Andy Rooney_ 60 Years Of Wisdom And Wit Part 3

Considering how much time we spend sitting, it's strange our chairs don't fit us better. No size 6 woman would think of wearing a size 14 dress but a size 48 man who weighs 250 pounds is expected to sit in the same size chair a 98-pound woman sits in. To some extent a chair in a room is considered community property, but in most homes a family arranges itself in the same way day after day when it settles down, and more attention ought to be given chair sizes.

Certain purposeful chairs have been well done but with no regard to the size or shape of the occupant. The electric chair, the dentist's chair, the theater seat or the airplane seat are mostly well designed, but again every chair is the same size. We're not. I suppose it would be difficult to sell theater tickets by seat size or for a dentist to have more than one chair depending on whose tooth ached. But the fact remains: people don't take the same size chair any more than they take the same size shoe.

Even though most public seating furniture must have seemed comfortable to the people who designed it, it seems to have been designed and sat on for the test under laboratory conditions. These conditions don't exist in a movie theater or on a crowded airplane.

In the theater chair, the shared armrest has always been a problem. The dominant personality usually ends up using the one on both sides of the seat in which he or she is sitting and the occupants of the adjacent seats get either none or one, depending on who flanks them on the other other side. The shared armrest may be part of what's known as the magic of the theater, but it's a constant source of irritation to anyone watching a bad movie. side. The shared armrest may be part of what's known as the magic of the theater, but it's a constant source of irritation to anyone watching a bad movie.

The average airplane chair is a marvel of comfort and we could all do worse than to have several installed in our own homes. The problem on board, of course, is the person in the seat next to you. The seats are usually lined up three across, and if the plane is full the middle seat can make a trip to Europe a nightmare. It is no longer a comfortable place of repose; it's a trap and you're in it.

At a time when all of us are looking for clues to our character, it's unusual that no one has started a.n.a.lyzing us from the way we sit in chairs. It must be at least as revealing of character as a person's handwriting and an even more reliable indicator of both personality and att.i.tude than, say, palm-reading.

The first few minutes after you sit down are satisfying ones, but no matter how good it feels to get off your feet, you can't stay in one position very long. Sooner or later that wonderful feeling you got when you first took the weight off your feet goes away. You begin to twitch. You are somehow dissatisfied with the way your body is arranged in the chair but uncertain as to what to do about it.

Everyone finds his own solution for what to do with feet. No two people do exactly the same thing. The first major alteration in the sitting position usually comes when the legs are crossed. The crossing of legs seems to satisfy some inner discontent, the scratching of a psychosomatic itch deep inside.

It's amusing to see how often we use a chair designed to be used one way in a manner so totally different that even the originator could not have imagined it. We straddle a chair, sitting on it backwards with our arms where our backs are supposed to be and our chin on our arms; we sit sideways in a lounge chair with our legs draped over one arm and our backs leaning against the other arm. We rock back in chairs that are not rockers, ungluing their joints. We do things to chairs we wouldn't do to our worst enemy, and chairs are among our best friends.

You'd have to say that of all the things we have built for ourselves to make life on earth more tolerable, the chair has been one of the most successful.

Mr. Rooney Goes to Dinner You see so many things that all of us have done badly that life can be depressing unless you look for some of the things we've done well. And there are some.

Take something as basic as eating, for example.

It's absolutely necessary that we eat to survive, but we could do that by stuffing food in our mouths with our hands, so we can congratulate ourselves for having turned eating into a civilized and often very pleasant little ceremony called either breakfast, lunch or dinner.

All of us enjoy the ceremony and one of the special treats we give ourselves once in a while is eating out in a restaurant.

There are 400,000 restaurants in the United States and if you ate three meals a day in restaurants for seventy years, you could only eat in 76,000 of them.

Obviously I haven't gone to all 400,000 restaurants in the United States to make this report. Chances are I didn't go to the one you like best or least. I didn't even go to the one I I like best. like best.

My job may seem good to some of you . . . but I've got a tough boss. Several months ago he gave me an order. "Travel anywhere you want in the United States," he told me. "Eat in a lot of good restaurants on the company . . . and report back to me."

I took money, credit cards and a lot of bad advice from friends and set out across the country.

People argue about where the best restaurants are in the United States. Boston, San Francisco and New Orleans have always had good places. Florida has had some for a long time. New York has a hundred that would be the best in town anywhere else. But there have been some changes for the better in places that didn't used to have any any good good restaurants.

[image]Mr. Rooney goes to dinner.

The South is getting over Southern cooking, for instance. Places like Cincinnati, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, even South Bend, Indiana, have excellent restaurants. You can get a gourmet meal in Houston, Texas, or Phoenix, Arizona.

There are a few places that puzzle me, though. For instance, I don't suppose there's a place in the whole world that grows as much good food as Iowa does. They brag about it. And yet a gourmet tour of Iowa would be a nonstop trip.

The biggest trend is a leveling out that has taken place. It's harder to find that great little undiscovered place in a small town, but more often than before you can find a restaurant that serves at least acceptable food. The Rotary Club usually meets there.

There's more dependable mediocrity than there used to be. It isn't going to be very good, but it isn't going to be very bad either. And because most of it's frozen, it's going to be the same in Maine as it is in Oklahoma. What's happened to all the good and bad little independent restaurants, of course, is all the big chains and the fast-food places. Many independents have been driven out of business.

There are the big steak chains, for instance. They often serve beef treated with tenderizer and are called something like the Beef and Bourbon or the Steak and Stein. They and the fast-food places bring in billions of dollars a year. Most are owned by big corporations with other interests: Pillsbury owns Burger King, for example.

Hamburgers are the big seller, a lot more American than Mom's apple pie now because Mom isn't baking pies much these days. The chicken places have come up fast in the last ten years and there are pizza parlors everywhere. You don't have to go to Mexico to get a taco.

The biggest and most successful fast-food operation is, obviously, McDonald's. There are 3,232 of them-and counting. They've driven thousands of individually owned diners and cafes out of business. The drive-ins have been victims in a lot of areas.

A typical meal in McDonald's costs about $ 1.75. The hamburger is good ground meat, the French fries are excellent and the shake is an imitation milkshake made with thickeners to give the impression it's made with ice cream-which it isn't.

McDonald's restaurants are probably a reflection of our national character. They're fast . . . they're efficient . . . they make money and they're clean. If they're loud and crowded and if the food is wastefully wrapped, packaged, boxed and bagged . . . let's face it, Americans, that's us.

There's nothing really distinctive about American cooking. "American cooking" isn't even a phrase like "French cooking." That accounts for why our best restaurants serve someone else's native dishes.

Italian restaurants are most popular. Thirty-six percent of all Americans who eat out eat in Italian restaurants at one time or another. Thirty-five percent, according to the National Restaurant a.s.sociation, eat in Chinese restaurants. French restaurants are most popular with people who make more than $25,000 a year.

But we have everything. In the last ten years there's been a population explosion of j.a.panese restaurants. They serve steak, shrimp or chicken along with bean sprouts and onions-and it's all cooked right there in front of you. The man doing the cooking is part chef . . . part show biz . . . and part Kamikaze pilot.

One of the good things about these places is they never serve you a piece of anything you can't eat . . . no bones, no fat. I've never been to j.a.pan. For all I know, they don't eat like this over there. Someone told me there's a Benihana of New York in Tokyo.

Part of the fun of eating out is doing something different. j.a.panese is different. How many times in the last few weeks have you come home from work to find your husband fixing sukiyaki for you?

The other kind of j.a.panese restaurant is the sus.h.i.+ bar. Five years ago you couldn't have told me I'd ever eat a piece of raw fish. Now I'm addicted to sus.h.i.+. Sus.h.i.+ is carefully boned and carefully sliced raw fish . . . tuna . . . squid . . . mackerel . . . eel . . . octopus . . . served with cold rice wrapped in seaweed. Sounds good, doesn't it? It's always attractively served on a board. It looks like a j.a.panese painting.

Scandinavian smorgasbord places are popular, too: Americans like the idea of helping themselves to all they want. It's as if they were getting something free.

I ate in one called the Copenhagen one day-with a friend. He's a smorgasbord expert.

Walter Cronkite: This is a Danish something.

Rooney: Lingonberries.

Cronkite: That's right. That's what it is. That's the word I was groping . . .

Rooney: You were grasping for.

Cronkite: And they're marvelous.

Rooney: What is this pink stuff?

Cronkite: That pink stuff is some very interesting . . . pink stuff there.

I think it's beets. I believe. I don't know. I'm not sure what that is. I've never taken it. It looks repulsive, to tell you the truth. How about shrimp? Beautiful shrimp?

Rooney: Yeah, I'll have a shrimp. I notice they leave the sh.e.l.ls on them, though. I figure that's to make it hard so you don't take too many.

Cronkite: Any restaurant you go to where the dessert tray is brought in like this, every table the reaction is the same. People recoil. They're obviously making the statement to their friends. "I . . . I shouldn't. Oh, no, I shouldn't. Take that away. I don't want to even look at that."

Rooney: "But maybe I'll just have a little bit."

Cronkite: But then they come back.

Waitress: And these are special ones over here. They're made of almond paste.

Rooney: I really shouldn't.

Cronkite: No, I shouldn't either . . . so have one.

Rooney: Oh, thank you.

Like everything else, there are trends in the restaurant business- fas.h.i.+ons in what a restaurant looks like. Years ago, many good restaurants had those white tile floors with lots of mirrors around and waiters who worked there for a hundred years wearing white ap.r.o.ns that came to their ankles.

In the past twenty years restaurants have gotten very conscious. Too conscious, probably. In the sixties, most new restaurants with any pretensions at all looked like this. As you came in, there was usually a coat of arms in the lobby. The dominant color was red, the lights were low and there was often a candle on the table held in one of those small bowls covered with white netting.

The menu was predictable . . . steak, shrimp, chicken, filet of sole and South African lobster tail . . . meaning they didn't really have a chef.

They were pleasant enough and there are still a lot of them around- but there's a new trend. In the trade it's called "the theme restaurant." Eating in one, according to the ads, is an adventure.

If you want to start a theme restaurant, you can go to J.B.I. Industries in Compton, California. They can make the inside of your place look like anything from a submarine to a men's locker room.

Carolyn Steinbach is production manager.

Rooney: How many of these do you do a year? How many restaurants do you design, roughly? Would you guess?

Steinbach: Well, we did something like three hundred and fifty last year.

Rooney: Could you show some of them to us?

Steinbach: Certainly.

Rooney: A pirate s.h.i.+p.

Steinbach: A pirate s.h.i.+p.

Rooney: Hey, what would it cost somebody to come up with a pirate s.h.i.+p in a restaurant like that?

Steinbach: Our pirate s.h.i.+p runs somewhere around six thousand dollars.

Rooney: Gosh, I'll be darned.

Steinbach: This is our tin goose . . . seating on both wings, seating behind the engine and then down the center of the- Rooney: The kids get a kick out of this?

Steinbach: Right. They really relate well to something like this.

Out back, it looked like Santa Claus's workshop. We talked to president Jay Buchbinder.

Rooney: Well, now, wouldn't something like that make kids stay longer in a restaurant so the restaurant would have a smaller turnover? I mean, is that a factor?

Buchbinder : Well, it might even speed up the process of eating, because if you go in with little children, the children will want to play on the trains, so they might eat faster and then the parents will want to leave more quickly. We've even tried to get design involved in the restroom areas where people might say, "Well, gee, they have nice clean restrooms. We'll stop there because the restrooms are nice and we'll also buy our food." So everything goes as a total package situation.

Rooney: You don't make any little engines for the restrooms or anything?

Buchbinder: There can be little decors in the restroom areas, little train plaques or little car plaques. So when you go into a fast-food operation, it's like going into a finer restaurant now. They're giving you every courtesy that you might have in a better restaurant.

Workmen were finis.h.i.+ng a new plastic replica of an old airplane to s.h.i.+p to a McDonald's opening in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. We were curious about how a hamburger would taste eaten in a plastic airplane, so a few weeks later, after it had been installed, we went to Glen Ellyn.

Rooney (to cas.h.i.+er): Same price whether I eat it here or in the airplane?

Cas.h.i.+er: Yes.

Rooney: I guess I'll eat it in the airplane.

It seems as though everywhere you go they're trying to take your mind off the food. It's got so it's almost as though they were embarra.s.sed to look like a restaurant.

The most successful theme chain is Victoria Station. Just five years ago three young Cornell Hotel School graduates started buying up old boxcars for a few thousand dollars each. Now they own 250 of them and they're using them in 46 restaurants around the country. In five years, sales went from nothing to $47 million.

The difference between this and the all-American diner is that Victoria Station serves mostly roast beef and steak. And, of course, for cooking steak and roast beef you don't need a French chef; you need a smart American kid who can cook meat.

They also have a help-yourself salad bar. They've become very popular in American restaurants too. You come along and just help yourself to as much of everything as you want. I suspect that people might take a little more lettuce than they'd get if the waiter gave it to them. On the other hand, lettuce is a lot cheaper than help. And it sure saves on the help.

The food is pretty good at Victoria Station, but just as in most other gimmick restaurants, food takes second place.

As a person who likes to eat, I am just vaguely worried about the food business being taken over by entrepreneurs rather than by restaurateurs but even if it isn't the gourmet restaurants that are making the money, there are still a lot of impractical optimists who keep opening what they hope will be the perfect restaurant.

I'm seated at a table at the most expensive restaurant in the United States, the Palace in New York City.

Two of us just dined here. You don't eat at the Palace; you dine. And I have the check . . . brought on a silver platter. For two people: dinner . . . $179.35.

A lot of expensive restaurants are sneaky with their checks but there's nothing sneaky about the Palace. They lay it right on the line. Two dinners, $100. Two c.o.c.ktails at $5 each, $10. A bottle of wine, $25. That was the second cheapest bottle on the menu, by the way.Tax.That all comes to $145.80. Plus 23 percent for service. That's $33.55 for tips, for a total of $179.35.

Rooney: I thought maybe you could tell me what it was I had if I went over the menu.

Frank Valenza, owner: The first appetizer you had was the salad de Palace, which is fresh lobster with truffles, walnut oil, artichoke bottoms and a vinaigrette dressing.

Rooney: I thought it was pecan oil.

Valenza: No.

Rooney: Walnut oil, aha. Well, they fooled me there. And then I had- this is the gazpacho?

Valenza: Gazpacho, very thin gazpacho, made with fresh vegetables and a little garniture on the side.

Rooney: Made of what?

Valenza: Tomato, garlic, peppers, onions, all your fresh vegetables. But just the essence of the vegetables.

Rooney: Garlic seasoned with a little tomato?

Valenza: Yes.