During the next twenty minutes the orchestra played once and I ate my roll. Then the roast beef came.
On a silver platter, with a silver cover, it was placed before me under the best possible scenic conditions. But the thing that met my gaze when the cover was lifted might just as well have been the same property piece of roast beef that was keeping company with a dab of mashed potato in the Bay State Lunch. It had a trifle more fat, was just a shade pinker, and perhaps a micrometer could have detected a bit more bulk; but, so far as I was concerned or so far as the calories were concerned, it was the same. I won't say that it was the same as the Roast Beef Special of the Bowery Restaurant, because the service in the Bowery Restaurant was infinitely better.
As a fitting garniture to such a dish, there was a corsage of watercress draped on the corner of the salver. At any rate, it could be said for it that it was not intoxicating, and so could never cause any real misery in this world.
I nibbled at my roast beef, but my spirit was broken. I had gone through a week of self-denial, ordering roast beef when I craved edibles, eating at restaurants while my family waited for me at home, and here was the result of my researches: Roast beef is roast beef, and nothing can prevent it. From the ten-cent order of the Busy Home Restaurant, up through to the piece I was then eating, it was the same grim reality, the only justification for a difference in price being a silver salver or a waiter in a tuxedo.
"But," I said to myself, "eighty cents isn't so much, at that. Besides, I have heard the orchestra play one tune every half-hour, and have had a kind word from one of the chargés d'affaires of the waiter's staff."
This quite reconciled me, until my check was brought. There, added to the initial expense of eighty cents, was the upkeep, such as "Cover, 25c." "Potatoes, 30c." And to this must be added the modest fee of twenty cents to the waiter and ten cents to the hat-boy who gave me the wrong hat. Total expense for one piece of roast beef, $1.70.
These investigations may not prove to be much of a contribution to modern science or economics. I doubt if they are ever incorporated in any textbook, even if it should be a textbook on this very subject. But I must take credit to myself for one thing: Not once throughout the whole report have I alluded to the Tenderloin District.