the largest of its restaurants I heard a Chopin ballade well played on a
good piano--and it was listened to in appreciative silence; event quite
unique in my experience. Also, the large restaurant whose cuisine
nearest approaches the absolutely first-class is in New York, and not in
Europe.) Nor would I complain that the waiter in the great restaurant
neither understands English nor speaks a tongue which resembles English,
for this characteristic, too, is very marked across the Atlantic. (One
night, in a Boston hotel, after lingual difficulties with a head-waiter,
I asked him in French if he was not French. He cuttingly replied in
waiter's American: "I _was_ French, but now I am an American." In
another few years that man will be referring to Great Britain as "the
old country.") ...

No; what disconcerts the European in the great American restaurant is
the excessive, the occasionally maddening slowness of the service, and
the lack of interest in the service. Touching the latter defect, the
waiter is not impolite; he is not neglectful. But he is, too often,
passively hostile, or, at best, neutral. He, or his chief, has
apparently not grasped the fact that buying a meal is not like buying a
ton of coal. If the purchaser is to get value for his money, he must
enjoy his meal; and if he is to enjoy the meal, it must not merely be
efficiently served, but it must be efficiently served in a sympathetic
atmosphere. The supreme business of a good waiter is to create this
atmosphere.... True, that even in the country which has carried cookery
and restaurants to loftier heights than any other--I mean, of course,
Belgium, the little country of little restaurants--the subtle ether
which the truly civilized diner demands is rare enough. But in the great
restaurants of the great cities of America it is, I fancy, rarer than
anywhere else.