Los Angeles revisited a few weeks ago, for the first time in two years, revealed more conclusively than almost anything else that the gastronomic highlight of the current moment is an arrangement called Caesar's Salad and that its consumption is constant, universal, and something to make the public prints in any fountainhead of good living like GOURMET, as it has. Caesar's Salad, which is only infrequently encountered in restaurants in the East, but which will inevitably arrive in New York one of these fine days, is based on romaine instead of lettuce, chopped-up anchovies, a liberal inclusion of heavily garlic-flavored croutons, French dressing made slick by the inclusion of a couple of whole raw eggs, and the whole thing liberally showered with grated Parmesan.
At Romanoff's, where we were taken to luncheon by GOURMET's own Stephen Longstreet, with an assortment of local characters which included Bob Hope, Gregory La Cava, Barbara Stanwyck, and Hedda Hopper at adjacent tables, we were introduced to Caesar's Salad. At Dave Chasen's, where we dined that evening with Robert Hanley, the newly discovered and flourishing decorator of the County Strip, we were immediately advised that Caesar's Salad was the thing to have. The next evening at Hansen's Scandia Restaurant in Sunset Boulevard, the assembled chivalry to a man commanded Caesar's Salad, and subsequent skirmishes with the menus at Perino's, the Vine Street Brown Derby, the garden restaurant of the Town House, and other ranking restaurants of the City of Angels evolved the conviction that Caesar's Salad is as much of a part of the Hollywood pattern as swimming pools or the new look.
Something else new and enjoying a stupendous vogue among teen-agers and, for that matter, film folk engaged in the actual screening of pictures and hence on the wagon, are the two super chic ice cream parlors inaugurated by Will Wright, one located right smack dab in the middle of the Strip and the other in Beverly Hills, and both upholstered in sumptuous elegance by the abovementioned Hanley. Wright has given Los Angeles what appears, from the excitement it causes, to be the first real French ice cream it has ever encountered and is furnishing it forth in terms that Hollywood can understand—banana splits are a dollar flat—so that the carriage trade, at the moment represented by half-pint cars of English or Continental manufacture, draw up to his premises in droves.
Hanley, a former Broadway actor in the years before the wars, has also latched onto the snob appeal inherent in fantastic prices and necessary to the success of any product of any sort whatsoever in California, and simply won't look at the client who doesn't push a metaphorical wheelbarrow filled with currency in the door ahead of him. No new shop in the California Southland is happy about itself unless Hanley has invested it with pastel banquettes, white satin tufted furniture, and goose feathers generally.
The gastronomic pattern of Hollywood and Los Angeles varies extraordinarily little with the years. To the mind of this department, the best of everything can be encountered at the perennial Chasen's, an establishment reputedly underwritten by the New Yorker's Harold Ross, if one is possessed of no greater resources than, say, the Bank of America. This fiscal circumstance is partly mitigated by the habit of the management of buying about one drink out of two on the house so that by ten in the evening Chasen himself is giving a creditable imitation of Leon Errol, now and then assisted in the impersonation by Leon Errol himself. There's never a dull moment for either the gourmet or the sightseer and celebrity-hunter, and the press of business is so intense that the management was forced to demolish its Finnish bath, which once handily adjoined the bar, and turn it into more dining space. “Take your baths at home,” says Chasen.
Second on this reporter's dossier of eating places would come the Scandia, a new Scandinavian eating house with a charmingly robust menu and prices that don't scare the pants off the customers. A really wonderful sirloin there is $2.75, which, compared to most Hollywood tariffs, is ridiculously cheap, and the cracked crab is a splendid complement to the Aalborg Akvavit, which, naturally, flows across the bar in Niagaras. There are attractions to the south California scene which, in a measure at least, compensate for the films, the chamber-of-commerce double talk, and the preposterous geographic diffusion of the town.
Now and then in even what pass for the best-run hotels and restaurants and with unhappily increasing frequency, it is possible to encounter nowadays some device of gyp, extortion, and cheating of the customers which makes one wonder if, after all, it isn't the business of the state to protect the patron by the summary jailing of a few managing directors of hotels for long terms and the closing of restaurants for keeps. Ever since the war the practice has been growing in otherwise presumably respectable hotels of charging for ice served in rooms anywhere from two bits to half a dollar and, for all we know, maybe more.
Charging money for ice! In a hotel in Los Angeles that shall be nameless, we recently encountered a sublimation of this scheme whereby one was required to purchase liquor for room consumption and the mineral water to go with it from two different sources: the liquor from a “commissary,” the seltzer from room service, and along with the seltzer at a dollar a split came a charge for the ice to go with it. This was quite aside from the tips involved. It strikes this department that it would be a good idea for the city authorities, in whatever body the licensing power in Los Angeles may lie, to close this hotel for a term of five years and send its manager to the penitentiary for a similar term. If such racketeering came within the province of the Federal Government, one suspects that twice the sentence could be obtained in a Federal court.
Another pretty practice that has grown up in gyp joints throughout the land is the “no bar” charge on the check, that is, a tax of twenty-five cents for not ordering anything to drink. It would seem that in any responsible community this would be actionable as criminal extortion or coercion, and yet in New York, where liquor practices are supposed to be rigidly supervised by a responsible state agency, this abomination flourishes and the stupid suckers among the patrons put up with it. Such rascality can only flourish with the knowledge and consent of the gullible public, but one suspects that one of these days there may be a sort of Taft-Hartley enactment governing eating and drinking throughout the land, and if there is, the restaurateurs and hotel proprietors who make a practice of rolling their guests while they are still on their feet will have to bear the blame for it.
The truth of the matter is that a state of actual hot war exists between the public and the hotel business as a whole in the United States. Perhaps a good touch of hard times is what the hotel business needs, with five-sixths of its rooms vacant and the remainder renting for a reasonable three dollars. This doesn't go for a few old-time, personally managed, conservative establishments who know the spending spree won't last forever and who cherish the bond that always used to exist between the inn-keeper and his guest. But for the rest, the time may be closer at hand than they think where, as in Mexico, the business of a hotel is the business of the state and the 100 per cent per annum profits that some American hotels have enjoyed for the last decade simply don't exist.
And incidentally, this department has yet to hear a complaint about any hotel in Mexico under the current state regime, and its own experiences there have been extremely gratifying. If there is a responsible hotelmen's association in the United States, it could do worse than to latch on to what gives among some of its members, as there are a lot of people going around remarking that there isn't anything wrong with the hotel business that wouldn't be fixed by a hole in the head.
Charging for ice and charging for not drinking indeed!
One of the gracious and congenial customs surviving, among others, from a gracious and vanished era and one which finds its fullest flower in leisured and leisurely Boston, is the dinner club. Boston, and to an only slightly less degree Cambridge and Harvard, is a veritable nest of tables of clubs within clubs, many of them of ancient origin and all of them possessed of a nostalgic charm deriving from other times and manners. There is a dinner club within the membership of the august Union Club, only a seltzer squirt above Brimstone Corner in Park Street; the Tavern is itself a dinner club with a distinctive evening waistcoat of its own to be worn on state occasions. There used to be a charming intimate group of eight or ten members within the St. Botolph, which included within its personal economy such notables as the late Jake McGrath, city coroner of Boston, and Dr. Gustavus Howard Maynadier of Harvard.
Perhaps the most celebrated of Boston's dinner clubs, however, is the Beacon Society, a group of congenial and generally important characters which gathers five or six times a year for wine, wit, and song at the stately Algonquin Club in Commonwealth Avenue. Its membership is exalted, its menus a legend, and its past fragrant with souvenirs of an older and more homogeneous Boston. The origins of the Beacon Society are in themselves reminiscent of a mellower way of life and had their source back in 1881 when there was a lot of fine talk in the air about Boston's having a world's fair. A group of first citizens came together at the then new and gleaming Vendome Hotel, the first public hostelry to boast electric lights in the whole United States, to set themselves up to dinner and talk over the proposed fair. So brilliant was the menu, so encouraging the wines, and so enchanting the company that, although little was done about the fair, it was decided to continue the investigation at another enjoyable dinner the following month.
In this agreeable manner dinner followed dinner, and the consumption of canvasback and terrapin, venison in season, lobster thermidor, and the best champagnes from the bins of S. S. Pierce and Company and Cobb Bates and Yerxa and Wood Pollard and Company, to say nothing of the Niagaras of Lawrence's Medford rum, was phenomenal.
Of course the fair got practically no-where, but it constituted a splendid excuse for getting together in the red plush suites on the second floor of the Vendome. Finally, after a full year had passed, the city fathers began to press for a decision from the learned committee, and, reluctantly, the committeemen reported that they didn't see any future in the fair business. It had taken fifteen dinner meetings of unsurpassed brilliance to reach a negative decision.
It seemed too bad to give up the dinners just because there was to be no fair, and from the original committee the Beacon Society was formed. A few weeks ago it celebrated its 415th dinner meeting at the Algonquin Club, to which it had removed in the nineties, and there is no falling off in the waiting list for members. Boston knows how to make a good thing out of a public committee.
NAMES THAT MAKE NEWS: At the Colony, handsome and dapper Michael Arlen keeping his weekly luncheon date on Friday in the bar with equally handsome and dapper former congressman Joseph Baldwin. Three cocktails each and then the fish of the season.…In the back room of the Plaza, properly morning-coated and Ascot-tied Frank Chapman and his wife, Gladys Swarthout, entertaining at Sunday luncheon for a dozen Metropolitan Opera headliners. …At Bleeck's Artists and Writers in Fortieth Street: Saratoga-commuter Frank Sullivan drinking Irish whiskey with Corey Ford and Kay and Howard Barnes.…At the Baroque, the town's most energetic lady-gourmet, Jeanne Owen, telling the Messrs. Frank and Joseph, the proprietors, all about the délices de sole maison she had had a few months before at the venerable Restaurant Lapérouse in Paris. …At opposite banquettes at Henri Soulé's: Cole and Linda Porter and Noel Coward and Neysa McMein, all looking, just like 1940. …In Fifty-seventh Street, two of the last of the “monocled dudes” of the old tradition: Jack Hines, “the sweet singer of the Yukon,” and James Montgomery Flagg, en route to the opening of the exhibition of Flagg's pictures at the Ferargil Galleries. …In the Biltmore Turkish Baths, Gene Tunney admitting ruefully that in his own personal sweepstakes between dieting and a good digestion, the diet almost inevitably loses out. …