At Mentor, about twenty-three miles before Cleveland, we came to a number of beautiful places that must have been the out-of-town homes of Cleveland people. The houses, many of them enormous, were long, low and white; not farmhouses and not Colonial manor houses, but a most happy adaptation of the qualities of both; dignified, homelike, imposing and enchanting.[2]
The remark of the man at the museum in Buffalo irresistibly recurs to me. We certainly won’t be “educated” if our chauffeur can help it! He is exactly like the time lock on a safe. Only instead of being set for an hour, he is set for distance. At Erie, for instance, he throws in his clutch, “Cleveland”? he asks, and snap! nothing can make him look to the left or the right of the road in front of him.
“Oh, look! That’s the house where President Garfield——”
Zip! we have passed it!
“Wait a minute, let me see that inscription——”
We are half a mile beyond! We arrive in Cleveland, when click goes the lock and he stops dead, and nothing will make him go further.
The food at the hotel in Cleveland, also a Statler, was so extraordinary good that I asked where the maître d’hôtel and his chefs had come from. I thought that possibly on account of the war they had secured the staff of Henri’s or Voisin’s or Paillard’s in Paris, and was really surprised to hear the head chef was from Chicago and the maître d’hôtel from New York.
The dining-room service was quite as good as the food. We did not wait more than a moment before they brought our first course, and as soon as we had finished that our plates were whisked away and the second put before us. Never, even in France, have we had better or more perfectly cooked chicken casserole, and the hollandaise sauce on the asparagus was of the exact smooth, golden consistency and flavor that it ought to be, instead of the various yellow acids, pastes, and eggy mixtures that too often masquerade under the name. Our waiter brought in crisp, fresh salad and expertly and quickly made his own dressing. He was in fact a paragon of his kind, serving all of our meals without that everlasting patting and fussing and fixing that most waiters go through with until what you have ordered is so shopworn and handled and cold that it is not fit to eat. Can anything be more unappetizing than to have a waiter, or two of them, breathing over your food for half an hour?
Personally I hate hotel service. I hate to be helped. In our own houses even children of six resent it. I often wonder, why do we submit to having the piece we don’t want, in the amount we don’t want, put on the part of the plate we don’t want it on, covering it with sauce if we hate sauce, or giving us the dryest wisps if we like it otherwise, by a waiter who bends unpleasantly close? Why do we have everything we eat pinched between the fork and spoon in that one-handed lobster-claw fashion, and endure it in silence? All of this is no fault of the waiter who, after all, is trying to do the best he can in the way that has been taught him. But why is the service in a hotel so radically different from all good service in a private house?