If This Were My Place

IT is as impossible to say what is The Perfect Restaurant as The Perfect Mate. A man will swear he wants women tall and quiet and then fall profoundly in love with a five-foot flibbertigibbet. In the same way, what I am convinced I now want when I eat in public has no connection with where I may blissfully find myself tomorrow, fork in hand.

This is for now, though. This is what I fume about now, when I must submit myself to the dubious delights of dining abroad, in a restaurant run for my theoretical pleasure and the owner’s possible profit. 1 his is, as well, what seems best, most proper, most thoroughly enjoyable, about the rite of non-private nourishment. This is, in brief, what I would want if I were running this place.

I like quiet. I hate a hysterical hubbub, whether it be of voices or of clashed plates. On the other hand, a hush which makes anything more than whispers a social outrage is equally distressing to me—or perhaps more so, because it too often smacks of ostentation and pretense: the fake crystal chandeliers, the gliding muted “captains,” of a hinterland Ritz.

Modern soundproofing, strange square pancakes glued to any old kind of walls and ceilings, performs miracles indeed. So, much more expensively, do eager young architects with Ideas: they break up a barn of a place into three or four well-related rooms, seemingly no bigger than cubbyholes, and there you are, sitting cozily before a cut off the joint and a pint of Old-and-Bitter (such reformed mausoleums seem to lean toward the tweedy side, for some reason — or is it the young architects who do?), not quite certain just who is behind you in the rationed dark, nor even who may be coming through the door from the paneled bar, and not caring at all because of the general feeling of intimacy and quiet.

That sounds fine, and so it can be. It can also be oppressively quaint and soundless. You can drink and eat and even try to talk in a kind of superartful vacuum, until finally you wonder if anyone else in the room is still breathing. You begin to feel that everything human about you except your dwindling appetite has been sucked out in a kind of discreet and decorative catharsis, until as a gentle proof that you still live you are handed a synthetic clay churchwarden’s pipe, with your name tagged on it, male or even female.

This is, generally, a discouraging ritual, and you are inclined to go to the nearest chili hut the next time you consider risking, with any seriousness, the hazards of such whimsy. I do not like the clay-pipe, rough-brick, crackling-hearth style of modern “restauraterie.”

Perhaps one good reason (or rather two reasons) for my innate distrust of such nutritional balderdash is that I love the two extremes of American pubs: Joe’s All-Nite Diner and the Chambord . . . la Buvette de la Gare and Foyot’s . . .

I love, as much as diners, the beautifully suave, knowing, experienced restaurants, the kind that perforce can exist only in great cities where desirable women and intelligent worldlings live. The last one I was in, too long ago, gave me great satisfaction, as did the delightful hats of most of the women in it and the flicked cuffs and the child-blue boutonnieres of their escorts. I liked it all . . . the flames under the gleaming dishes, and the murmur of fluty Eastern voices, and the finnan haddie I ate, the best in my life, to lay the ghost of all the bad I had eaten in my childhood.

But such a restaurant must be good, and honest, and real, as well as suave and knowing. There are a dozen places within call of me, this minute, with the appearances of such gastronomical grandeur, but with nothing, nothing at all, to bolster them, beyond the ornate chafing dishes and the eager supercilious stewards and the too hot plates, and all the diners pretending this is almost as good as the real thing. I hate such restaurants even more than I hate the tweedy English-inn type of chophouse.

I think now, willy-nilly, of the most dismal restaurant in the American world, to my mind, the small town coffee shop. I have been in hundreds of them, and I firmly believe that until their windows grow steamy and the waitress lets her hair fall vaguely out of place and the coffee machine sends off little pops of extra steam which the cafe manager frowns on because of Waste, they are just about the most horrid holes ever invented for such a decent ceremony as that of nourishing our poor tired puzzled bodies.

There are slabs of bad pie behind a piece of smeared plate glass. There are used dishes in a streamlined and doubtless antiseptic sink beneath the counter. There are tables complete with paper napkins in chromed dispensers and with tasteless pepper and medicated salt in inadequate shakers. There are chairs that rattle against the hard sanitary floors. There is, perhaps, canned music from a juke box, dependent upon desperately cheerful diners or the five-cent profligacy of the manager. Such hellholes of gastronomy need a lot of steam on the windows, a very healthy fine-pated waitress, and a really energetic coffee machine, to make them anything but hell.

It is understandable that many of us, tossed onto the endless roads of this continent, head in our wanderings for the low-brow diners, rather than these so-called coffee shops — the kind Hemingway and many a lesser giant have written about, the long, narrow real-or-imitation railroad cars, warm, bright, easy to enter and leave, redolent of other people’s cigarettes and rain-flecked jackets, of coffee and hot soup. Where else can a hungry traveler go, once having spurned the “shops,” but to these metamorphosed cars ?

I have read almost every guide made available to the general public, I imagine, about American eating places. The memorable meals I have found in small-town hotels I can count only too easily on one hand, although I have traveled fairly widely and have carried with me, along with my normal number of fingers and thumbs, my “curious nose,” first asset of even the most amateurish gastronomer.

The guides I have most trusted have led me, almost invariably, to tea-roomy places, and although I myself dislike them I can understand why most travelers prefer their fairly honest regional cooking (hot biscuits, Ladies’ Aid desserts, Mrs. Frazee’s Famous Chicken Puff) to the alternatives of shoddy Ritz or pool hall. Dietetically they are safe, or at least safer than the steam-table Béchamel of one and the iridescent corned beef of the other. Their calories may be high — all that whipped cream on the pecan pie on Thursdays!—but the ptomaine mortality is very low indeed, and their canaries do sing so sweetly, innocent of juke.

Once in a Western state I followed the recommendations of a best-selling gastronomical guide and went to a fantastically dirty hole and ate the best barbecued spareribs of my life. And once in Georgia I obeyed the same mentor and went grudgingly to the local Waldorf, there called the Poinsettia, I think, and was rocked where I sat to have the chef, yes ihe chef, read my order and then send me a glass of properly chilled dry sherry, when I was wondering with understandable grimness if a double Martini would see me through the evening, (He came in later, and we shared a bottle of excellent wine from Maryland under the dusty fly-specked “electroliers.”)

But such accidents are rare. In general the mobile gourmets of the country have a very tough time indeed. I suffer for them.

I do so vicariously at this period in my life, for I am stationary and at least five hundred miles from the nearest decent eating-place. I know that such a statement is blatantly intolerant and unfair. The great Henri Charpentier now runs a little and good restaurant near Redondo Beach — but when I go I here I want to sleep in a motel near-by, rather than drive three hundred miles through smog, round trip. There is a place on La Cienega where deft waiters in scarlet coats move in the light from Georgian silver candelabra — but the Yorkshire pudding is burned and lead heavy. There is an old house in San Juan Capistrano beside the shallow stream where crayfish live—but tacos give me a stomach-ache.

San Francisco, only five hundred miles away, has good places for the civilized nourishment of the human body. I can think, this minute, of a dozen, where I could walk in, sit down, and have the ancient Yugoslav waiter snarl amicably at me and then flap across my knees a real napkin, although the prices would indicate paper; where I could order anything I wanted, based on fresh cracked crab, bay shrimps, or lobster; where I could see the man slouch to the big icebox at the end of the dining room and pull out a perfectly chilled bottle of the proper wine.

If I were running this place, this place, I’d leave it just as it is, cluttered and fumy and right — right for now, that is: a bottle of cold light white wine, sizzling crab-legs meuniere, crisp bread on an ugly thick white plate, and beyond them the fog and the sound of harbor horns. But last, week another place was right, a lunch of pure fantasy, of equally fantastic expense and “restauraterie,” in a beautifully appointed and beautifully managed and beautifully dishonest Beverly Hills hash house. And far back in my mind is that light high-voiced subtle room in New York, where the champagne and the finnan haddie were so completely right.

If I were running this place, the mythical Perfect Restaurant, I’d try to be honest and fantastic and artful, so that I could serve forth what would be, at a given moment, the essential food, the nourishment most needed in a man’s Design for Living.