The point is not, however, that the icebox resources of the Baroque are ample so much as that, in the classic French manner, each dish, be it nothing more than an endive-and-grapefruit salad or sautéed shad roe, is an essay in perfection and is served with the air of being a separate entity, which gives French cuisine its greatest distinction. The tariff at Baroque is fairly stiff, and there is no compromise with such devices as combinations or prix fixe meals. Everything is à la carte and excellent.
Whether or not such is the case, the staff at Baroque gives the impression that it is a family undertaking. There has been no change in the corps of waiters discernible to the reporter in many years. This is a pretty fair index of the quality and management of any restaurant.
The author of this department for GOURMET has just been privileged to see in proof form the text of Gene Fowler's long-awaited biography of Jimmy Walker, which, by the time this achieves circulation, will be generally available between boards under the title Beau James, bearing the imprimatur of the Viking Press.
This, it seems to us, is the all-time high in Fowler's formal biographical series and, as such, is in a class with his chronicles of rowdy newspaper days in old Denver, Timberline and Salute to Yesterday. Many of his admirers were disappointed in Good Night, Sweet Prince, feeling that the story of John Barrymore somehow escaped being a biography and became instead a brief of defense and a denial of charges.
No such objection attaches to Beau James. This is in no sense, save the most oblique one, a justification of Walker because, so far as millions upon millions of people were concerned, he never needed one. Jimmy, a name he hated, preferring to be known as Jim, was in fact Mr. New York for the spangled decade of the twenties, and Fowler allows no opportunity to pass for ringing in the changes in the era that was, perhaps, the most incoherent, foolish, and yet somehow beguiling of all periods in the twentieth century. In a time of prohibition, speakeasies, channel swimmers, bell-bottomed trousers, cloche hats, Ziegfeld revues, and a boom market, Walker was probably better known throughout the world than any other American personality, including film stars and the President. Probably nobody who lived through the cycle of bathtub gin would want to do it again, but by the same token, by golly, he wouldn't have missed it.
Book reviewing isn't the normal function of this column, but under the terms of GOURMET's subtitle, it seems that, both to Fowler fans and others, this book is a contribution to good living.
Comes to hand as this dispatch goes smoking to the compositor's hook the intelligence that this department's favorite tavern of the Western deserts, the Bonanza Inn at Virginia City, Nevada, is about to reopen for the season, this year with flourishes and grace notes unaccustomed even in its somewhat gaudy management. Readers of “Along the Boulevards” may recall that the Bonanza swept into its editorial ken a year or so ago and that since that time we have been at intervals gastronomically bemused by the presence of a restaurant conducted in a curious synthesis of the grand manner and Sunday at the zoo in a ghost town high on the spine of Nevada's fabulous Comstock lode.
The Bonanza is the only slightly demented dream child of a brace of stewpot drolls named Ginny and Halvor Smedsrud in kitchen collaboration with an antic character, Douglas Moore, Yale '41, reported in some manner to be a Du Pont of Wilmington. Enamored of the Nevada wastelands and aware that, while Nevada beef and Minden lamb are among the market wonderments of our time, there is scarcely a restaurant worthy of the name between Elko and Las Vegas, the trio came by a bonanza king's mansion in Virginia City and set out to stupefy the region with threeounce cocktails, snails bourguignonne, quail in aspic, and English trifles floating in five kinds of imported liqueurs.
Since the days of the bonanza kings in the Comstock back in the seventies when John Mackay and Jim Fair were accustomed to the legendary splendors of the International Hotel, western Nevada hadn't seen such fancy doings, and the fame of the Bonanza soon spread over the Sierras and into San Francisco. Virginia City is, of course, only fifteen miles from Reno, and in no time the tourists and sightseers were phoning for reservations and splashing around in the fresh crayfish bisque in a crystal-andormolu setting of stylish Victorianism. They don't always realize that the cook was once an Eastern debutante, that the waiter and major domo is a sometime son-in-law of a celebrated French industrialist, and that the barkeep is a Yale man with his own yacht and hunters, but that doesn't bother the staff.
Usually the Bonanza closes the premises along about ten o'clock and goes down to C Street to play roulette and drink champagne in the Crystal Bar, Sawdust Corner, or one of the other cony traps which are the reason for Virginia City's twentieth-century being. Luncheon is available to all comers. Dinner by phone reservation only.
This year there is going to be a less formal restaurant (how much less formal can you be than with levis all over and guests falling right through the French windows into the garden outside?) out back of the Bonanza's stately front room where the tariff won't be quite so stiff, a sort of Buttery, the management says. They found some old Virginia City wallpaper for it in, of all places, Katzenbach & Warren back in New York, and the place will probably be more gay nineties than the Old Knick over in First Avenue. In any event, the food is certain to be something that would have enchanted Soames Forsyte.
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