Ordinarily, we hate to dwell on, or even bring up, the sorry work of age upon our fellow diners, but we find that we must in sketching this scene for you, for the diners come in all ages and stages, and the differences count. At many tables are men whose pink pates show beneath longish strands of white hair, whose ruffs of fat hang over their white collars, dining in silence with women who scowl, who seem always to have scowled. At others are couples still in middle age, in from the ’burbs for the night, mangling those odd foreign phrases on the menu, wondering aloud what gustatory trials they conceal, offering one another solid misinformation, passing on errors that have gone uncorrected for so long that they are now almost as good as true. At still others are much younger people, starry-eyed, timid, cautious in choosing their utensils; he’s uncomfortable in his tie and tight collar, and she is wearing the dress she wore in her sister’s wedding. Oh, here’s something a little out of the ordinary: a graying man with a slip of a girl, tête-à-tête, but separated by nearly thirty years. Father and daughter? Lounge lizard and victim? Fille de joie and client?
Uh-oh, it’s happening again. We’re slipping into that state of enchantment. Now, when in memory we look around us, we see bedazzled couples with stars in their eyes, couples who quite evidently love the evening arranged for them, the performance mounted for them, even the indifferent food served to them and the phony brio on the side. We have to ask ourselves: “If they are made happy by all this, even for an evening, doesn’t that redeem the place? It can’t be completely contemptible, can it? One night of bliss — surely that’s worth something, even if we have to surrender to illusion to achieve it.”
We’re fighting to regain our objectivity. Just give us a moment. There. That’s better. Let’s be rational about this. Certainly every restaurant is a theater, and every meal is a performance, but this is really much too opéra bouffe. From the moment of our arrival, the staff began bowing and scraping and performing outré rituals designed to make us feel like jejune rustics still wet behind the ears connoisseur-wise.
Allow us to describe for you the outstanding fault in the whole verschwenderisch display, the one that towers above all the others, the crowning achievement in this temple of übermässigkeit, the food. The pâté we were served in the lounge was entirely acceptable, but we were expected to convey it to our epicurean maw on those round orange crackers called Ritz. Call us “snob” if you will, but we felt as if we were at one of those food barns in the country where one is expected to tuck into a “full-course” meal of New England cookin’, course one of which is inevitably some dreadful cottage-cheese spread, with the very same round orange crackers called Ritz. Just what are these Ritzes doing in Café Zurich? Is their presence supposed to be a nod to the sometimes simple tastes of the sophisticated, or to the unalterably vulgar tastes of the nouveau-riche? We can’t say. We left the lounge and went on in to dinner, where our breathtaking companion began with the Bündner Gerstensuppe, a vegetable soup with barley and Bündnerfleisch, the air-dried beef that the enterprising Swiss use for soling shoes. We chose the Busecca alla Ticinese, a vegetable soup with small strips of tripe or something. We both ate a wedge of iceberg lettuce topped with some paste flavored with garlic; this was listed on the menu as insalata mista — perhaps our Italian isn’t all it should be. Essaying the Zuger Rötel, a trout poached in white wine with herbs, swimming in a soapy sauce, we found that the herbs had been laid on in wholesale quantities to compensate for their not being fresh. Since she was in a forgiving mood, our charming companion ate her way bravely through — well, nearly through — her Züri Gschnätzlets, thin slices of decent veal, veal kidneys, and mushrooms in a tenacious and mucilaginous goo quite possibly developed to benefit the Swiss dry-cleaning industry. The Gschnätzlets (by the way, aren’t you proud of us for not having made a single joke about the fact that all of these dishes sound like sneezes?) were served with Rösti, grated potatoes fried in butter, then stamped with a cholesterol warning from the Swiss surgeon general. In the breadbasket were tiny Zwiebelwähe, the onion tarts that the inventive Swiss use as doorstops. Each of these dishes so admirably restated the theme of Café Zurich that we feel compelled to seize the opportunity to restate it ourselves; it was — how shall we put this? — de trop, de trop, de trop. There must be someone in the kitchen screaming “More fat! More flour! More salt!” We watched with ghoulish fascination while each dish collapsed under its own unbearable weight. Apparently we consumed quite a bit of this ponderous meal, for, upon our return home, we were disturbed to find that our elevator couldn’t quite lift us all the way to our exalted floor, stopping instead, exhausted and wheezing, between two inferior floors. We swear to you, trusting reader, that this actually happened.
[to be continued]
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🎧 525: Ordinarily, . . .