The third thing I did was to see the headwaiter and tip him. And since I knew the restaurant and the good relations therein between the various professional levels, I left another tip with him for the man who would take care of us, come eight o'clock.
The final step: I arranged that the bill would be mailed to me. There are few things more boringly painful about public dining, to my mind, than the obligatory plunging and grabbing and arguing that is taken as a matter of course at the end of such a meal as I planned. If men are present they look on it as an insult to their virility to let a woman pay. If women are eating together, they simply outshriek one another, and the noisiest bears off the check in expensive but curiously rewarding triumph. I feel rebuffed, when I have invited anyone of no matter what sex to dine with me, to have the bill snatched gallantly from me, just as I would feel insulted if after dinner in my home a guest slipped a bill under his plate for the food I had used.
So … I finally walked out of the restaurant feeling that I had done everything I could to assure my friend of a meal which I could have given him for one-fourth the cost and about one-eighth the bother at home, but which he would, because of his peculiar importance in a very peculiar industry, enjoy a hundred times as much because it was in that peculiar town's smartest eating place.
Everything went beautifully. The table was the right one, the Scotch was from the proper bottle, the waiter scudded on velvet, other Very Important People nodded and smiled … and then the slices of salmon were so thin, and the wine came, and the rack of lamb, a masterpiece, with the headwaiter cool as a surgeon above it.…
My guest turned to me, for the first of many times that night, saying, “Do you know, in my whole life nobody has ever ordered a meal just for me?”
“Nonsense,” I said, thinking of all the dinners that people had served him, people who for one reason or another wanted to please him … as I did.
“No,” he said, by the end of the evening tearfully, “no, never! And I hate menus. I hate them. I go to places where they know what I want, just so I don't have to look at menus. If I pretend to look, I have something memorized to say. If my doctor has told me to eat tomatoes, I say, ‘A fresh tomato omelette’ … something like that to make them pay a little attention to me. Now and then I get peeved at all the French, and I say, ‘spécialité de la maison’ … how's my accent? But, do you know, this is the first time anyone ever seemed to realize that I hate menus and having to order and … Do you know, this is just like a party!”
It would be easy here for me to indicate that at this somewhat maudlin point my guest slid under the table. He did not. It was a good evening, with good talk, even in Hollywood where the fact that we were enjoying ourselves in public proved us embarrassingly out of line. It had about it something, no matter how faint, of the festive ease, the latent excitement, of my childhood celebrations … a reward to me for having observed, no matter why, the basic principles of decent dining out. I had treated my guest as much as possible as if he were in my home. And “miracles occurred….”
E is for exquisite…
… and its gastronomical connotations, at least for me.
I hasten to admit that I am deliberately incorrect, in the strict dictionary sense. I have shifted the meaning of the word from its right one as a noun (A man who is an exquisite is a foppish dandy, say), to a distorted one as an adjective: exquisite in its modern usage means keen, intense, consummate, but in my private wordbook it has taken on overtones of preciosity, even of decadence.
When I hear of a gourmet with exquisite taste I assume, perhaps too hastily and perhaps very wrongly, that there is something exaggeratedly elaborate, and even languidly perverted, about his gourmandism. I do not think simply of an exquisitely laid table and an exquisite meal. Instead I see his silver carved in subtly erotic patterns, and his courses following one upon another in a cabalistic design, half pain, half pleasure. I take it for granted, in spite of my good sense, that rare volumes on witchcraft have equal place with Escoffier in his kitchen library, and I have read into his basic recipe for meat stock a dozen deviously significant ingredients.
Such deliberate romanticism on my part can most easily be dismissed as wishful thinking by an amateur cook who scrambles eggs very well but only reads, these days, about filets de soles Polignac and pâté de foie truffé en brioche. Or perhaps it is Freudian: subconsciously I would murder, or even seduce, by means of cookery, and therefore I ascribe such potentialities to someone I envy for his culinary freedom! Whatever the reason, I continue to see the word exquisite ringed about with subtle vapors of perversion, in my private lexicon of gastronomy.
Most of the great historical and literary gourmets, in this sense of being exquisite, have had unlimited money, like Des Esseintes in Huysmans' Against the Grain. The very fact that they can command no matter what incredible delicacy adds to their satiety, and that in turn gives just the fillip of distortion to their appetites, which satisfies my own definition, if not Webster's, of their exquisiteness.
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