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Mayfair
Ladies It was a time when for a nickel, you could ride the bus all day and twenty-five cents got you a plate of French fries at the Woolworth Lunch counter. Downtown London was a remarkable place in those days, partly because I was still a child with an endless supply of curiosity and partly because the downtown was filled with interesting and thriving business. The Mayfair room existed during a time before the sexes insisted on barging into each other’s business, when there was a ritual called ladies lunch, an interlude in a woman’s busy day that allowed her to fortify body and spirit with a meal and setting as proper as she herself. This was a culinary fashion often dubbed “tearoom” dining, a label that distinguished this citadel of femininity from the serious restaurants in town, as well as the plebian coffee shops and lunch counters. Only a Neanderthal could misread the ethos of these “tearooms” as anything but feminine. Even as a ten-year-old I would not have dared do anything but watch the goings on from a distance. This place was not for me nor never would be. The Mayfair room was the antithesis of the Iroquois Restaurant where men ate steaks and drank cocktails and made too much noise. The Mayfair Room was a place in which ladies shared a common aura of politesse, in which food was edible proof of the superiority of the feminine spirit forged into a distinctive culinary style. Men were welcome, but they came reluctantly and knew to tread lightly. You don’t have to be female to appreciate this cuisine of Angel Cake and Ambrosia, of chicken bedded in various cream sauces, of muffins sized to fit, just so, between rouged lips. In the forties and fifties there were literally thousands of ladies tearooms nestled in the hearts of large department stores across North America, serving nothing fancier that a club sandwich and a pot of well made tea. Places where women could dine with assurance waited on by other women in black taffeta uniforms and starched white aprons. One could be sure that there would be no ogling salesman on his lunch hour, for these were safe isles of gentility, where the morals were as high as the Angle biscuits. Like a visit to the beauty parlour, lunch in this feminine restaurant conveyed a sense of immunity. The dark things of the world would not intrude into an edifice constructed on the sugary foundation of Strawberry Shortcake. After a lunch of creamed chicken on toast points, the jagged edges of life seemed nicely softened. I think to get a full sense of lady food’s charms, it is necessary to appreciate what it meant to be a lady. Understand, that there were once three sexes: men, women and ladies. Unlike women – who had babies, sweated in the yard, yelled for their children to come in to supper – ladies were creatures of a higher calling. While some might have been born to high manners, daily advice columns such as Ann Landers and Emily Post held out hope that with proper effort, even those who crawled out from under the cabbage patch might make it up through the ranks and enter the rarified circle of polite society. Would be ladies studied the arts of charm and grace with the intensity of scholars. Their daughters practiced walking with books placed on their heads. They crossed their legs at the ankle and blotted their lipstick so as not to leave scarlet prints on the Spode. Aspiring ladies needed a stage on which to practice their act; so where better than the places where ladies lunched. There they could be assured of an appreciative audience who could be counted on to admire them at their best. Among heart shaped aspics, pink lemonades and desserts as palpitatingly sweet as all their best intentions. |