Even in the field of the theater and with a singularly uninspired season behind it, New York has become the capital of the English-speaking theater world, and it is beyond any comparison the best and most imaginatively fed city of all. Its restaurants alone would occupy a pilgrimage of years' duration on the part of a pious gourmet, and it is a matter of debate whether Manhattan or Paris is the world center of feminine fashion.
While life in New York can probably never achieve the spacious style and grand manner of the classic of all great cities, San Francisco, since neither its tradition nor its geographic location can lay such a hold upon the imagination, it is still a place where the good life can be achieved in a very emphatic way. With the decline of Rome, the fine things of the world all drifted to Constantinople, and with the decay of London, New York has assumed a new vitality all its own.
While this department is usually content to leave the field of pure gastronomy and the aesthetics of dining to the various other entirely adequate agencies maintained by GOURMET, we recently had an experience which gave us, as the phrase goes, pause. We attended a semi-public dinner of some state and circumstance given at the Waldorf-Astoria with a good deal of gastronomic fanfare and costing the convives, as the menu elegantly designed the guests, a cool twenty-five dollars a cover. The three principal courses were formally listed on the menu as Le Pompano dans Son Braisage, Le Dindonneau de Saison, Sauce Prairiale, and Le Cochon de Lait, Enrobé en Sa Gelée. These magnificences when served turned out to be a composite of pompano filets, excellently broiled and seasoned and served in what might be termed an elegant fish hash; a fricassee of turkey; and with the salad, a thin slice of what is usually known as pork souse or head cheese, depending on one's regional vocabulary.
What this department is exercised by is not the rather pedestrian and commonplace fare masquerading under the magnificent pretensions of French culinary terminology, for this is an accepted and traditional devising of the haute cuisine and a rather pleasant way of dressing up and lending imagination to the menu. Indeed, there is a wholly enchanting imagery in describing pork souse as “milk-fed piglet, enrobed in his own jelly.” Nor is this department raising an eyebrow at the service by the Waldorf at a very fancy price of the component parts of the ＄1.75 house dinner in a less pretentious premises. That, too, is taken more or less for granted, and there were wines with the dinner which more nearly approximated justification of such expense.
What this department does take exception to is that here, at what might be termed a state dinner in one of the town's most pretentious and stately restaurants, every single course of importance was either a hash, a stew, or a ragout. Not a single course made its appearance uncarved, intact, and in the original dimensions intended by God and absolutely required at dinners possessed of any least claim at all upon style, circumstance, and propriety.
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