There was cold silence: I was plainly being either very rude or embarrassingly whimsical. I sat mum: I was pretty sure that we could walk right in to a good table at one place where the highly successful owner had known me since I was a small child … but what would that do to the already tottering morale of my host, who had just damned the chop house to his wife as prejudiced, unfair, and completely snooty? Yes, I sat mum.
We finally drove gratingly to a bad but popular restaurant, and because by now it was inconveniently late, we got a table and sat down. The interviewer was bleached with weariness and nerves.
“I suppose you girls want something to drink?” he asked flatly. His wife looked at him with a too-familiar glance of timidity and scorn and said, “Well, it doesn't matter really … I mean … well, maybe Miss Fisher …” I thought, I have been dragged here on very false pretenses and I owe it to my ideals, if not to my digestion, to make the best of it, so I said, “Thanks very much. Yes. This place has some good sherry.” (I would have lapped up a double Gibson with glee at that dismal point. I knew they, too, were good there … but I was by then in a haughty mood and did not wish to feel much better for fear that forgiveness would mellowly set in.)
The sherry finally came. The menu cards finally came. The man who had mentioned a “little dinner” for me looked up at his eager, striving, unhappy little bundle of mink and at me, his evening's assignment, and said, “Well, what'll-it-be-I'll-take-a-hamburger-de-luxe.” His wife said quickly, “I will, too.” I was tempted to order breast of pheasant Souvaroff or the immediate equivalent. I would be damned if I'd order hamburger de luxe. Finally, calm as cheesecake and very angry, I asked for a bowl of split pea soup.
The food came. We ate. The man got a little color in his cheeks. He began asking his skillful professional questions of me. I recognized what I must always have known, that I was business he had to take care of and that he figured he might as well get rid of it while he ate, since he had to do both anyway. What misery! What waste and mistakenness! O horror! (The interview, when it saw daylight, did me or him no good.)
The opposite of this ugly tale is one of the time I took a Very Important Person to dinner in Hollywood. He had often entertained me with lavish simplicity in his home, in various glamorous groups around the electrically shaken cocktails, the electrically lighted swimming pool, and the electrically rotated spit. I thought it would be a compliment to him to cook dinner for him myself, as soon as I got a place to cook it in. But no: I was tipped off with elaborate tact by his wife, his secretary, and the secretary of his immediate superior in the studio, that he felt badly, in fact terribly, that I had not “entertained” him. All right, I said, all right, forgetting my disappointment in a deliberate campaign to do the thing as much as possible as I think it should be done, if someone willy-nilly is my guest in a public eating place.
I telephoned the restaurant the day before we were to go there and asked for a table which was in line with my friend's local importance … that is, one of the first five in a place which takes care of the fifty top characters in town. That obviated what is always a kind of shuffling ignominy of standing in line, no matter how diplomatically the line may be spread through the bar and so on by a good headwaiter.
Then I ordered the meal, to be served to four people. It was dictated by what I could remember of my honored guest's tastes, as it would have been in my home. He boasted of being a meat-and-potato boy, a hater of “fancy sauces,” a lover of Scotch in moderation, and a shunner of anything but chilled pink wine. Very well: smoked salmon, a small rack of lamb, potatoes Anna, Belgian endive salad, and a tray of Langlois Blue, Rouge et Noir Camembert, Wisconsin Swiss, and Teleme Jack cheese. Scotch or sherry first, and then Louis Martini's Gamay Rosé. It was not my idea of a perfect meal … but it could be eaten with no pain, and the chef had an angel at his elbow.
And by ordering in advance I avoided another horrible barrier to decent dining out: the confusion that inevitably follows the first showing of menu cards to more than two people at once.
The waiter waits. The diners ponder, stutter, variously flaunting their ignorances or their pretensions to knowledge. They mutter and murmur into the air, assuming godlike clarity of hearing on the part of the poor harried servant and disregarding entirely the fact that they are guests at a table. The men usually blurt some stock familiar order. Women hum, sip their cocktails, and change their minds at least twice after the waiter has scrawled on his pad. There is a general feeling of chaos, and nobody seems to realize that if the same human beings were invited to any normal home they would not dream of giving their orders thus confusedly and arbitrarily, that the hostess would not dare leave her guests thus tenderly exposed. No … a good meal, inside or outside the private circle, should be ordered in advance (or at least ordered with great firmness by the host at table, in a restaurant), to avoid this distressful welter of words and then its usual result of unrelated odors, plates, servings, when a group has gone helter-skelter through a menu card.
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