Personally, I class roast beef with watercress and vanilla cornstarch
pudding as tasty articles of diet. It undoubtedly has more than the
required number of calories; it leans over backward in its eagerness
to stand high among our best proteins, and, according to a vivid chart
in the back of the cookbook, it is equal in food value to three dried
raisins piled one on the other plus peanut-butter the size of an egg.
But for all that I can't seem to feel that I am having a good time
while I am eating it. It stimulates the same nerve centers in me that
a lantern-slide lecture on "Palestine--the Old and the New," does.
However, I have noticed that there are people who are not bored by it;
in fact, I have seen them deliberately order it in a restaurant when
they had the choice of something else; so I thought that the only fair
thing I could do would be to look into the matter and see if, in this
great city, there weren't some different ways of serving roast beef
to vary its monotony.
Roast beef is not the same price in all eating-places. What makes the
difference? What does a diner at the Ritz get in his "roast prime ribs
of beef au jus" that makes it distinctive from the "Special
to-day--roast beef and mashed potatoes" of the Bowery restaurant?
To answer these questions I started out on a tour of the
representative eating-places of some of our best known strata of
society, and, whatever my conclusions are, you may be sure that they
are thoroughly inexpert.
First, I tried out what is known as the Bay State Lunch, so called
because on Thursdays they have a fishcake special. It is one of the
hundreds of "self-serving" lunchrooms, where you approach the marble
counter and give your order in a low tone to a man in a barber's coat,
and then repeat it at intervals of one minute, each time louder and
each time to a different man, until you are forced to point to a tub
of salmon salad and say, "Some of that," for which your ticket is
punched and you are allowed to take your portion and nurse it on the
over-developed arm of a chair.
Here the roast beef shot through the Punch and Judy arrangement in the
wall, a piece of meat about as large around as a man's-size mitten,
steeping in its own gravy and of a pale reddish hue. The price was
twenty cents, which included a dab of mashed potato dished out in an
ice-cream scoop, a generous allowance of tender peas, two hot
tea-biscuits and butter to match.
[Illustration: "Considering the basic ingredient, it was a perfectly
satisfactory meal."]
Considering the basic ingredient, it was a perfectly satisfactory
meal, and I felt that twenty cents was little enough to pay for it,
especially since it was going in on my expense account.
For the next experiment I went to a restaurant where business men are
wont to gather for luncheon, men who pride themselves on their acumen
and adherence to the principles of efficiency. The place has a French
name and its menus are printed on a card the size of a life insurance
company's complimentary calendar, always an ominous sign. The roast
beef here was served cold, with a plate of escarole salad (when I was
a boy I used to have to dig escarole out of the front lawn with a
trowel so that the grass could have a chance) for seventy-five cents.
The meat bulked a little larger than at the Bay State Lunch, but when
the fat had been cut away and trimmed off the salvage was about the
size of a boy's mitten. As for the taste, the only difference that I
could detect was that one had been hot and the other cold.
And, incidentally, the waiter had some bosom friends in the next room
who fascinated him so that it was all I could do to make him see that
if he didn't come around to me once in a while, just as a matter of
form, there would be no way for me to tip him. Beef and salad, plus
tip, ninety cents.
That evening I ambled up the Bowery until I came to the Busy Home
Restaurant. On a black-board in front was written, "Roast Beef, Mashed
Potatoes and Coffee, 10 Cents." My old hunger again seized me. I said
to myself: "Look here! Be a man! This thing is getting the best of
you." But before I knew it I was inside and seated at an
oilcloth-covered table, saying, in a hoarse voice, "Roast beef!"
The waiter was dressed in an informal costume, with his shirt-sleeves
rolled up and a mulatto apron about his waist, but he smiled genially
when he took my order and was back with it in two minutes. The article
itself was of the regulation size, cut somewhat thinner, perhaps, and
bordering on the gray in hue, but undoubtedly roast beef. It, too, had
an affinity for its own gravy and hid itself modestly under an
avalanche of mashed potatoes. A cup of coffee was also included in the
ten cents' initial expense, but I somehow wasn't coffee-thirsty that
night, and so didn't sample it. But I did help myself to the plate
piled high with fresh bread which was left in front of me. All in all,
it was what I should call a representative roast beef dinner. And I
got more than ten cents' worth of calories, I know.
But so far I had kept below the Fourteenth Street belt in my
investigations. Roast beef is a cosmopolitan habit, and knows no
arbitrary boundaries; so I went uptown. Into one of the larger of our
largest hotels, one which is not so near the Grand Central Station as
to be in the train-shed, and yet not so far removed from it as to be
represented by a different Assemblyman. Here, I felt, would be the
test. Could roast beef come back? Surrounded by glittering
chandeliers and rich tapestries, snowy table linen and silver service,
here was the chance for the ordinary roast beef to become a veritable
dainty, with some character, some distinctive touch that should lift
it above all that roast beef has ever meant before. I entered the
dining-room, in high hopes.
Clad in a walking suit of virile tweed, I considered myself
respectably dressed. Not ostentatiously respectable, mind you, but,
since most of the other diners were in evening dress, rather
_distingué_, I thought.
But apparently the hotel retainers weren't trained to look through a
rough exterior and find the sterling qualities beneath. They looked
through my rough exterior all right, but they didn't stop at my
sterling qualities. They looked right through to the man behind me,
and gave him the signal that there was a seat for him.
Not to be outdone, however, I got my place in the sun by cleverly
tripping my rival as he passed me, so that he fell into the fountain
arrangement, while I sat down in the seat pulled out for him by the
head waiter. And, once I was in, there was nothing for them to do but
let me stay.
After I had been there a few minutes a waiter came and put on a fresh
table cloth. Five minutes later another man placed a knife and spoon
at my plate. Later in the evening a boy with a basket of rolls
wandered by and deposited one on my table with a pair of pincers.
Personally, I was rather glad that it was working out this way, for it
would make my story all the better, but I might have really been in a
hurry for my dinner.
It wasn't long, as the crow flies, before one of the third assistant
waiters unloosened enough to drop round and see if there was anything
else I wanted besides one roll and a knife and spoon. I looked over
the menu as if I were in a pretty captious mood, and then, with the
air of an epicure who has tasted to the dregs all the condiments of
Arabia and whose jaded palate refuses to thrill any longer, I ordered
"roast beef."
It was billed as "90 (.80)," which didn't strike me as being very
steep, considering the overhead expense there must be in keeping
little knots of waiters and 'bus-boys standing round doing nothing in
the further corner of the room.
The waiter wasn't very enthusiastic over my order, and something saved
me from asking him if they threw in "a side" of mashed potatoes with
the meat. He seemed to expect something more, even after I had ordered
potatoes, so I suggested an artichoke. That cheered him up more than
anything I had done that evening, and he really got quite fratty and
said: "A little salad, sir?" Again I imitated a man who has had more
experience with salads than any other three men put together and who
has found them a miserable sham.
[Illustration: "The waiter wasn't very enthusiastic over my order."]
"No; that will be all for now," I said, and turned wearily away. I
wanted to tell him that I had a dinner coat at home that looked enough
sight better than his, but there is no use in making a scene when it
can be avoided.
During the next twenty minutes the orchestra played once and I ate my
roll. Then the roast beef came.
On a silver platter, with a silver cover, it was placed before me
under the best possible scenic conditions. But the thing that met my
gaze when the cover was lifted might just as well have been the same
property piece of roast beef that was keeping company with a dab of
mashed potato in the Bay State Lunch. It had a trifle more fat, was
just a shade pinker, and perhaps a micrometer could have detected a
bit more bulk; but, so far as I was concerned or so far as the
calories were concerned, it was the same. I won't say that it was the
same as the Roast Beef Special of the Bowery Restaurant, because the
service in the Bowery Restaurant was infinitely better.
As a fitting garniture to such a dish, there was a corsage of
watercress draped on the corner of the salver. At any rate, it could
be said for it that it was not intoxicating, and so could never cause
any real misery in this world.
I nibbled at my roast beef, but my spirit was broken. I had gone
through a week of self-denial, ordering roast beef when I craved
edibles, eating at restaurants while my family waited for me at home,
and here was the result of my researches: Roast beef is roast beef,
and nothing can prevent it. From the ten-cent order of the Busy Home
Restaurant, up through to the piece I was then eating, it was the same
grim reality, the only justification for a difference in price being a
silver salver or a waiter in a tuxedo.
"But," I said to myself, "eighty cents isn't so much, at that.
Besides, I have heard the orchestra play one tune every half-hour, and
have had a kind word from one of the _chargés d'affaires_ of the
waiter's staff."
This quite reconciled me, until my check was brought. There, added to
the initial expense of eighty cents, was the upkeep, such as "Cover,
25c." "Potatoes, 30c." And to this must be added the modest fee of
twenty cents to the waiter and ten cents to the hat-boy who gave me
the wrong hat. Total expense for one piece of roast beef, $1.70.
These investigations may not prove to be much of a contribution to
modern science or economics. I doubt if they are ever incorporated in
any textbook, even if it should be a textbook on this very subject.
But I must take credit to myself for one thing: Not once throughout
the whole report have I alluded to the Tenderloin District.