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Foreword:
If
there had never been a Stork Club, mankind
in his vast and urgent necessity would have in".ented one. This is,
to be sure, a corruption of an epigram evolved by a celebrated
philosopher about man and his relationship wiµi Divinity and not
the profound reflection of the author of this handy manual to gulp–
ing and guzzling. But it is altogether and entirely true. The Stork
and the man who created it are equally the product of their times
and the personal and emotional complement
to
the essentially naive
hanker on the part of the American public for snobbishness and
glamour in Cecil de Mille proportions.
Gene Fowler once remarked: "The history of Greece is written
in its temples, that of the United States in its hotels." And to carry
the parallel even farther, a good deal of the history of New York
has been written in its restaurants, saloons, night clubs, cafes,
cabarets, bars, lounges, dining rooms, ordinaries, fish and chips,
chophouses, dives, deadfalls, beer stubes, dramshops and all the
allied institutions dedicated to the stoking and sluicing of cus–
tomers of many tastes and means.
More than any other city on earth, NewYork lives in public. It
'
I
drinks, dines and dances in multiple postures in public places and _
it takes inordinate pleasure in reading about itself so occupied and
admiring photographs of itself tearing at Scotch grouse, hoisting
schooners of beer or tossing clamshells on the sawdust floor as its
pleasure may dictate. The by-products of public eating and drinking
vii: Foreword