masterly two and a half hours of medieval pageantry, much of it filmed in twodimensional focus to achieve a brilliant verisimilitude of pre-Renaissance pictorial art. If there is any more profound symbolism to the cresting tide and its abatement at Agincourt of armored chivalry as represented by the mounted knights of France, it has been understated in the picture in favor of the sheer heroic cyclorama of war at the dawn of the age of gunpowder. The superlative shot of the mounted court of France drinking its battle toast against the lily banners a moment before the English archers ended forever the supremacy of individual chivalry is perhaps, in its achievement and its implications, the most stupendous scene ever recorded in motion pictures.
By the time this brief memorandum is available, Henry V will have become common currency over and above all the opposition of the embattled booking agencies for American films. There is no single Hollywood production since The Birth of a Nation that will not seem a shabby essay in cheap and meretricious romance by comparison.
MANHATTAN GLITTER: The exciting news to roaming gourmets that C. D. and Connie Stearns have again opened their celebrated Bird and Bottle Inn at Garrison, just off the Albany Post Road (and within handy seltzer squirt of Brown's Health Farm). This amiable outpost of the gustatory humanities boasts a classic cuisine and hand-picked cellars and, should the mood overcome you, you can spend the night on the premises and, in fact, stay around as long as your banker will advance you credit… The sight of the venerable Pat Rafferty, long king of the Plaza jehus and retired these past few years, back again on the box of his victoria, although he is past eighty and not what could be described as slender. He's one of the really old-time cabbies and not just a stable boy with a plug hat, and has known all the swells since the golden days of Bustanoby's and Rector's.… The intelligence from Charles H. Baker, Jr., a brother practitioner of gracious guzzling and inspired ingestion, that his Gentleman's Companion, a two-volume variorum guide to exotic eating and drinking, has sold to date 60,000 copies at a luxury price and is going into new printings all the time.… The wonderful Hawaiian pineapples standing two feet high in the window of the Madison Grocery and Hicks, symbols that trans-Pacific happy days are here again at least.… Luncheon these days at the Colony where, at one recent luncheon sitting, the observer could count eight monocles, two archdukes, two ambassadors, two ministers, and enough small fry—English titles, Powers models, and magazine executives—to fill Yankee Stadium.… The upper case military clientele any evening at the Del Bello Inn at Stony Point on the Hudson. It's a favorite with the plush West Point trade and its management was trained in magnificences at El Morocco under the incomparable Carino.… The renewed availability, after several years, of the most magnificent champagne of the living generation, Moët and Chandon's unsurpassable Dom Perignon Cuvée in a new bottling, 1928, which is the successor to the now almost vanished 1921 vintage which rocked the wine world on its heels, both literally and metaphorically. … The unanimous report of all local luxury hotel proprietors, wine stewards, and restaurateurs that the town is on the biggest champagne binge in the history of silver ice buckets.… “It doesn't make any difference how many hundred cases of what brand, what year, or what cuvée we get into the cellar,” reports Prince Serge Obolensky at the Plaza, “it is all sold before the steward is able to place his next order.”… At the Colony and Jack and Charlie's it is the same. “The reason we don't have printed wine cards any more is that we'd be out of any single bin of imported wine before we could get a printer to set it in type,” reports Gene Cavallero.… The same is pleasantly true of almost all luxury food and drink and the country has never before extended itself to such gustatory proportions of elegance as since the end of hostilities.… Incidentally, at the ever up and coming Plaza you can, if you are friends with the management, have at the same price as any other suite of rooms, one decorated by Lady Mendl or Cecil Beaton if it's not at the moment occupied.… Rolls Royce Motor Company plans include a stupendous comeback in the United States now that times have returned when so many potential customers think nothing of paying ＄18,000 for an automobile, and plenty of folk are in the market for cars by the half dozen!. …