Bread, Love and Dreams

“Everything written before our time was written for our instruction.” --Romans 15:4

“Tortoni’s Hotel Restaurant in Le Havre,” begins a passage in my favorite restaurant guide, “must not be confounded with the Brasserie Tortoni quite close to it, which is a bachelor’s resort; and which I, as a bachelor, have found very amusing sometimes after dinner.” Another passage, in reporting the existence of a number of clarets “of the great vintage years at extraordinarily low prices” at the modest Hotel du Monte Carlo in the city of the same name, adds the aside that the hotel manager is trying to get rid of them because, he says, “In Monte Carlo the winners drink nothing but Champagne, the losers water or whiskey and soda.” Still another passage begins, “If you are detained at Calais (and every man at least once in his lifetime is detained at Calais) . . . “

Clearly this is not your pocket-sized Zagat or your red-bound, hide-bound Guide Michelin talking. What this is is an urbane, witty, highly evocative, information-packed little volume called “The Gourmet’s Guide to Europe,” by a man who signs himself simply “Lieut.-Col. Newnham-Davis”--a book devoted to the dining customs, menus and after-dinner entertainments not just of Western Europe but also of Russia, the Balkan countries, even Turkey. In many ways, it is my favorite restaurant guide.

Sounds good, you say? Sounds like something you might like to pick up at Brentano’s before your next trip across the Big Pond? Well, maybe--but I guess I should probably mention at this point that Brentano’s doesn’t carry “The Gourmet’s Guide to Europe.” Not very many other bookstores are likely to carry it either. It is long out of print and would be of limited practical use today even if you could find a copy: It was originally published, you see, in 1903.

I collect old restaurant guides, particularly (though not exclusively) those dealing with Paris, London, New York and Los Angeles. Not everyone, I have found, appreciates the appeal of such volumes. Isn’t collecting old restaurant guides a bit like collecting old telephone books or old calendars? Aren’t they yesterday’s papers? What earthly use can such guides be?

The answer is, of course, that old restaurant guides are of no use at all as guides, but that they can tell us a very great deal, culinary and otherwise, about earlier times and other places.

For instance, I thought I knew what a chateaubriand was, until I read Newnham-Davis on the subject. The real chateaubriand, he writes, “is a steak of great thickness, with two thin slices of rump-steak tied above and below it. These slices are burned in the cooking and are thrown away, the steak done-through being passed over a bright fire before being served, to brown it.”

He adds that the dish was invented at Champeaux on the place de la Bourse in Paris, where “the cuisine has always been of the best,” and tells what he calls “a pretty story” about that establishment: “Champeaux, its founder, as a poor boy came to Paris, starving and without a sou. A kindly restaurateur gave him at daybreak a dish of broken food. When he himself was prosperous and a restaurateur he ordered that all the food left over should each morning at daybreak be given to the hungry poor, and this is still done.”

Such delicious tidbits aside, though, one of the most interesting things about old restaurant guides is that--unlike their contemporary counterparts--they don’t always waste a lot of time yakking about food. There are certainly exceptions to this, but I find that a good many such books, though they certainly recommend certain dishes and proffer judgments as to overall quality of the cooking at the places they include, at the same time seem to acknowledge, at least implicitly, that restaurants are social arenas and repositories of tradition and not just feed troughs. These guides talk about the heart as much as about the palate. They’re full of personality, full of life--books in which chefs are human beings, not celebrities, and in which a meal is only as good as the spirit by which it is animated. Oh, and they don’t give stars.

Here, for example, is a review by Julian Street of a Parisian boite called Adrienne, reproduced in its entirety from his “Where Paris Dines” (1929): “Into this restaurant I chanced one night by accident. Entering alone, I was greeted by female yelps in the ‘Here comes Charley!’ manner, but having got that far, and being hungry, I sat down and dined while terrible old harridans cavorted and sang. The wine was good enough, and the dinner was so far from bad that it surprised me, yet I found the place entirely unpleasant.” What precisely did Street eat and drink? Who cares? What more could anybody possibly need to know about the place than what he tells us? And how, for heaven’s sake, could anyone assign a rating to it?

And then there is the passage, attached to a reference to a Provencal establishment called Restaurant Blanc, in “Paris a la Carte” (1927) by Sommerville Story, in which the author tells his readers how “real” aioli is made, in prose that shades palpably into the purple. “Take a mortar,” he writes, “or rather place one between the knees of a brown-faced, dark-haired youth of Provence and watch him while he crushes into it a few gousses of garlic and a little piment with a wooden pestle. He adds to this the yoke (sic) of a fresh egg. Then the girl he loves, standing over him as he sits with the mortar, pours delicious olive oil from a long-necked bottle over the mixture, as he goes on grinding with the pestle, slowly at first, but gradually getting quicker and quicker. The garlic, egg and oil form a delicious silky paste which gradually rises until it fills the mortar, and stiffens until, when the oil bottle is empty, the youth in triumph leaves the pestle standing upright in the mixture.” Aioli, indeed! (Story adds, incidentally, as if in afterthought, “One can guarantee that all aioli is made exactly in this way!”)

On at least one occasion, a restaurant guide has illuminated a present-day establishment for me with a remarkable, poignant glow: Before I first visited the resuscitated Rainbow Room at New York City’s Rockefeller Center, shortly after it reopened under the management of the legendary Joe Baum in 1988, I happened to obtain a copy of a book called “Round the World With an Appetite” by Molly Castle, published in London in 1936. In it, the English-born Miss Castle-- whose photograph adorns the front jacket of the book, and who looks as though she must have been (delightful) trouble to me--tells of attending a lavish party given at the Rainbow Room a few days after its original opening in 1934, a bash so exclusive, she reports, “that Mr. Rockefeller himself was heard to say . . . that he had been lucky to have been able to secure an invitation.” (I think Castle deserves extra points, incidentally, for that elegant display of auxiliary verbs.) In the midst of this grand affair, Castle reports, she found herself helping a girl in the ladies room (“a very pretty girl . . . curved in all the right places”) to repair a stocking. The girl, who had “always thought English dames were so frozen that they wouldn’t put out a hand from a boat to save a drowning person if they hadn’t been introduced first,” warms to Castle, and tells a remarkable story:

It seems that the local “Junior Leaguers” have decided that modeling is a ball. “They like to see themselves dressed up to the eyes: jewels by Cartier, furs by Revillon, and their pictures in all the illustrated weeklies, by heck. They didn’t even get paid most of the time--as long as there were enough photographers lined up on the sidelines. . . . Things began to get so bad that the shops we professional models had been working in even started turning off their regular girls, hoping that they’d always be able to get a customer to take their place . . . and the ones who depended on piecework didn’t get but one job in two weeks, instead of two a day. . . . And curves were coming in, causing a need to eat regular. So . . . we got a meeting together, and one of the girls had a boy friend that worked on a newspaper and he came along. And what a neat scoop that boy got! We gave out an ultimatum through his sheet that if the Junior Leaguers didn’t lay off our jobs we were all going gunning for their sweethearts. And they photographed all of us in our underwear, and the sweethearts came right down and lined up in queues. So it all worked out quite well. Didn’t I tell you that was young Vandeburg I had out there?”

I guarantee you that no other visitor to the new Rainbow Room after it reopened experienced the place through quite the same eyes that I did.

And sometimes, finally, as I discovered recently, old restaurant guides can knock the wind right out of you. Browsing one afternoon through John Drury’s “Dining in Chicago,” published in 1931, wondering what the Alaska mountain goat at Wiechmann & Gellert might have tasted like, or maybe just the chicken shortcake at the College Inn, I suddenly met my late father. He was there, listed as “Bob Andrews, the novelist,” among the celebrity habitues (“Thomas Ross, the actor; Aline Stanley, the actress; Jess Krueger, the newspaperman and American Legion official . . . “) of a restaurant on East Delaware Place called Casa de Alex. The food at Casa de Alex was American, reported Drury, “prepared in an appetizing style,” and Spanish dishes were available on special order. There was, he added, “Dancing in the evening, but no rowdy stuff allowed. Afternoon teas attract many women, but there are no gigolos.” It sounds like an OK place. I like to think that the old man, as a bachelor, might have found it very amusing sometimes after dinner.