Food
Michele Roberts on hierarchy at the old Ritz Carlton
Published 11 April 2005
At the old Ritz Carlton, the best tables went to society snobs, not celebrities
Ludwig Bemelmans, whose Madeline books continue to enchant many childhoods, also wrote captivatingly - for example, in Hotel Bemelmans (Ebury Press), a mixture of autobiography and fantasy - about the restaurant trade. He was born in 1898 in a hotel in the Austrian Tyrol. An old maItre d'hotel acted as his nurse and the chef mixed up the formula for the baby's bottles. But he soon went to the bad. Expelled from school after school, he ended up apprenticed to his uncle Hans, who owned a chain of hotels. Young Ludwig went out riding before work every morning, and breakfasted on hard peasant bread dipped into a pint of red wine. One day, after an argument, he shot a head waiter. He was offered a choice: reform school or emigration. Off he sailed to New York City, sporting two pistols with which to ward off hostile Indians.
Bemelmans worked at the Ritz Carlton, which he called the Hotel Splendide. A rigid hierarchy structured the staff. The hotel manager was le patron. Technically under him, but actually more important, was Monsieur Victor, the head in the restaurant. Below him came the maItres d'hotel, and below them were the chefs de rang, each in charge of several tables. The waiters who serviced these were the commis de rang, and at the bottom of the heap were the debarrasseurs.
Monsieur Victor acted like the recording angel admitting punters to paradise. He kept the best tables for society snobs, followed by celebrities, actresses and publishers. In a wider circle sat "the people who are photographed much . . . who are found at the Atlantic Beach Club, in Miami, and occasionally murdered or mixed up in fashionable messes; also Italian aristocracy, young men who give morning concerts or dancing lessons, and movie stars". Beyond these sat the "untouchables . . . innocent people who just walked in off the street thinking that this was a restaurant".
The commis ate before and after their shifts. One particularly greedy waiter, nicknamed Beau Maxime, would help himself to the best leftovers - capon wings, foie gras dumplings, pieces of truffle, lobster claws - leaving little for his colleagues. One of them, "a pale little French boy", once had to take his three plates of food upstairs for him: "On the stairway, where no one could see him, the commis carefully spat into all three." One waiter used words, not deeds, as protest. He had "communistic ideas. 'Ecrasez l'infame!' he would shout." When he began writing threatening anonymous letters to Monsieur Victor, in which he'd harp on about his need for a machine-gun, Bemelmans had him shipped off on a liner leaving for Marseilles. Next morning, however, another anonymous letter arrived, postmarked Brooklyn. Sturdy survivors, these communists.
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