Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

by Andy Rooney

  • I don’t eat where there’s music, either. Sometimes two things that are great by themselves are ruined when mixed. Food and entertainment are best kept apart.

  • It’s hard enough to get waited on in a restaurant that thinks it has enough help without going to one with a sign in the window advertising for waiters.

  • And when I stay in a hotel or a motel, I never eat in the restaurant attached to it unless it’s snowing.

  There are just as many things that attract me to a restaurant:

  • I’m a sucker for a place bearing the first name of the owner. If it’s called “Joe’s,” I go in.

  • I’m attracted to a restaurant that has a menu written with chalk on a slate.

  • And to me, a real sign of class is a restaurant that refuses to accept credit cards.

  If you’ve always thought of a menu as just a list of the food a restaurant serves, you’re wrong. Menus are a big business by themselves and a lot of restaurants spend a fortune making theirs look good.

  We went down to a studio one day when they were filming a new cover for a Howard Johnson menu. The food was fixed in a kitchen near the studio. They try to be honest about it . . . but nothing ever looks smaller in the picture on the menu. For instance, they weigh the meat all right, but then they barely cook it so it doesn’t shrink.

  In the course of doing this report, we’ve looked through and collected several hundred menus. You can tell a lot about a restaurant from a quick look at its menu . . . even from the outside of it. For instance, if there’s a tassel on the menu, you can add a couple of dollars per person.

  Here’s the Captain’s Seafood Platter. The trouble with a restaurant called the Captain’s Seafood Platter in Kansas City is that all the fish comes frozen, and by the time it’s cooked in hot fat, you can’t tell the oysters from the French fries.

  The Lion’s Paw . . . “Homemade Cheesecake.” You always wonder whose home they mean it was made in.

  Don Neal’s Mr. T-Bone. He’s a musician, I guess. This is the kind of a menu that’s so cute you can hardly tell what they have to eat. “Rhapsody of Beef ” . . . Roast Top Sirloin. “Symphony of the Deep” . . . Baked Lake Superior Whitefish. “Taste Buds in Concert” . . . Breast of Chicken Almondine.

  Here’s a place called the Bali Hai, a Polynesian restaurant. The “PuPu Platter,” they have. “Shrimp Pago Pago.” I never know about the drinks in a place like this. Here’s one called “Scorpion Bowl.” I hate drinking from a glass with a naked girl on it.

  This is a Spanish restaurant, La Corrida. Picture of a bullfight. They’ve just killed the bull, I guess.

  I’m not a vegetarian, but I hate being reminded of the animals I’m eating. I’ll eat almost anything, too, but there are a few things I’m narrow-minded about. Rabbit I don’t eat, tripe, calves’ brains, snails. I know I’m wrong, but I just don’t eat them.

  Karson’s Inn in Historic Canton. This is one of those menus that tell you more about a town than you want to know. “Welcome to Karson’s Inn in Historic Canton. . . . ” It goes on and tells you all about how interesting Canton is.

  Here’s one from Troggio’s in New Castle, Pennsylvania. This one tells you about how interesting New Castle is.

  This is the Lamplighter, a family restaurant. It’s one of those where they tell you about the family. “For over 50 years the Ferri Family has enjoyed serving the finest food to nice people like you. . . . ” They like me.

  This is another one: the Presuttis’. Mama and Poppa Presutti are on the cover there. And, yep, they tell you about the Presuttis here. “In 1933, Mr. and Mrs. S. Presutti converted their home into a restaurant.” It goes on. You know, fine, but what have they got to eat?

  This is something called the Shalako. It’s one of those menus with a lot of writing in it. I always figure if I wanted to read, I’d go to a library. It says, “The Shalako is the most important religious ceremony performed by the Zuñi Indians.” And it goes on for three pages. You can imagine a waiter standing there while you read this history of the Zuñi Indians.

  Here’s a place called the Parlour. I wonder where this is? Oh, there is no doubt where this is: “It is dusk in St. Paul. Sunset’s fading light reflects a red ribbon on the meandering Mississippi River. The skyline is silhouetted against the blue-gray haze.”

  A menu.

  We had a not particularly reliable survey made of menus and we have the results for you. According to the count we made, the most used words on menus were these, in order of frequency:

  1 . “Freshly”

  2. “Tender”

  3. “Mouth-Watering”

  4. “Succulent”

  5. “On a Bed of ”

  6. “Tangy”

  7. “Hearty”

  8. “Luscious”

  9. “To Your Liking”

  10. “Topped with”

  11. “Savory”

  12. “Tempting” and “Delicious” (Tie)

  13. “Surrounded by”

  14. “Golden Brown”

  15. “By Our Chef ”

  16. “Seasoned to Perfection”

  17. “Choice Morsels of ”

  18. “Delicately” and “Thick” (Tie)

  19. “Crisp”

  20. “Not Responsible for Personal Property”

  “Freshly” was far and away the first.

  “Savory,” Number 11, was interesting. Actually, on menus where the dinner was more than $7.50, it was usually spelled with a “u.” s-a-vo-u-r-y.

  “Surrounded by.” “Surrounded by” and “On a Bed of ” are a lot the same, but “On a Bed of ” actually beat out “Surrounded by.”

  “Golden Brown.” Almost everything is “Golden Brown.” Sometimes the lettuce is golden brown.

  “By Our Chef.” Even places that don’t have a chef say “By Our Chef.”

  “Seasoned to Perfection.” “Choice Morsels of.” “Delicately” and “Thick” were tied for 18. Number 19 was “Crisp.” And Number 20 on our list of most used words was “Not Responsible for Personal Property.”

  Wine menus. Last year was a very good year for wine menus.

  Anyone who orders wine in a restaurant always wonders how much the same bottle would cost him in a liquor store. We thought we’d find out.

  Rooney (in liquor store): What’s the price of the Chauvenet Red Cap? Liquor-Store Owner: Six-ninety-nine.

  Rooney (from menu): Chauvenet Red Cap . . . twenty dollars a bottle.

  This is at the restaurant called the Michaelangelo. Let’s see. Liebfraumilch, Blue Nun . . . ten dollars. (To liquor-store owner) What do you get for Blue Nun?

  Owner: Three-eighty-nine.

  Rooney (from menu): Mouton Cadet Rothschild, 1970 . . . twelve dollars. (To liquor-store owner) This Mouton Cadet. What do you get for that?

  Owner: Three-ninety-nine.

  Rooney: You don’t lose any money on that, either.

  Owner: No.

  Rooney (from menu): Château Malijay . . . six-forty-five.

  Owner: That’s a Côte du Rhône . . . one-ninety-nine.

  Rooney (from menu): Here’s a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé de la Doucette, 1971 . . . eighteen dollars. (To store owner) What do you get for that?

  Owner: La Doucette, Pouilly-Fumé . . . We sell it for six-ninety-nine.

  Rooney (from menu): This is a restaurant in Las Vegas. Here the Lancers Rose is eleven dollars. (To store owner) Lancers Vin Rosé?

  Owner: Lancers sells for four-twenty-nine.

  Rooney: I always thought this was the kind of a wine where the bottle was worth more than the drink. I guess you wouldn’t want to comment on that?

  Owner: No. I’d rather not.

  Everyone complains about wine snobs. Snobs of every kind have a bad reputation in America. No one understands that it’s the snobs who set the standards of excellence in the world. There are art snobs, literary snobs, music snobs, and in every case it’s the snobs who sneer at mediocrity. The gourmets are the food snobs. Without them we
’d all be eating peanut-butter sandwiches.

  Like the gourmets, wine snobs know what they’re talking about. So if you’re going to drink wine, get to know something about it. Be prepared to pay too much for a bottle of wine. Be your own wine snob . . . it’s part of the fun.

  A good rule of thumb is, if you can afford a wine, don’t buy it. I went to the National Restaurant Association Convention in Chicago and everywhere I wandered someone was pushing food or drink at me.

  Everyone who sells anything to restaurants had an exhibit, so there were garbage cans . . . corn cookers . . . can openers . . . wall decorations . . . seating arrangements . . . and devices to keep bartenders from stealing.

  Restaurants sell 20 percent of all the food eaten in the United States. They are first in the number of retail business places. In other words, there are more restaurants than any other kind of store. We did a lot of poking around at the convention and we got a frightening look at what some restaurants are going to be feeding us.

  1st Exhibitor: Well, this is a soy protein with about 60 percent protein and it goes into . . .

  Rooney: What does it do?

  1st Exhibitor: Well, it stretches out products like tuna salad by about 30 percent.

  Rooney: What do they use it in, in addition to tuna fish?

  1st Exhibitor: It goes into egg salads. It’s used to extend all kinds of meats, either uncooked as meat patties or it might go into precooked entrees . . . sloppy Joes, chili con carne.

  Rooney: Is it any good?

  1st Exhibitor: What kind of a question is that?

  Rooney: Now, what is this here?

  2nd Exhibitor: These are our Morning Star institutional link sausage–like flavor product.

  Rooney: Sausage . . . like?

  2nd Exhibitor: Sausage-like flavor.

  Rooney: They’re artificial sausage?

  2nd Exhibitor: They’re artificial sausage. They have no cholesterol, no animal fat.

  Rooney: What do they have?

  2nd Exhibitor: Well, they’re made out of various vegetable proteins . . . soy protein, wheat protein. We use egg albumen to hold it together. Rooney: Are you a chef?

  2nd Exhibitor: No. I’m trained as a biochemist.

  Rooney: Now what is this machine?

  3rd Exhibitor: This is a mechanical meat tenderizer.

  Rooney: You put the meat on there?

  3rd Exhibitor: Put the meat on here. It’ll pass through underneath the needle. The needle will come down and penetrate the meat and break down the tissue.

  Rooney: So a restaurant could buy this and really buy less expensive meat?

  3rd Exhibitor: That’s right.

  Rooney: Now, I would call that orange juice canned. Not fresh.

  4th Exhibitor: Fresh frozen.

  Rooney: Fresh frozen. Right.

  Rooney (looking at ingredients): Now, “standard chicken base.” How, do you pronounce that ingredient?

  5th Exhibitor: It contains hydrolyzed vegetable protein.

  Rooney (reads ingredients): “Salt, chicken fat, monosodium glutamate, dehydrated chicken, dextrose, dehydrated vegetable, spices and spice extract, bicalcium phosphate, citric acid.”

  5th Exhibitor: Right.

  Rooney: That’s chicken base?

  5th Exhibitor: That’s right.

  Rooney: It tastes like chicken?

  5th Exhibitor: Exactly. Four ounces of it tastes like an extra gallon.

  Rooney: You put just four ounces of this hydro . . .

  5th Exhibitor: And that’s the basis for . . . in other words, if you want chicken noodle, you throw noodles in.

  Rooney: How many restaurants don’t use anything like this?

  5th Exhibitor: Almost 100 percent of the restaurants use it. If they don’t, then you’re way on the other side of the . . . You can’t exist today.

  Rooney: You mean without the artificial stuff?

  5th Exhibitor: It’s not artificial really. You’ve got monosodium glutamate. You’ve got extracts. You’ve got fats. The real thing mixed with the chemical. This can feed or this can substitute or feed a thousand people per chicken, where you might have to take a hundred chickens. . . .

  Rooney: The chickens must love it.

  5th Exhibitor: You’re a nice fellow.

  Restaurants are one of the few good examples left of really free enterprise in America. There isn’t much government control of them and the good ones prosper. The bad ones usually, though not always, go out of business.

  The best restaurants are operated by people who like food better than money. The worst ones are run by people who don’t know anything about food or money.

  So that’s our report on eating out in America. The camera crew is glad it’s over because they say they’re tired of spending their dinner hour watching me eat.

  During the time we’ve been working on it, many friends and others here at CBS have been stopping me in the hallway to ask one question. It’s a question I haven’t mentioned so far in the broadcast . . .

  But the answer, as of this morning . . . fourteen pounds.

  In Praise of New York City

  It’s been popular in recent years to suggest that Nature is the perfect condition, that people have done nothing to the earth since they got here but make a mess of it. Well, that’s true about some places but untrue about others.

  New York City is as amazing in its own way as the Grand Canyon. As a matter of fact, you can’t help thinking that maybe Nature would have made New York City look the way it does if it had had the money and the know-how.

  When people talk about New York City, they usually mean the part of the city called Manhattan. Manhattan is a narrow rock island twelve miles long. Being an island is an important thing about New York because even though no one thinks much about it from day to day, they have to go to quite a bit of trouble to get on it and off it. This makes being there something of an event and people don’t take it so lightly. New York isn’t like so many places that just sort of dwindle away until you’re out of town. In New York, it’s very definite. You’re either there or you aren’t there.

  The twenty-eight bridges and tunnels don’t connect Manhattan with New Jersey and the four other boroughs. They’re for entering and leaving New York. Where from or where to is of secondary importance. It may be some indication of the significance of the event that it costs $1.50 to cross the George Washington Bridge entering New York, nothing to cross leaving it.

  The Brooklyn Bridge is a cathedral among bridges. Coming to Manhattan across it every morning is like passing through the Sistine Chapel on your way to work. You couldn’t be going to an unimportant place.

  Although two million people work on the little island, only half a million of those who work there live there. As a result, a million and a half people have to get on it every morning and off it every night. That’s a lot of people to push through twenty-eight little tunnels and bridges in an hour or so, but it’s this arterial ebb and flow that produces the rhythm to which this heartless city’s heart beats. There must be something worth coming for when all those people go to that much trouble to get there.

  Although it isn’t the outstanding thing about it to the people who live or work there, New York is best known to strangers for what it looks like. And, of course, it looks tall.

  The World Trade Center has two towers, each a quarter of a mile high. The New York office worker isn’t overwhelmed by the engineering implications of flushing a toilet 106 floors above the street.

  The buildings of the city are best seen from above, as though they were on an architect’s easel. It’s strange that they were built to look best from an angle at which hardly anyone ever sees them. From the street where the people are, you can’t see the buildings for the city. The New Yorker doesn’t worry about it because he never looks up.

  You have to talk about tall buildings when you talk about New York, but to anyone who has lived for very long with both, the people of the city are of more continuing interest t
han the architecture. There is some evidence, of course, that the New Yorker isn’t all that separate from his environment. If dogs and masters tend to look alike, so probably do cities and their citizens.

  The New Yorker takes in New York air. For a short time it trades molecules with his bloodstream and he is part city. And then he exhales and the city is part him. They become inextricably mingled, and it would be strange if the people didn’t come to look like the city they inhabit. And to some extent like each other.

  While the rest of the nation feels fiercely about New York—they love it or they hate it—New Yorkers feel nothing. They use the city like a familiar tool. They don’t defend it from love or hate. They shrug or nod in knowing agreement with almost anything anyone wants to say about it. Maybe this is because it’s so hard to say anything about New York that isn’t true.

  New Yorkers don’t brood much, either. They go about their business with a purposefulness that excludes introspection. If the rest of the country says New Yorkers lack pride because they have so little to be proud of, the New Yorker shrugs again. He has no argument with the South or the Midwest or Texas or California. He feels neither superior nor inferior. He just doesn’t compare the things in New York with those anywhere else. He doesn’t compare the subway with Moscow’s or with the Metro in Paris. Both may be better, but neither goes to Brooklyn or Forest Hills and for this reason doesn’t interest the New Yorker one way or the other.

  New York is essentially a place for working but not everyone works in a glass cube. The island is crowded with highly individual nests people have made for themselves. There are 100,000 Waldens hidden in the stone and steel caverns.

  At the Stork Club in Manhattan with fellow Arthur Godfrey colleagues; left to right: Andy, Chuck Horner, Mug Richardson, Frank Dodge, Hank Miles

  The places people work and live are as different as the people. If a Hollywood façade is deceptive because it has nothing behind it, a New York façade is deceptive because it has so much. You can’t tell much about what’s inside from what you see outside. There are places within places. Houses behind houses. Very often in New York ugliness is only skin deep.