NEW YORK RESTAURANTS.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 416, 2 November 1889, Page 3

NEW YORK RESTAURANTS.

Stayers in town, and visitors, too, if they have the money to indulge their tastes, industriously seek for merits and singularities in restaurants. No feature of metropolitan life is moreindicativeof the change wrought by fche lazy reason than the restaurants. When a sories of hob waves submerge New York the winter aspect of these rendezvous, from Delmonico's and the Madison-square houees to the comparatively,; cheap, foreign table d'hotea. undergoes a complete transformation. •It is not that New Yorkers are conspicuous by their absence ; it is that one class ot New Yorkers, the regular patrons, is replaced by another, the householders, who, having closed or partly suspended their own establishments, suddenly appear at the dinner hour of the various restaurants of the town, fashionable or unfashionable. The summer or pastime in the country, of dulness and dissolution in town, is selected by married couples, whether the conjugal tie be of short or long duration, to vary the monotony of housekeeping and dinner parties by making the rounds of the restaurants. If there are 'no incumbrances' this is all the easier. If, on the other hand, there is a family to be provided for, matters are simplified by having afamily dinner at the luncheon hour, and, the evening thus made free, departing arm in arm to dine tete-a-tete. One sees numerous couples thus enjoying an outing, and they may be found, in demi- season state at Delmonico's, or in an out-and-*out bohemianism in the French and German restaurants of University and Lafayette Place. Delmonico's is perhaps too conventional to suit their taste. They are tired, too, of the too familiar faces of all-the-year-round guests, men who perform the opera tian tersely characterised as ' wearing out Delmonico's chairs.' Some of the restaurants have somehow acquired a reputation of carelessness, not

amounting to wickedness. This is especially true of one gorgeous Broadway hotel. Ono of the things that the fair partner of our wandering diners-out insists on is to dine at this house. She has heard of the Turkish bath-like splendour ot ibs interior, of the ' nymphs and the satyrs' in its opulent barroom, of music from the lattice oi a Moorish gallery throughout dinner, and of the occasional presence at dinner and.suppor of those beautiful beings who sing in the comic operas.. Like Cyprienno in SardoV.3 merry • Divorcons,' she insists on being taken out to dine, and, rejoicing in the semblanceof anatmosphere less conservative than that to which she is accustomed, she realises what has been describoi by a clever woman as a delightful combination — that of being C;v*ar'a wife, and yet indulging in the petit sou pcr — with Cajsar ! Or she can plunge into absolute bohemia by going . further down town and regaling at datable d'hote, whether Italian, French or Germ An. . ( The oddest of the Italian places is run by a man who is one of the characters of the metropolis... -Heis not to be despised becaase he wears a soiled apron, a fact duo to his personally conducting his cuisine, an abundant one. The menu, though copious*, is susceptible of rearrangement ; for example, soup is introduced by cold arparngus, and the fish follows the macaponi. The dinner is altogether an enormous, meal and includes dishes euough for three meD.^,T,he proprie- :- torused to feed tenors in, the day sm Italian opera at the Academy of Music ; hence the abundance of supplies. The most famous German restaurant is down town to the extent of being in Lifayotto Place, and has for a neighbour the ] Astor Library. It is an immense house, formerly an old New Yorker's privato, dwelling. There is a .cafe, where men' retire to smoke, the only codec room of its ' kind in town, but of a character familiar { enough to people who have lived abroad. This i» a great place for regimental and collegiate dinners, and the rooms upstairs have been the scene of many entertainments in honour of Sir Henry Irving and other distinguished men, gourmets having discovered the concern's proficiency in cooking and serving canvas back ducks, terrapin and delicacies in general characteristic of the United States of America. Of the French restaurants the most popular is in University Place. The dinner is excellent, and, apart from an extension, there is at this season of the year a tent illuminated with thveu-coloured globes. The fcri-colour is, in fact, in evidence throughout this establishment. Parit and South America are, in fact, equally well repiesented and bha establishment welcomed, on his ariival from Paris, no less a personage than Joseph, cook extraordinary to \V. H. Vanderbilt, Mrs Joseph making the hotel her home throughout the chief's engagement at the palace in upper Fifth Avenue. — New York coriespondent of the Chicago ' Herald.'