Club Fed--For Members Only
St. James’s Club, 8358 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (213) 650-7100. Members and hotel guests only; non-members may audition the restaurant by appointment. Breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner daily. Valet parking. Full bar. All major credit cards accepted.
I’ve been hearing from the sort of people who ought to know that St. James’s Club in West Hollywood is the hottest new restaurant in town, even though-- because --its members-only policy keeps out most of the celebrity-sniffing hoi polloi who stuff Spago and Nicky Blair’s to capacity. The dining room of the Art Deco private hotel, the first American branch of a 140-year-old British institution, is reputedly a discreet playground for the leisure class--”That was no lady,” one CBE says to another, clipping his consonants, “That was my . . . er . . . astrologer “-- and the kind of place you can bring, say, Sting, for a quiet business lunch.
The building itself is an impeccable $40-million restoration of the old Sunset Towers, a glamorous Deco apartment building where Jean Harlow lived, John Wayne reportedly kept a cow on the balcony of his penthouse, and bandleader Tommy Dorsey was dangled by his ankles 10 stories above Sunset Boulevard. Those deemed clubbable now, sources said, are feted night after night with old-fashioned English servility, exquisitely non-English cuisine and unimpeded views of Miss Liza Minnelli. Concrete palm trees glow softly outside by the pool. The drinks are very large. It’s all off-limits.
Is the restaurant hot? What would it be like to dine at a private British club amidst the billboards and all-night coffee shops of the Sunset Strip? Is St. James’s Club without peers? I dream of foie gras, Champagne, caviar, old single-malt Scotch, fresh kippers.
I call the club and learn temporary residential membership is available to anybody willing to pay $180 a night for a tiny though overdecorated hotel room. A friend agrees to join me for five meals and 24 hours of putative luxury. We’re in.
7:20 p.m. We roll up the driveway in her dented Toyota, which has been washed for the occasion, and a clean-cut attendant takes the car without flinching. He waves jauntily as he drives off to the garage. We walk through the revolving door into the ornate marble lobby.
7:21 p.m. The desk clerk tells us her first name, registers us without comment and hands me glossy brochures describing the club. She seems eager to give us a tour of the premises and insists on leading us to our room. We take the elevator, which is kind of like the ones you see in the Chrysler Building, only less so. When we reach our destination, she shows us where the closets are and points out the room’s features: a bed shaped like a giant clam; a spectacular view of the city lights if you stick your head out of the window and crane a little. The room is quite small, and three suddenly seems like a crowd . . . what floor space there might be is almost entirely taken up with Art Deco chatchkes. The clerk thrusts a handful of remote-control devices at me and exits, stage right.
7:32 p.m. Somebody bearing a tray knocks on the door. He hands us each a flute of the Champagne-peach juice concoction called Bellini. The cocktails are delicious.
7:35 p.m. I absent-mindedly push a button on one of the remote control devices. What I assumed was a dresser heaves, and an honor bar rises as majestically as the organ at Radio City Music Hall.
8 p.m. Our dinner guest, a local muckraker, telephones. I confirm the time and remind him that he’ll need a jacket in the dining room.
9 p.m. We walk downstairs, veer left through a hall lined with Hollywood portraits by glamour photographer George Hurrell. I see that the muckraker, jacketless, has been detained by the doorman. I take him by the arm and sweep him into the dimly lighted Members’ Dining Room. The hotel seems sparsely occupied, but the restaurant is full. We are led to a small table on the periphery of the raised bar area, as far from Lionel Richie’s exalted window seat as it’s possible to get. We spot men in dinner jackets, women in Ungaro, and one Joan Collins type in a metallic green dress that makes her look just a little like the Michelin man.
9:15 p.m. There are giant dry martinis and little swans sculpted from butter. I lop off a head, sever a wing and smear a light, hot roll. A busboy refills each water glass from a cold bottle of Evian, and we are brought baby lettuces topped with tiny boiled potatoes topped with caviar. (The chef here uses caviar and baby lettuce the way Denny’s uses parsley.) The butter is stale, but not quite as stale as the lounge pianist’s repertoire.
9:35 p.m. The fish tartare, lumps of chopped salmon, sea bass and sashimi-grade tuna, is too genteel for us, overspiced yet bland, served with dry triangles of crustless whole-wheat bread like canapes served apres-croquet at an upper-class garden party. A gamy rabbit terrine is better, sparked by an oddly luscious pear-melon chutney, and a “gateau”-- sauteed mushrooms, sliced sweetbreads and foie gras bound with a sliver of carrot into the shape of a tart--is delicious. Less is more, I suppose, but this stuff works.
10 p.m. And this stuff doesn’t: Overcooked scallops in an acrid beurre blanc; steamy grilled veal; the single weirdest plate of food I have ever been served--a mahogany heap of roast quail arranged to look like the June Taylor Dancers, garnished with grapes that have been rolled in flour and deep-fried, flanked by fried cornmeal patties that taste like milk left out overnight. Dessert is brown-butter mousse tucked into elaborate chocolate curls, and Zagnut-size piers of deep-fried custard. For a mere $750 initiation and $750 dues, you can eat like this every night, food as expensive and cluttered as the rooms.
Midnight. I bite into the chocolate truffle left on the pillow. Does it have a pronounced aftertaste of Roquefort, or is my palate still exhausted? Hard bed; troubled sleep.
10 a.m., next day. We stagger downstairs to the empty Terrace Restaurant and collapse at a table outdoors on the sunny patio. The coffee is strong, the orange juice sweet and cold; the croissants are flaky and hot. My pal orders something called Omelette Arnold Bennett, which turns out to be a half-inch egg pancake in a cream sauce and topped with slices of smoked haddock. She likes it; nothing exceeds like excess. I eat half a blueberry muffin.
10:45 a.m. We tour the hotel. It is very historic.
12:30 p.m. Terrace Restaurant again, this time inside under a sort of silvery pyramid that drips with plastic bougainvillea. The couple we’ve invited to lunch is impressed with the place, and especially with the clientele: dapper businessmen; other men, probably musicians, with razor-sharp Carl Lewis ‘dos and bits of gold braid everywhere; ex-Texas prom queens with big hair and stupendous cleavage.
Tomato soup is a warm Bloody Mary without the vodka; salad the usual melange of baby lettuces (the club must go through truckloads); asparagus unpleasantly mounded with course-ground mustard and dusted with paprika. But the crisp, loosely bound crabcakes are exceptional. There is a “club lunch” that includes tepid grilled chicken or (a club tradition, no doubt) decent strip steak breaded and fried until it tastes grey, even though it looks medium rare. One of us orders a la carte and is served steamed sea bass topped with chopped tomato and shreds of deep-fried ginger on a bed of pureed eggplant in heavy cream sauce--the epitome of misguided British “nouvelle cuisine.” The rest of us get queasy even looking at it.
5:30 p.m. And a few hours later, we’re hungry again. Terrace Restaurant shuts a little early for tea, but we convince the waiter to bring us a pot of Lapsang Soochong and some sweets upstairs in the library, a large room whose end tables are laden with such magazines as Country Life and Horse and Hound. I idly pick up a large, leather-bound volume of Dante. It is hollow, as are the rest of the books on the shelves. We like the sweets--violet-studded truffles, crisp butter cookies, warm scones with Devon clotted cream--very much. We sit and chat until . . .
9 p.m. We wander into the Members’ Dining Room and are immediately recognized by a waiter, a friend of ours. She leads us to the good stuff: Quail consomme with a minute julienne of fennel; simple refreshing chilled cantaloupe soup spiked with Sauternes; nearly succulent poached oysters with spinach and curry; crisp, sauteed rouget stuffed with a mousseline of pike, a kind of “fish quesadilla” with tomato and chervil.
Then again, she recommended the quail too. And nothing we ate thrilled us the way almost everything does at La Toque, or Spago, just to name a couple of restaurants within walking distance.
A few artists we know float down from a party upstairs, we have a dram or three of smoky Talisker single-malt scotch, and I almost start to have a good time.
Recommended dishes: quail consomme $6.50; sweetbread and foie gras gateau $18; rouget with mousse of pike $23; apple custard $8
