But Byfield's most secure and certainly most spectacular fame has been based on the Pump Room, its clientele of notables, and its gustatory conflagrations.
When on one occasion one of his guests remarked with surprise upon the number of combustible and incendiary dishes being paraded back and forth across his restaurant and seemed amazed to note that practically one out of three diners was wreathed in flames from shashlik or cerises jubilé or café diable, Byfield replied grandly: “Oh, the customers seem to like it and it doesn't do the food much harm!”
The fame of Byfield and the Pump Room in the Ambassador East, beyond any question the most beautiful restaurant in the United States, even including the celebrated Adam Oval Room in New York's Ritz-Carlton, rests on other things than Paine's Fireworks gastronomy and a genius for serving everything on fire without violating the municipal fire regulations, but the crêpes Louise and the crêpes Suzette and the crêpes à l'orange are important factors, and it has been Byfield's sense of exquisite showmanship as well as a sincere devotion to the principles of Brillat-Savarin that have made him one of the three or four most famous de luxe restaurateurs in the land. So luxurious, in fact, is the décor of the Pump Room, so upholstered the guests, and so regal the menu, that a Hollywood millionaire-actor with a fine urge for communist gestures once wrote in the guestbook: “There isn't anything wrong with the Pump Room that a good revolution wouldn't fix!”
It has long been a lament of the traveling public that an established racket, sponsored by all Chicago and abetted by the railroads of America, has, ever since the completion of the Pacific Railroad in 1869, made it necessary for every transcontinental voyager to stop over for at least a brief period in Chicago. Only by the elaborate stratagem of going by way of Saint Louis or New Orleans was it possible to avoid spending time and money in Chicago en route from one coast to the other, and the railroads and the municipalities contrived the same sharp practice in both of those cities, so that the traveler gained little in satisfaction and nothing at all in time by going to California over the Southern Pacific across Texas, or by way of the Wabash and Denver and Rio Grande Western across Missouri and Colorado. Chicago is a form of highway robbery, and there all travelers must dismount and deliver.
It seemed, therefore, not improbable that the custom of notables to break their transcontinental journey by coming up to lunch in Booth 1 with Ernie might diminish appreciably with the inauguration of Mr. Young's through Pullmans. It shortly appeared, however, that although Mr. Young's now celebrated pig might occupy the same drawing room from Grand Central to the Oakland Mole, he still would have to spend time in Chicago. The complexity of train movements through the metropolitan area and the departing schedules east and west to which through cars must accommodate themselves still required a stopover liberally in excess of the time requirements for a businessman's lunch, and, in the end, Mr. Young's pig had a chance to be watered or, indeed, sluiced with as much Dom Perignon Cuvée as his taste and means might indicate.
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