Only infrequently, perhaps, as fetching as the names of English taverns over the centuries, the names of the saloons, bars, restaurants, and other eating and drinking premises of the United States might yet provide material for an academic thesis. Boston's gone but not forgotten Bell-in-Hand and still flourishing Thompson's Spa, the Switch Key in Fort Worth, and the Hurry Back, an old-time resort in Salt Lake City, come at once to mind. There is a Happy Landings Bar in Manhattan's Fifty-eighth Street, and traveled folk will at once think of the Golden Pheasant in Dallas, the King of Prussia in, of all places, King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and the Brick Wall in Providence.
Perhaps the most fragrant of all such regional catalogues of tavern and restaurant names derives from San Francisco in the latter decades of the last century, when that golden community was famed throughout the world for its gustatory resources and high living generally. Before this department at the moment is an agreeable volume published by Paul Elder back in 1914, Bohemian San Francisco, Its Restaurants and Their Most Famous Recipes; The Elegant Art of Dining, by Clarence E. Edwords, and its index is a wistful souvenir of the storied past.
There was the Maison Dorée, the Nevada, the Old Louvre, the Tahama House, Three Trees, the Poodle Dog, and, of course, the Pup, the Palace of Art, Peter Job's, the Cobweb Palace, the Iron House, Mia Tanta, Christian Good's, Hang Far Low, the Odeon, and the Mint. There was the Fly Trap, the Buon Gusto, Jule's Leon d'Oro's, the Shell Fish Grotto, the Fior d'Italia, Tortoni's, Captain Cropper's, the Viticultural, and Zinkands. There was Darbee and Immel's oyster bar, Marchand's, Perini's, Gobey's, and the Good Fellows Grotto.
Not every community was so fortunate as San Francisco, either in its imagination or in the variety of its saloons and restaurants, but a fairly good case can be made for the claim that tavern names are part of the great body of Americana, and, as such, worth preserving in some comprehensive record.
Today's little horror story concerns the conduct of what used to be one of New York's greatest luxury hotels. In an attempt by its owner to augment its already superlative profits, he called in an efficiency expert recently graduated from a leading so-called “college of hotel management,” and a conference was called of various department heads. During its course, the purchase of some new bedroom furnishings was brought up, and floor plans of some of the bedrooms were submitted to the vice-president in charge of decorations. That experienced functionary raised an eyebrow.
“But according to this layout, the telephone is located across the room from the bed,” he objected. “I never heard of a telephone that wasn't available to a guest while he was in bed.”
“Aha,” smirked the expert. “That's a little idea of my own. It's like this. The guest gets an early morning call, and if he answers it in bed, he's very apt to go right back to sleep. If he has to get out of bed, shut the window, get across the room, and get a good chilling, he's not half so apt to go back to bed. He gets up, gets on his clothes, and checks the hell out, and there your room is ready for reoccupancy four or five hours before it might otherwise be. Make 'em cold and uncomfortable, and they leave twice as fast.”
And hotelmen wonder what occasions the ever-growing hostility toward hotel management on the part of the public!
All regular diners-out around New York and, doubtless, elsewhere in the gastronomic scene are familiar with the ageless complaint: “Oh, it used to be a wonderful restaurant, but I think it's gone down dreadfully lately.” Such lamentations for the decline of food, service, or clientele may indeed be founded in fact, for almost every restaurant has its ups and downs, or it may simply derive from long association and familiarity with a particular establishment. No matter how high the average level of cuisine may be, a piece of grit in the greens or a bug in the raspberry can suggest to the impressionable that the place is falling off, “but dreadfully, my dear.”
One restaurant that, to the personal, continuous, and long-time observation of this department, has never had any downs at all and shows no least sign of decay is an old favorite, the Baroque, in East Fifty-third Street just cattycornered from the Stork Club. Even during the war, the management of the Baroque, an incomparable team of partners named Frank and Joseph, who are always personally on duty, never seemed to suffer for lack of the best of everything, and the manner in which the premises is conducted has never deviated from that of an ultrasmart, small, conservative French restaurant of the first class.
Baroque seats only about seventy patrons at a time, with a small overflow at the one-man bar down front, but it is run with a flourish and in the grand manner, and its clientele is fairly well limited to port-voiced gentlemen who command two sorts of wine at a minimum and a few professional names who know wonderful food and are important enough to be able to eat in a restaurant not frequented by the entire corps of Broadway paragraphers.
The menu is a reasonable one, perhaps four or five fish courses daily, half a dozen entrees of the day, and half a dozen grillades available to special order, but its resources are not limited to the menu by any means, and any reasonable preferences in the preparation of the available meats, fish, and birds will be accommodated in a repertory that compares favorably with that of the Colony, a restaurant which will provide anything, any time, in any manner.
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.
All that screaming and hollering and swearing, with Donald Duck noises of indignation thrown in, down in the neighborhood of the National Theater in Forty-first Street, are not the patrons of the Aviation Grill next door or even the bus depot across the street. They are largely attributable to an absurd playright named Clifford Odets, who has contrived a stupefying mishmash of treachery, murder, and suicide out of a story of Hollywood which, in the hands of anyone with his blood pressure under control, might have made a very considerable play.
Mr. Odets made himself a reputation around Broadway some years ago as a playwright of some competence with pronounced leftist leanings, and for the last seven years he has been accepting a fantastic Hollywood salary and getting ready to denounce the films good and proper in something called The Big Knife. Mr. Odets' favorite part of the anatomy for lodging knives is the back.
Not that he hasn't got something when he comes to create the character who, as a film actor of terrific box-office power, loses his friends and his wife and, being a fellow of slightly unbalanced genius, is eventually driven to suicide in a noisy and spurious offstage carnival of wrist-cutting. In addition, however, to this macabre but still possible setup, Mr. Odets so complicates his play with a multitude of internal plots, villainies, and malfeasances that his main thesis, which is that Hollywood is a corrupter of honest folk, is totally lost in the screams and recriminations of the actors.
An actor of vast capacities for expert characterization has been recruited for this disorganized scuffle in the person of John Garfield, but not all Garfield's excellences of technique can make his role, after the first act, at any rate, anything but pure corn of an almost unbelievable proof.
Not content with fouling up his script with a farrago of matters entirely irrelevant to his plot, Mr. Odets is possessed of the conceit that in the Hatfield-McCoy assassinations of Sunset Boulevard he has found a mirrored image of the entire world's insanity of the moment. This would be more valid if it weren't fairly widely acknowledged that, whatever else it may be, Hollywood is probably more totally divorced from any reality and more completely unlike the rest of the world, in any aspect whatsoever, than any other community or social hierarchy known to man. The Big Knife is, in a word, just plain preposterous, and Garfield was being had when he was induced to become involved in such a shabby charade.
That's the explanation of all those low tumults downtown. Just a street accident.