Ah, nostalgia! Long before Starbucks, there were diners, and long before diners, there were Tea Rooms. Specifically, I am thinking about department store Tea Rooms. Not ideal for writing. Nor for thinking, actually. Too much to look at -- restaurant-as-theatre, that is -- too many flower prints, too many bird prints...
Speaking of birds, the Bird Cage in a long-ago Lord & Taylor comes to mind which besides all that elegance had no space in which to wield a pen, let alone a laptop. And certainly, not room for a cell. Hard to explain if you were not familiar with it, but the arrangement in the Bird Cage depended upon these tiny tables for two with linked arm chairs facing each other, a sort of S. A room full of these Ss. In the good old days in the Bird Cage, they gave each patron a cigarette, so I have been told, with a place setting, and in those days that I actualy remember, they brought around a cart full of dessert goodie to die for. You had but to gaze at all that whipped cream and chocolate to gain weight...
Dismaying, atmospherewise, that the Bird Cage then became a featureless Cafe American Style, which morphed into a wannabe elegant Larry Forgione, which yesterday I discovered, ta-DA, has become a Sarabeths, which chain, I have been told, is devouring all the department store tea rooms in the known world. Or at least in the U.S. of A. A bright note -- now costumed in Sarabeth waitperson get-up. is a waitperson I swear I remember from the Bird Cage. Cross my heart. She remembers me, too.
But the best tea rooms -- even better than the Charleston Gardens which used to grace B. Altman when there was a B. Altman -- were the Tea Rooms at Marshall Field's in Chicago. I grew up in the Walnut Room (was it the Walnut Room or the Fountain Room that had the style show? ) There were at least six Tea Rooms in Marshall Field's. You could actually have tea in a different Room from the one you'd had lunch in, if as I am assuming, your mother had dragged you on an all-day shopping trip..
Since the grown-up part of my life, including middle age and the best-time-of-my-my-life (geriatric, I admit )has taken place in New York, not Chicago, I want to refer back to the Charleston Gardens of yore at Altman's, where I took my kids and feel it a pity it did not endure into my grandmotherhood. I don't remember that the food was actually all that good, nor in the best sense, even Comfort Food, but all that Tea Room kitsch was so comforting...
I really intended to rave on about the wonderful transformational (I've yet to come up with a better adjective)times in which we discover we are living. What a fabulous, unbelievably life-affirming Election! Back to my diner. No distracting flower prints, no bird prints, -- just plain old terrible tuna melt, to meditate to/by/whatever.
