The season's award for the most brilliantly executed gustatory barn-raising goes high, wide, and handsomely to the Pierre Hotel's chef des cuisines, Manuel Orta, for the splendid caviar carnival he arranged for the most recent dinner of the Chevaliers du Taste-vin. The whole business was a monstrous success. The dinner was beautifully devised and expertly mounted, altogether a triumphant production number and easily the finest the Chevaliers have enjoyed since before the war. This department recalls one dinner held at the St. Regis in the regime of Gaston Lauryssen which could stack up against the Pierre's, but nothing since then.
For one thing, the executive committee of the Chevaliers, headed by Jules Bohy, Michel Dreyfus, Gordon Brown, and Jean Ravaud, held no fewer than three rehearsal dinners with various menus before the final and happy selection was achieved. For another, the society relaxed its regulation against donations by wine-dealer members with the result that, for the first time in the history of the New York chapter, there was champagne on the menu. Champagne indeed, five choices and in seemingly limitless quantity. While champagne may seem heresy in the light of the strict Burgundian faith of the order, it certainly does things at the end of a dinner which cannot precisely be achieved with any other wine.
The menu marched grandly and as a state dinner should for so notable a confraternity through hors d'oeuvres and a double consommé, essentially frivolous trifles, to a salmon Chambord with écrevisses and truffles, which was a masterpiece of the fish chef's department. The third plate was a larded filet of beef which was substantially furnished forth and beautifully underdone, and the fourth plate was pheasant volière, in full plumage, served with a delicate mousse of foie gras and an altogether commendable salad of ice-cold endive. The pheasant was followed by an assortment of imported cheeses, so hard to come by nowadays, a spectacular iced confection for dessert, and the conventional coffee strong enough for anvil-floating.
The wines ran through a gamut of sherries, a Chevalier Montrachet, Les Demoiselles 1937, a Beaune Grèves 1938, and, of course, the Clos de Vougeot 1937 which is also from the Chevaliers' private cuvée and specially bottled for them. The champagne, which began to appear about the time the pheasant made its state entry, included Bollinger Brut 1937, George Goulet 1937, Ernest Irroy Brut 1941, Mumm's Cordon Rouge 1937, and Tattinger 1937. To this department's taste, the Bollinger was the great wine of this category and admirably suited to the fancy ices which comprised dessert, but that didn't prevent our sampling each of the other four. For a number of years now we have been favoring the Mumm's 1933 vintage, a big, vital, and highly alcoholic wine, and the 1937 seemed to have sacrificed some of these qualities in favor of more delicacy and bouquet. Generally speaking, we place our sparkling trust in Bollinger, Perrier-Jouet, and Krug, especially when they come in double magnums.
The wine, which was served in a splendid silver chalice borrowed for the occasion from a Fifth Avenue silver-smith, was a Vosne Romanée Malconsorts 1936, and, while only the newly initiated members of the order had this wine, it was reported on most favorably by them. The matter of the chalice is one of the club's mysteries. The same one seldom appears twice, and it occurs to mind that, if we are only borrowing the prop, why not a gold one and be done with it?
When Frank Paget, managing director of the Pierre, produced Mr. Orta at the conclusion of the meal, the applause amounted to an ovation. Mr. Orta is a Spaniard, and to make such an impression on a posse of confirmed Francophiles was something of an achievement. The late Charles Scotto, onetime chef of the Pierre and grand old man of American gastronomy, would have approved the whole symphonic performance from caviar to cognac. As has been remarked before, it is the best Chevalier dinner in recent history, and whatever establishment next undertakes their entertainment will be hard put to it to devise its match.
Even as far east as Manhattan, reports are coming through of the epic convulsion which is turning Colorado into two armed camps, the like of which hasn't been seen since the bad old days of the railroad wars between the Santa Fe and the Rio Grande back in the seventies and eighties. The issue at stake is whether or not the celebrated old Opera House at Central City, Colorado's most publicized and, at some seasons of the year, most populous "ghost town," shall be modernized and streamlined, as well as fireproofed.
Every year Central makes a fine thing out of its six-week opera season with large and expensive casts recruited from New York's Metropolitan. Only fifty miles from Denver and awash with the atmosphere of bonanza times and the legends of pioneer days and Haw Taber, Central City each summer relives its opulent youth with all Denver and Colorado Springs society on hand for first night and boiling shoals of solvent tourists for the rest of the season. Prime attractions are the Teller House, dating from the seventies and with every bonanza property of the age intact, the Glory Hole Saloon run by the Widow Wilson down the street, and, of course, the Opera House itself with its beautiful curtain, dress circle, curving staircase, and perfect acoustics.
Now the trustees of the Opera Association, which is closely connected with the University of Denver, are talking of modernizing the Opera House with fireproof "improvements" and, incidentally, a hundred extra seats which will eliminate the staircase, the balcony, and the dress circle. A substantial part of Denver is screaming vandalism and threatening to withdraw its financial support of Central if the façade of the venerable building is changed in any single detail.
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