Now any of these functions is, on its face, open to suspicion. The business of free loading by reporters in their individual capacities has long been frowned on by responsible publishers and by reporters themselves who are possessed of the least bit of integrity. Putting the arm of an organized and possibly influential group on the town's restaurateurs would only be an arrogant and offensive exaggeration of this evil. It is frequently difficult for the individual writer to draw a hair line between what he feels he may and may not accept in the way of free drinks, food, and other courtesies of entertainment, but the wholesale acceptance of entertainment and hospitality would constitute a singularly flagrant and outrageous breach of professional ethics.
As for the awards which might possibly lie within the gift of such a group, their decisions would without conceivable exception be guided by various expediencies such as the necessity for rotation and other considerations quite divorced from pure gastronomic merit. Nor are New York's restaurant reporters altogether above possessing favorite restaurateurs whose names appear in the public prints far beyond their deserving on a purely meritorious basis.
And as for organizing the soup reporters and entree interviewers on a purely social and self-contained basis, heaven in its wisdom forfend! With one or two exceptions there are no two of New York's restaurant writers who can pass the mutual time of day without the possibility of a stabbing, and one has but to turn to the record of the Drama Critics' awards for a paradigm of what can happen in a judicial group every member of which is possessed of a separate genius for tumult and disagreement. A congress of food writers could serve no thinkable purpose other than a major breach of the peace.
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