comprehensive that the ground floor and mezzanine of a really big hotel
in the United States offer a spectacle of humanity such as cannot be
seen in Europe; they offer also a remarkable contrast to the
tranquillity of their own upper stories, where any eccentricity is
vigorously discouraged. I think that it must be the vast tumult and
promiscuity of the ground floor which is responsible for the relative
inferiority of the restaurant in a great American hotel. A restaurant
should be a paramount unit, but as a fact in these hotels it is no
more than an item in a series of resorts, several of which equal if they
do not surpass it in popular interest. The Americans, I found, would
show more interest in the barber-shop than in the restaurant. (And to
see the American man of business, theoretically in a hurry, having his
head bumped about by a hair-cutter, his right hand tended by one
manicurist, his left hand tended by another manicurist, his boots
polished by a lightning shiner, and his wits polished by the two
manicurists together--the whole simultaneously--this spectacle in itself
was possibly a reflection on the American's sense of proportion.)
Further, a restaurant should be a sacred retreat, screened away from the
world; which ideal is foreign to the very spirit of the great American
hotel.

I do not complain that the representative celebrated restaurants fail to
achieve an absolutely first-class cuisine. No large restaurant, either
in the United States or out of it, can hope to achieve an absolutely
first-class cuisine. The peerless restaurant is and must be a little
one. Nor would I specially complain of the noise and thronging of the
great restaurants, the deafening stridency of their music, the artistic
violence of their decorations; these features of fashionable restaurants
are now universal throughout the world, and the philosopher adapts
himself to them. (Indeed, in favor of New York I must say that in one of