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nce upon a time there was a town called New York. She made a good living on the strength of her harbor and a big river which brought in some trade. The country was young and growing, and so was New York, but she couldn’t put on any airs. She certainly wasn’t any grander than her sisters, Boston and Philadelphia. That all changed practically overnight with the opening of the Erie Canal. For the surge of money it brought into the city the canal might as well have been flowing with greenbacks. All that moolah spurred an enormous growth spurt, one that never really stopped, and it gave the city a new identity as the preeminent center of commerce for the young nation. A lot of folks got very rich very quick. But although New York was a businessman’s dream come true, it soon was found wanting in a crucial area: there wasn’t a single decent restaurant. To be fair, at that time you couldn’t find anything you might call “fine dining” along the entire Eastern seaboard. Here was a problem: how are you going to show the world what a successful sport you’ve become if there’s no place to put on the dog? Two brothers had a scheme to fill the void and in the process practically invented the restaurant business as we know it in this country. Delmonico was soon more than just the name of the most famous restaurant in New York, it became synonymous with excellence, with everything swank and high class, and found itself attached to dozens of recipes, cuts of beef, and even a particular shape of cocktail glass. Across the country emerged Delmonico’s restaurants, steakhouses, taverns and hotels where you would be hard pressed to find anyone who answered to the name Delmonico. This, then, is not the story of a restaurant, but how a name took on a life of its own.
The Brothers Delmonico Take Manhattan To dine at Delmonico’s, as a correspondent of the Tribune once said of traveling in Europe, two things are requisite—money and French. Of the latter a little will answer; but the more you have of the former ingredient the better you are off, as well at Delmonico’s as elsewhere. George Foster, New York In Slices,1856 In the early 1820s Giovanni Del-Monico had a wine shop near the Battery, a business he started with capital accumulated captaining a schooner in the classic triangular trade routes: Cuban tobacco to Cadiz, Spanish wines to New York, and lumber and dry goods to Cuba. Sharp instincts for business led Giovanni to believe that what the city needed more than another wine merchant was a decent café in the French mode, something that didn’t exist at the time. Enter brother Pietro, a successful confectioner in Berne, and together they opened their first shop at 23 William Street. They offered pastry, coffee, chocolate, bonbons, wines, liquors and fancy ices. At first their customers were mainly transplanted Europeans, comforted by the familiar set-up; by 1831 the business expanded to become the Restaurant Français next door at number at 25, the city’s first eating establishment to offer a bill of fare. Remember that before this European innovation, a New Yorker dining out ate a set meal served at a scheduled time, called an “ordinary” meal. The “Ordinary” eating houses served British meals: roast beef, meat pies, ale and English brandy. Delmonico’s was continental (even then!) cuisine, with French and Italian dishes listed “a la carte.” The cookery served at Delmonico’s changed New Yorkers’ tastes from rustic colonial to continental sophistication just as the city was exploding economically, and fed the pretensions of an increasingly prosperous merchant class. Delmonico’s started the everlasting conceit of printing their menu in French. As Lately Thomas writes in Delmonico’s: A Century of Splendour, “French was the language of cooks as Latin is the language of lawyers.”
Yes~ Location, Location Delmonico’s relocated as often as fashion dictated. Everyone who was anyone was moving uptown, and in 1861 Delmonico’s obtained what had been the Grinell Mansion at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street; by 1876 they were off to Madison Square across from the Brunswick Hotel at Fifth and TwentySixth, and twenty years later a gleaming new Delmonico’s served up the swanky at Fifth and FortyFourth until Prohibition, that scourge of epicures, destroyed the fine restaurant business. The last time you could set a well-shod foot in a genuine Delmonico’s was 1923. The current eatery called Delmonico’s occupies the 1837 location at 2 South William (a.k.a. 65 Beaver Street) but it’s been out of the family since Josephine Delmonico sold the building in 1919. The site has hosted various no-relation restaurants over the years, most notably one called Oscar’s Delmonico (1934-1977).
Recipes Delmonico There are a bunch of recipes bearing the name Delmonico, some because they were served at the restaurant, and many others just because folks thought the name meant “classy.” Delmonico Steak and its companion Delmonico Potatoes are the Real McCoy, well documented on Delmonico’s menus. They are also the most famous and enduring. Delmonico Potatoes are mashed potatoes topped with grated cheese and bread crumbs, baked golden brown, and customarily served with their namesake steak. If you peruse cookbooks dating from around the turn of the 20th century you’ll find recipes with the name Delmonico, but there is little evidence they may have been served at the restaurant. Fannie Farmer, A New Book of Cookery {1912}, offers us Delmonico’s Tomatoes, which are stuffed with onion, peppers and sweetbreads, and baked. Sounds great, but the recipe doesn’t appear in any other cookbook. Chef Filippini describes a few stuffed tomato dishes in his own The Delmonico Cookbook {1890}, but not this one. In other books from the same period you will find additional recipes with iffy provenance. Some cookbooks seem to be trying to dress up a good recipe with a little Big Apple class. The National Cookbook {1896} has Delmonico’s Ice Cream, which is really a fairly standard vanilla, and the Delmonico Pudding found in Mrs. Charles H. Gibson’s Maryland and Virginia Cook Book {1894} doesn’t seem any fancier than the average rich pudding. The Ossoli Club Cook Book {1905}, perhaps taking a cue from the creamy Delmonico Potatoes, dubs their Finnan Haddie “à la Delmonico.” There are also dishes that Delmonico’s invented or popularized that are not named after the restaurant. Lobster Newberg was reportedly created by a sea captain by the name of Wenberg, adapted by Delmonico’s star chef Charles Ranhofer in 1876, and appeared on the menu as Lobster à la Wenberg. Soon after, Charles Delmonico and Wenberg got into an argument which culminated in the good captain being banned from the restaurant and the name of his dish permanently changed to an anagram, Lobster à la Newberg. Everyone knows what Eggs Benedict is, but no one can agree on where it originated. One story says the idea for the dish came from a Delmonico’s regular named, you guessed it, Benedict. And Baked Alaska is said to have been named by Ranhofer to commemorate the recently acquired Territory of Alaska. Neither of these tales is very well documented, but they are slightly more believable than the legend that Chicken à la King was originally “Chicken à la Keene” in honor of sportsman and Delmonico’s regular Foxhall Keene. There is essentially nothing to back the story up, but at the least, we like to think Ranhofer had to be better than Chicken à la King. Maybe he had a hangover that day?
Class in a Glass If you spend much of your time, as we do, nose deep in vintage beverage manuals, catalogs, and their corresponding potions, you have heard, no doubt, of the Delmonico glass. It’s a small juice-glass type vessel – slim, straight or flared sides, holding 3 to 5 ounces – also known as a sour glass, or at the early Waldorf Hotel as a star glass, for reasons lost to time. Its longest running moniker is sour glass, declaring the enduring popularity of the whiskey sour, a most curiously appealing drink. Sometime around the 1950s its popularity waned in favor of a stemmed glass, but a short-stemmed and squat little number reminding us that in addition to the frill-free modern design of mid-century there was also a Colonial revival and, worse, the ghastly white French Provincial.
Of course there was a Cocktail Bar guides list a variety of gin-vermouth-orange recipes named Delmonico. David A. Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks describes the Delmonico as a plain Manhattan with cognac subbing for the whisky and says that a Delmonico Special is a medium Martini with a teaspoonful of brandy and a twist of orange peel. Let’s try a few. Shall we twist your arm?
DELMONICO SPECIAL
The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, 1948/1961 aka
DELMONICO 1
Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts, 1949 3⁄4 oz. gin 1⁄2 oz. French vermouth 1⁄2 oz. Italian vermouth 1⁄2 oz. cognac 2 dashes Angostura Twist of orange peel This one tasted muddy, and brought to mind unsuccessful or incomplete cocktail invention sessions. Next we mixed up one from The Old Waldorf Bar Days, Albert Stevens Crockett’s sweet volume of reminiscences of the good ol’ 1890s, “served at the Famous Big Brass Rail,” and published in the most parched and nostalgia-filled days of Prohibition.
DELMONICO
The Old Waldorf Bar Days, 1931 “Adopted from the bar of Delmonico’s, a long-famous New York restaurant” Dash of Orange Bitters One-half French Vermuth {sic} One-half Plymouth Gin Two slices Orange Peel Frappé The same recipe appears in Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts as DELMONICO 2. It’s essentially a 50-50 Martini shaken with orange peels in place of bitters. Not a bad Martini variation on a summer’s day but a bit lacking in the oomph department. Why not go to the source, you say? Well, because there is no Delmonico cocktail in The Delmonico Cookbook of 1890, the work of Alessandro Filippini, who was, for 25 years, chef – in fact, there are no “cocktails” at all. However, there are “appetizers” and “coolers”: Appetizer à la Joseph Herman, Cooler à la Frederick Vanderbilt, and so on. Appetizer à la T. Kingman caught our eye; it has the gin, vermouth and orange we were on the lookout for.
APPETIZER À LA T. KINGMAN The Delmonico Cookbook, 1890
G“A”F NOTE: This recipe calls for “half a sherry glass” each of vermouth and gin which we have taken the liberty of translating to one ounce. Feel free to double the recipe if you’re feeling all twenty-first century. 2 good dashes Angostura bitters 1 good dash dash orange bitters 1 ounce Italian vermouth 1 ounce Holland gin Mr. Filippini asks you to thoroughly stir with a spoon for three-quarters of a minute, then strain into a small glass (italics ours) and serve. Our scientific taste buds declare Mr. Kingman’s appetizer the winner. It’s really much like the fabled Martini ancestor, the Martinez, very old-timey, and an elegant drink with good body and a nice kick. Serve in a Delmonico glass and it might be the closest you’re going to get to channeling the original hash house.
Mobile Dining a la Pullman Following the success of his sleeping car, railroad magnate George Pullman in 1868 presented a novel idea: the dining car. And what would you call a rolling chamber of luxury, featuring two cooks and four white-jacketed waiters, but The Delmonico? The very civilized conveyance debuted on the Chicago & Alton Railroad, took off hot potato style, and soon dining cars were a norm.
The Steak A little stroll through the internet will show a controversy raging over what is the true Delmonico Steak and you can find detailed arguments touting up to eight different answers to this burning question. Yes, over the years different people, chefs, restaurants, wholesale butchers with a surplus stock they had to move in a hurry, have promoted a variety of “Delmonico Steaks,” but why believe any of them when you can get it from the horse’s mouth? Chef Ranhofer was at Delmonico’s from 1862 to 1896, the period of the restaurants greatest fame. In 1894 he distilled all his culinary expertise into a slim volume of 1183 pages and called it The Epicurean. A Complete Treatise of Analytical and Practical Studies on the Culinary Art Including Table and Wine Service, How to Prepare and Cook Dishes, an Index for Marketing, a Great Variety of Bills of Fare for Breakfasts, Luncheons, Dinners, Suppers, Ambigus, Buffets, etc., and a Selection of Interesting Bills of Fare of Delmonico’s, from 1862 to 1894. Making a Franco-American Culinary Encyclopedia. Recipe {number 1375} for Delmonico Steak is this: Cut from a sirloin slices two inches in thickness; beat them to flatten them to an inch and a half thick, trim nicely; they should now weigh twenty ounces each; salt them on both sides, baste them over with oil or melted butter, and broil them on a moderate fire for fourteen minutes if desired very rare; eighteen to be done properly, and twenty-two to be well done. Set them on a hot dish with a little clear gravy {Recipe No. 404} or maître d’hôtel butter {Recipe No. 581}. Kind of looks to me like a Delmonico steak is a twenty ounce top sirloin, cut two inches thick and reduced to an inch and a half, cooked to order and served plainly with a compound butter (butter, lemon, parsley) or clear gravy. That’s not going to stop anybody from giving you a rib-eye or New York strip and insisting that it is a Delmonico cut.
T
oday we still say “ritzy” but few of us would be nutty enough to utter “Delmonican” in conversation, and the fashion for slapping Delmonico on whatever to gussy it up seems so yesteryear. It is remarkable that the name once had the power to breed a litter of homages on its impressive journey through the Main Streets of young America. It was a time when a little bit of class and a murky background were just the ticket to get over. And so a tip of the hat to all things Delmonico, no matter their true pedigree.