11 / 148
very close to perfection, his guess would be that one of its weighti–
est, albeit intangible, assets is the superb organization of its staff
and the circumstance that
Mr.
Billingsley has never lost a customer
through failure to estimate a patron's importance, the improper
allocation of tables or any injudicious approach whatsoever. In an
institution serving, often enough, three thousand persons a day,
many of them notables with a complete willingness to be imaginarily
slighted or to turn on the flow of professional temperament, this
is
a notable achievement.
And, over and above all considerations, there is the primary
function of the Stork as a night club and restaurant: the service of
liquor and food in that order of
importa~ce.
These are also the
concern, in what is hoped will be a humaI_le and practical manner,
of this Bar Book. The subject has engaged the attentions of many
learned practitioners of the calling of beautiful letters.
Of
the
making of many cookbooks and cocktail guides there is no end.
But because drinking in the Stork Club manner is probably repre·
sentative of the most civilized and urbane habits of American toss–
pots, barring, of course, the mysteries and mannered potations of
such esoteric oenophiles as Les Amis d'Escoffier and the Wine and
Food Society, this essay is devoted to drinking as practiced in the
various parlors, anterooms and state suites of the Stork.
It
embraces
hardly at all the postured sniffing of debatable vintage years or the
ceremonial evaluations of rare and improbably costly spirits,
although it may be remarked in passing that the Stork's collection
of dated cognacs and other eaux de vie of note is the most extensive
1
I
in North America.
Taste in drinking is, quite naturally, everywhere and at all times
conditioned by economic resources, available types of wines and
spirits, climate, society and a score of other more or less ponderable
factors. The various native and Indies rums which were the first
xi:
Foreword