Under the Spell of Old Restaurants

In an iconic scene at the "21" club in "The Sweet Smell of Success," when Burt Lancaster, as the columnist J. J. Hunsecker, snaps at the waiter, complaining that his drinks are warm, the waiter tries to explain, and Hunsecker shoots back coldly, "What are you, a critic?" Even with the banquettes and checked tablecloths rendered in black and white, the mood of the place is captured: the clattering conversation, the sizzling steak, the frost on the perfectly stirred martini, the sense that something was happening that was worth being a part of. In an age of studied casualness, of competitive waiting in line and chef-stalking and meal-Instagramming, of pedigreed pigs and forced intimacy with your neighbors' elbows, it is novel to be served by a dignified career waiter in a jacket who knows his business. All of these places will make you feel at home, appreciated and relaxed, whether that means the bustle of the Tadich Grill in San Francisco - the air filled with the cacophony of martini shakers, the menu full of lobster thermidors and crab Louies, the long wooden bar packed with a mix of gregarious businesspeople and, somehow, always someone you haven't seen in 10 years - or the rougher environment of the old Parisian Right Bank worker's restaurant, Bouillon Chartier, with its enormous Art Nouveau interior, where the unflappable waiters tot up the bills on the paper tablecloths of prostitutes and tourists alike and the unadorned steaks and escargots are plopped down with all the grace of a Dickensian workhouse. I checked my coat and followed the waiter - a younger man whom I didn't recognize - through the crowd of older diners to a table that, I hoped, was not too Siberian.
Source: NEW YORK TIMES


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