For the past twenty years, as readers of this department may be aware, its author has been a New Yorker almost by profession, a newspaper reporter by occupation, and a pious and faithful Manhattanite whose only apostatic doubts have been excited by the splendors of San Francisco, the world's one and unique, incomparable city.
To be long absent from New York has been, as the French say about the bidding of even a temporary farewell, to die a little. Such accustomed and institutional pleasures as Sunday breakfast at the Plaza, the match game with Dick Maney and Howard Barnes at the bar in Bleeck's, cruising the Fifth Avenue store windows, Christmas dinner at Luchow's, and horsecab riding in Central Park on fine summer afternoons have been a part of our way of life, and their neglect or suspension has been almost the suspension of animation itself.
For the past two months, however, as this is being written in Carson City, Nevada, this department has for the first time within its experience contrived to get along very well without New York and has missed only its most superficial aspects of accustomed deportment and manners. This is probably a grave mistake, something to be corrected instanter, but the fact stands that, just as the defects of Manhattan appeared so identifiable and magnified to Stanley Walker in his now famous renunciation of New York written from Lampasas, Texas, so are its shortcomings doubly perceptible when viewed from beneath the immemorial elms of this most charming and placid of all Western towns.
Except for its immaterial two hundred and fifty miles from the actual shore of the Pacific, Carson City possesses the greatest asset today available to any American community: it is as far away from Europe as it is possible to get. The depressions and crises are nearly three thousand miles farther from Carson City than they are from New York, and its situation is improved in geometric proportion.
While New York newspaper editors and publishers with their preposterous pretensions to importance and cosmopolitanism are available to the most grotesque panics imagined by their correspondents for no better reason than that they can be run under a foreign dateline, it is still possible to pick up the papers of Reno or Carson and discover something of the current condition of the United States. No editor in these parts has ever subscribed to the absurdity that a dogfight in Europe is more important than current news in Main Street.
Nor, happily, are the people of Nevada, the only state in the Union without debt and with no appreciable taxes of any sort, at the criminal disposal of irresponsible goons posing as labor leaders, who can destroy at their most capricious whim the entire pattern of life in any Eastern city. If New York is the most vulnerable city in America in this respect, Reno is probably the city of any consequence which is the least vulnerable to the diseases of an industrial civilization.
If additional evidence were required to supplement this department's conversion to the belief that New York is not the quintessence of perfection in the matter of urban amenities, it was furnished by a recent evening at the theater in San Francisco. It is undeniable that Manhattan is the theater capital of the world, but there is a comparative record to show that it is also the world's capital of inconvenience, bad manners, and making a chore of what should be a pleasure.
Let us, simply, look at the record. To achieve a first night in New York a playgoer must forego dinner entirely. The eight o'clock first-night curtain, arranged for the convenience of a single play reviewer's press room schedule, makes it necessary for every other person of consequence in the world's greatest metropolis to scuttle his pleasure and convenience and present himself at what, in any reasonable person's time scheme, is the middle of the afternoon. The atmosphere of going to the theater in New York, once a patron has gotten himself into evening attire and presented himself, for all the world as though he were calling on the Pope, in a boiled shirt in broad daylight, is that of a conservative and well-ordered directors' meeting. There is no music. Only a single theater in New York, the still glamorous Empire, has an orchestra between the acts, and the only thing lacking to make a first night a perfect boardroom is a chairman to call the meeting to order.
Between the acts at a Broadway play, the playgoer must, by the terms of one of the commonwealth's nuisance laws, leave the premises to get a drink. A well-ordered, decorous, and convenient bar in the lobby is against the law, so he must do battle with the touts, pimps, truck drivers, and other street characters at the nearest speakeasy in order to achieve a glass of beer.
If he chooses to remain in his seat, he is condemned to a dreary auditorium lit by glaring overhead lamps without music, lemonade, or even the bonbons that once were sold by pretty girls in the aisles. The entr'acte itself is usually about six minutes long, just of sufficient duration for a down-front patron to get to the rear gangway and have a cigarette smoking female burn a hole in his dinner suit. The only sane regulation in the New York theater code, the one against smoking inside the house, is one that is universally and shockingly disregarded. At the end of the show he must pay blackmail to a runner to secure a taxi, a form of competitive endeavor and expense made necessary by the limousines of half a dozen Hollywood exhibitionists which are parked at the carriage entrance to the inconvenience of all.
Contrast this evening of haste, shoving, and bad manners with the pleasure of attending a play at, say, the Geary Theater, where, at the moment this is being posted, Harvey is available to the polite audiences of the town with Rudy Vallee in the title role.
Curtain call is for quarter to nine, an hour which makes possible dinner either at home or at one of San Francisco's public restaurants where, pleasantly enough, it may be reported, there is a very considerable revival of good dining. The theater lobby is entirely free of the vacuous loungers and autograph nasties who scream and jostle their betters at New York first nights. There is a six-piece orchestra performing valiantly in the orchestra pit, and it will continue to do so under the guidance of a concert master who is obviously on good and familiar terms with many of the patrons at each entr'acte. Downstairs, and available without hurry or battling the elements at the fifteen-minute intermissions, is a spacious three-man bar.
This is play-going as New Yorkers can remember it before a highball in a theater became felonious and before the requirements of labor unions made it impossible for an honest fiddler to make a living at his occupation. New Yorkers can read this and weep or, taking arms against a sea of troubles, wire for a suite at the Palace or the Fairmont and rediscover a way of life which still combines graciousness and urbanity in an age when both are at an almost inordinate premium.
In this department's role of, as it were, a non-tearoom specialist, it gives us pleasure to be able to report, and favorably, on a couple of new abodes of the gustatory muse in the Far West. The first of these excellent premises is the Bonanza Restaurant in Virginia City, a vicinage which, since the great days of the Comstock, has been without eating places of any sort save a lunch counter of deplorable aspect and kitchen practices inherited directly from the Borgias.
The Bonanza is one of the three or four habitable mansions in Virginia City still surviving from the great, spacious days of the sixties and was, in fact, the Comstock home of the powerful Louis McLane, first manager of Wells Fargo's Virginia City branch. An imposing three-story stone house with lordly staircases and sixteen-foot ceilings (simply hell to heat in winter, they say), it is surrounded with its own lawns and flowering shrubs, a great luxury in this desert country, and is separated by a magnificent wrought-iron fence, also dating from the sixties and a veritable museum piece, from the Virginia City home of Roger Butterfield, brightest light in the Nevada literary firmament.
The Bonanza is open for luncheon and dinner and strictly by reservation, since its dining room can accommodate only sixteen or twenty guests within range of its perpetually burning fireplace. The entire setup is de luxe, limited, and, for Nevada, expensive, although New Yorkers who pay five and six dollars for a filet mignon three inches in diameter will not protest the usual ＄3.50 price tag on Nevada filets weighing upward of a pound per portion and averaging three inches in thickness, not diameter.
The Bonanza is the dream child of Mr. and Mrs. Halvor Smedsrud, who have leased the mansion for a term of years from Virginia's famous Catholic Church founded in the sixties by Father Manogue, lit the premises with gas and candles with a gratifyingly non-tearoom effect, and installed, in the galoshes closet off the front parlor, a door-wide, one-man bar presided over by Douglas Moore, Yale '41, crew haircut, “Whiffenpoof Song,” and all. The effect is a slightly demented and altogether satisfactory atmosphere of Chapel Street and the tables down at Mory's laden with Norwegian smörgaåsbord and populated by the ghosts of Jim Fair, Darius Ogden Mills, and Adolph Sutro along with the more tangible, cash-paying guests.
The smörgaåsbord is regionally famous and attracts to the Bonanza such notables as John Dos Passos, General Mark Clark, Governor Pittman, Johnny Weissmuller, Alice Terry, and the adjacent Roger Butterfield. The last time your reporter stuffed himself with smoked ham and Norwegian herring washed down with aquavit, Judith Anderson at the next table was proudly displaying a complicated and intensely Victorian silver cruet stand she had just acquired at the antique shop in the Silver Dollar Hotel down in C Street. The presence of the Bonanza makes it possible to hunt antiques and atmosphere at Virginia City and become handsomely victualed as well as sluiced, a circumstance already liberally provided for by at least twenty saloons in which President Grant is reported to have tarried, much as General Washington is reported to have slept in all those beds.
A comparatively new San Francisco restaurant worthy of the attention of gastronomic purists, since it makes no obeisance in the direction of atmosphere and relies altogether on the not inconsiderable virtues of its table fare, is the Alouette, whose destinies are presided over by Laurent, widely and favorably known as the “Crêpes Suzette King” of the Pacific Coast. Alouette is in Polk Street at the former address of the Poodle Dog, a great name in the legend of San Francisco's bohemian restaurants of the days before the fire of 1906. This was not, of course, the original Poodle Dog which was presided over by Old Pierre and which sired another notable San Francisco restaurant of the turn of the century, the Pup, but so much a part of the heroic saga of California gastronomy has the name become that there will probably be a Poodle Dog somewhere in San Francisco as long as there are giant crabs, sand dabs, and pismo clams.
To return to Laurent's Alouette, it is probably the nearest thing now available to the old-time San Francisco French restaurant such as were the Louvre, Marchand's, Maison Dorée, Perini's, Tehama House, Palace of Art, and Nevada. The menu is liberal without being definitive, and the abalone meunière, coq au vin, and prawns Louis are superlative. The wine cellar, quite understandably, leans in the direction of California wines.
Laurent himself does the crêpes for dessert as he has done them by an estimated hundred thousand orders in former years for San Franciscans at the Palace and the Prado, employing all the nice touches and refinements which give this arrangement an artistry, as differentiated from mere pyrotechnic yokel bait. The premises themselves are, to our way of thinking, plainly lit and severely decorated as barely to escape the depressing, but obviously discreet and knowing citizens in reassuring numbers are present nightly, a testimonial to the sound cuisine of the house in the absence of any parade or ornamentation. An aged waiter in charge of wine service claims to have been a member of the staff of the original Poodle Dog, and this is the sole concession of the management to atmosphere.