Jazz fans, no doubt, are delighted that Ramsey Lewis has found a ”home” at 217 W. Huron St., where he is performing through Jan. 6. But an announcement that the new Ramsey`s on Huron is a combination nightclub and restaurant serving ”classic Chicago fine dining fare” can only raise eyebrows among those to whom ”fine dining fare” is a serious matter.
There`s evidence that even in Chicago, a terrific town for music, melody and meals don`t mix very often or very well.
Long before the dinner theater, there was ample historic precedent for combining entertainment and dining. In ”Early American Inns and Taverns,”
Elise Lathrop comments, ”The tavern of those days was generally the center of news, and the gathering place for balls, musical entertainments, public shows, etc.”
But the best fit came during the heyday of the supper clubs, from the mid-1920s into the `50s, when dining and dancing reached an apex of sophistication at Chicago`s Pump Room, Manhattan`s Rainbow Room and several fictional clubs constructed for Fred Astaire movies.
Chicagoans of a certain age fondly recall dining and dancing at such classy spots as the Empire Room of the Palmer House, the College Inn at the Sherman, the Latin-American Room of the LaSalle, Chez Paris and the Camellia House at the Drake.
Eventually the supper clubs collapsed under pressure from competing forms of entertainment and the rising cost of labor. Menus at most nightclubs became minimal and their cooks migratory. Restaurants, meanwhile, were using canned music as freely as canned vegetables. This was the `60s.
I have a vivid memory of being directed some years ago to a mall supper club in search of ”the best” restaurant in the Warren, Ohio, area. When I saw a band, a dance floor and a menu that featured beef Wellington, I left.
At a few Italian restaurants, you could still hear an accordionist (you can view this anachronism nightly at Scoozi, of all places). In some hotel dining rooms, strolling violins continued to accompany the tired ”continental cuisine.” Guitarists strummed ”Celito Lindo” endlessly as humming blenders mixed margaritas in formula Mexican cantinas.
Only at fine French restaurants where the sole art form recognized was the culinary art would silence reign when no one was talking. The famous Paris restaurant Laserre did something I`ve never seen elsewhere. During dinner a pianist played, but she was hidden from the diners by a screen. Only the French, I decided, could come up with live Muzak. Then there was-and still is- Betty Groff, the noted cook who operates a restaurant in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. To announce a new course, Betty comes into the dining room and blows an introduction on her trumpet.
It was a bad era, succeeded by an even worse one.
Refugees from the discos staggered into 1970s restaurants, half deaf but, like addicts, craving more noise. In high-tech, hard-edge, crowded-table settings they found it. It wasn`t just music. It was loud music combined with human voices raised to the umpteenth power.
Jordan Mozer, the designer, says noise creates a blanket that allows intimacy in a crowded setting. In my less generous view, members of the disco crowd were willing to sit down and look someone in the eye, but they didn`t have anything to say. All the noise provided an excuse not to talk.
This trend is with us still, but the electronic era also has encouraged some restaurateurs to make imaginative use of their sound systems. Two extreme examples where the food can be splendid are Jimmy`s Place, a restaurant dedicated to opera where owner Jimmy Rohr programs recordings of his favorite operas and singers; and Star Top Cafe, where patrons are invited to bring and play their own records or CDs.
Currently, the town`s leading exponent of combining live music and ambitious cuisine is Bob Djahanguiri. The recently opened Yvette Wintergarden expands on the formula he instituted successfully at two other restaurant-night spots, Yvette and Toulouse.
There`s also a reasonable balance between entertainment and food at the Fairmont Hotel`s Primavera, with its aria-singing waitstaff; at the Pump Room and Gordon, where you can dance; at Spiaggia and Pops for Champagne`s brunch, where the jazz-inclined pianists need the sure-footedness of mountain goats to reach their elevated perches; at Arnie`s, Eli`s and Nick`s Fishmarket; at the 95th and the Knickerbocker Hotel`s Prince of Wales dining room, where harp music soothes the hungry until they can be fed.
Then there`s Tony Spavone, who sings to diners at his Tony Spavone`s restaurant, the twin pianos at Catch 35 and the country band that plays in the bar at Bub City.
George Badonsky, who attempted to combine entertainment and quality dining at George`s until its closing last month, offers several reasons why this balancing act is so difficult to bring off.
”It`s like putting a restaurant in a movie theater,” he says.
”People`s motivation for coming isn`t the food. Furthermore, you get a very different crowd for Buster Poindexter than for Theodore Bickel, but you can`t change your menu every week. And you can`t charge what a quality restaurant will. When customers get the bill, they don`t separate the cost of food and entertainment. Even if you have a prix fixe of $19.95, they look at the bottom line and think they`ve had an expensive meal.
”Meanwhile, the kitchen has to feed a lot of people all at once and finish by show time. It`s almost impossible to keep a creative chef in what is a factory situation and there`s tremendous pressure when customers show up late or an act doesn`t go on or come off on time.”
When it comes to blending entertainment and food, it may be that the place in Chicago that someone who puts food first would enjoy most when it comes to blending entertainment and food is the Eccentric. At the far end of the dining room is a large, red theater curtain. Usually, it`s closed, but when someone pulls it open what you see through a glass window are the kitchen and the crew at work in it.
Meanwhile, after restoring Manhattan`s Rainbow Room to its full 1930s glory, innovative restaurateur Joseph Baum observed:
”People go to a restaurant to have a good time, to be together. They don`t go because they`re hungry. They want to be surprised, astonished, excited, intrigued. They want to be seduced.”
If that seduction be accomplished by music, so be it. That can happen at the Rainbow Room, but Les Violins with Franz Benteler`s Royal Strings was last year`s most ambitious musical restaurant effort here and one of the quickest failures.
So I`d still offer long odds that you will be better off eating at least a snack before you go off to dine in most restaurants where music or entertainment is the main draw.
