New Year's is, traditionally, the season for resolutions. The particular New Year's you have in mind may, of course, vary in favor of the conventional January 1, or Russian New Year or Yom Kippur or even, conceivably, Happy New Fiscal Year. To the essentially urban intelligence, however, the New Year comes at a period indeterminate in the calendar but nonetheless strictly identified by the disappearance of summer attire in public places, summer buffets from restaurants, and summer faces from hotel lounges, and the happy reappearance of bowler hats, first nights on Broadway, and Beth Leary at her accustomed table at the Colony. People are back in town: Southampton tans are fading, advertising executives have long since disposed of fall fashion schedules and are thinking of Florida exploitation, and the doorman at Monte Carlo has changed into his winter uniform. In a word, the season is on.
The phrase “the season” has about it an undeniable cachet of urbanity and snobbish superiority, simply because a “season” is unthinkable without open town houses, dinner parties, the opera, and, in good times, the Horse Show, debutante balls at the Ritz, and the other identifying hallmarks of metropolitan existence. New York's “season” has expanded itself over the years to include almost everything between the opening of the first Shubert musical of the fall to Harvard-Yale boat-race week at New London. In much the same manner, San Francisco gets a head start on everyone by having its very splendid and very gold-and-white opera in the improbable month of September.
The impending autumn in New York is freighted with fair promise of being the most stupefyingly elegant and probably the most expensively upholstered period of concentrated essence of urbanity since before the wars even began to be thought of. The prices on everything are undeniably up, and people's inhibitions about almost everything are equally patently down. Grouse from the Scotch moors are again in the restaurants; Moët and Chandon, through the monocled agency of Nino lo Savio, have declared a new vintage year of Dom Perignon Cuvée for 1928; Justerini and Brooks's 1878 Cognac is $38 a bottle at Sherry's and, what's more, selling; there will be no fewer than four ballet companies competing for the favor of the fevered balletomanes of Manhattan; a new Noel Coward play is scheduled, and the one and only Clifton Webb is back in town to appear in it. Labor organizers are sporting $275 dinner suits and brushing their teeth in English export champagne; Rolls Royces with footmen are back in circulation; the Public Library lions have had their faces lifted; Jack and Charlie are considering a businessman's lunch for the modest consideration of $8 a serving; and Random House has sold out an edition of Thomas Aquinas at $18 a copy.
You tell me what the answer is!
In the face of all these superlative circumstances this department thought it might not be ill advised for it to make a few resolutions for the beginning of its own personal New Year which begins coincidentally with Margaret and Brock Pemberton's first cocktail party in honor of somebody connected with Harvey. They include the following:
At a recent luncheon, given by the wine trade at San Francisco's incomparable Palace for André Simon, and at which this department had the honor of sharing the speaker's table, the world's No. 1 gourmet made some observations on the subject of drinking in general and the selection of wine in particular which seemed so admirably just and so excellent in content as to warrant printing for an even wider circulation.
“When I was a young man,” said Mr. Simon, “and being schooled in matters of the world, my father took me, in the normal course of events, to a tailor, a hat maker, a maker of boots, and a wine merchant, so that my tastes might be properly guided and that I might be suitably fitted by the merchant of each of these articles of trade. In those days a man of a certain position in the world did not wear suits or hats or shoes taken from a rack and of universal pattern, nor did he drink machine-made Martinis or a château-bottled claret simply because it was widely advertised and exploited. He drank a wine, the way he commanded the style of his hat, because it suited his taste and was part of his person.
“May I commend to you such a way of choosing your wine? That it be adapted to your own individual and particular person and taste and be as much of an expression of yourself as your necktie or the pictures on the walls of your home? To tell a man what is good for him to drink is a great folly, and he should not be guided by the decisions and arbitraments of self-styled experts. The wine a man drinks is almost the ultimate expression of his individuality, and a wine should be fitted to his temperament the way a shirt is to his bodily measurements. May I suggest to you that, without unseemly arrogance, you insist that, so far as you yourself are concerned, your choice and taste in wine are irreproachable and not subject to the decisions of other men? If you abide by your own decisions in the matter, even if it leads to drinking whisky with your dessert or Burgundy for breakfast, you will live more happily and know more good things than through any other course of worldly conduct.”
Possibly as some sort of sign of the times, this department recently received in its morning mail the suggestion from an affable but demented colleague in the business of reporting the New York restaurant scene that there should be organized a food and wine writers' guild, a sort of parallel to the Drama Critics' Circle, only embracing in its membership the several score writers engaged in chronicling professionally the saloon, restaurant, and night club scenes of Manhattan.
Because it is quite possible that such a tong or blackmail league in the interest of free loading may actually come into existence, although it will most certainly do so without the participation of this department, let us briefly consider the demerits of the notion. What purpose, indeed, what valid purpose, could such a confraternity of professional eat-alls and tosspots possibly serve? Careful scrutiny can reveal no least vestigial trace of legitimacy in the project. Leaving quite aside for the moment the disinclination of any first-rate practitioner of any calling to associate himself actively with less recognized practitioners, and thereby reducing his product to the level of the lowest common denominator of the group, what end could such an organization pursue? It could gather its members together for an occasional free feed and drunk at the expense of some restaurant selected for this dubious honor. Its members could add to their professional by-line the initials “Member of the N.Y.S.F.G. & G.” (Society for Gulping and Guzzling). It could, through whatever system of selection and awards it might care to evolve, designate various restaurants as the recipients of its official approval.
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.