Starving Abroad!

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 998, 14 June 1930, Page 18

Starving Abroad!

Will Dyson’s Amusing Account of Menu-Mysteries

Will Dyson, the famous. Australian cartoonist, i-s on a world tour and is contributing a series of amusing illustrated articles to the Melbourne “Herald.” Here are his impressions of “dining out” in the United States.

UCCESS in travel in savage lands may be ganged by the success with which the voyager is able to overcome the disability of being a toreiguer. This disability is felt at its keenest in dealing with the hostile representatives of foreign Governments —they are all hostile—and with the waiters of foreign restaurants. 1 cannot say that this generalisation holds good in Lapland and the remoter corners of Tibet, but it is true of America. My experiences of the last few days convince me that

the groping isolation of the modern Marco Polo can only be felt at its full in an American restaurant when one is confronted by the American menu. Tha Chicago menus can exhibit a more terrifying unfamiliarity of nomenclature thau those of Budapest.

When first confronted by an American menu there was borne "in on me a full realisation of how much a man’s self respect is bound ,up in his ability to look like a' practised diner in the presence of . savage waiters. And any waiter is likely to be savage until you have shown you know the difference between a filet mignon and tripe and onions. No man can truly feel he is a man until he Is able to order with nonchalance a meal that has that indefinable something about it which stamps the orderer as “one who knows.’’

In any Australian restaurant I would do this with aplomb. But here In the home of the Tamale, the Chili Con Carne, I am reduced to the ranks of the bumpkins. Before entering my moral begins to 'ebb. I am haunted by the fear that it will not be a plain eating house, but something with a strange new ritual for getting your

j food —a cafeteria, an automat, a hof j Brauhaus, a Blue Plate Service— J places in which in the name of effiI cieney you have to do things I am | not used to doing, before you qualify jas a diner. Things that I am too old j to learn. I But once inside the- restaurant I jam reduced to plain boob. There is. a yard and a-lialf of menu. I pause over it, sweating almost audibly. It contains dishes named by city boosters after every town in the Union—but none of them are named after food. Virginia Slaw is not a food; it is a geographical enigma. You can pause over a menu for a certain time. After that the waiter begins to silently register thoughts about you. To have a waiter registering thoughts about me throws me into a panic. I am not one of your hardy, callous i diners. No hostile vibration from

a waiting waiter is ever missed by the morbidly sensitised prawn which is me in an American restaurant. I end by ordering almost blindly from the poly-ungual chaos before me—ordering something that seems to have some slight verbal conformity with food. When 1 get it I find that what I was a clear soup is porridge—garnished with tulip buds and anchovy sauce—the fish is an icecream crusted with red pepper and served in an alligator pear—what I expected to be roast beef is unashamedly sago cutely decorated with shrimp fins. I eat what I can of the shameful messes, doing my best to look as though the noxious combination was the conscious solution of a slightly exotic taste. Beside me are men eating dishes that are maddening in their desirability, the names of which I am destined never to know. Today I determined, come what may, I would order bread and cheese. Gamely I did so. When I found the bread was rich with raisins and allspice, something in me snapped. I know what it. was. I knew by the nature of the sound what it was—it was my spirit which had broken. Only so much can a man stand.