The times are demoralizing for tilting at the windmills of haute gastronomy.  The headlines in Nation’s Restaurant News tell of mass surrender to the steak-lobster-and-a-gimmick syndrome.  The ads hawk instant potatoes au gratin and quick-thaw supremes of chicken Polynesian.  Perfectionism unchecked is fiscal madness.  Survival is its own reward.

        And Quo Vadis survives.  The menu is still handwritten—only now it’s been reproduced.  Staff discipline and snap is not as easy to regiment as it used to be.  The house still offers its celebrated Belgian and Italian specialties—fondue Bruxelloise ($2.25 as hors d’oeuvre, $3.50 as entrée), eel in green sauce ($.50 at lunch), osso buco ($.95 on Wednesday) and a heroic bollito misto each Saturday noon.  Otherwise the menu is an exercise in classic and familiar French…more ambitious still than many, but with few high-wire acts and no pyrotechnics. Yet this is a house that cares.  Even today, with its measured underreach, Quo Vadis is one of the few restaurants in town where you may pronounce the menu “unexciting… unappealing” and find yourself feasting on an unlisted complexity of pheasant Souvarov 45 minutes later.

        Still, a fine grilled salmon, sweet bay scallops meunière or a wholesome broiled calf’s liver with bacon is no less than nutritional sanity for the Quo Vadis regulars: the Geritol Set, the sexagenarian capitalists, statesmen and old-time warriors.  Quo Vadis witnesses such affectionate reunions as General George C. Kenney embracing Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, at table with Eddie Rickenbacker; the Baron Rothschild rinsing his hands with water from a goblet; Jean Paul Getty and heir; Richard Rodgers introducing the John Lindsays to Quo Vadis, and the house’s landlord—the Backer brothers, George, Ted, and Justice Fred.

        Especially loyal are the musical Italians—Tebaldi, Corelli, Tucchi, Bergonzi.  On the day of an opera performance, Cesare Siepi will put away a dozen and a half oysters.  Two dozen oysters and clams pique the appetite of Giuseppe DiStefano.  They do not come for intimations of strict Escoffier.  They come for edible feelgood…for French food, Italian style, for the warmth and pampering of Gino Robusti and Bruno Caravaggi, Parma-born proprietors.  One or the other is always there, always watching, anticipating, soothing… serious, proud… no cold shoulder, no humble pie served here.

        There is an easy familiarity in the antimacassar parlor elegance—the red plush, the cliché bronzes on marble pedestal, the flowered chintz and crystal—innocently wed to Italian mosaic and painted palazzo ceiling. There is a secluded bar and lounge with tattered magazines in a rack and tiny tables where Averell Harriman and Charles Collingwood prefer to eat.  And Siberia here is more like Toledo.  Not exactly a frozen wasteland of neglect…but then again, not where you’d be, given a choice.

        I know.  I have lunched at Quo Vadis twice with American food establishment princes, half a dozen times in ignominious anonymity and once, though unknown, was witness to a historic chutzpatic breakthrough.  Lunch with Craig Claiborne cognito (I was profiling C.C. for Look) can be sensory bliss and emotional trauma.  Bowings, scrapings, solicitations, snap.  It starts out rapture and de-escalates into nervousness, too many hands, too many hoverings, too many eyes watching as a slice of Bercy’d kidneys is forked toward Food Power’s mouth.  The fondue Bruxelloise, creamy pockets of batter-wrapped, deep-fried cheese, was sublime with the pleasing shock of parsley crisp-fried to a frizzle.  My subject Claiborne confided that his anguille au vert was utterly unsalted, an oversight that seemed inexplicable in a great restaurant, yet easily correctable.  He salted and I tasted.  The eel are poached in white wine and mulched in fresh green herbs—parsley, tarragon, thyme, spinach, mint, chervil.  A very green sensation.  Once Craig frowned in exasperation over his pilaf de rognon Bercy ($4.25).  It was not the quality but the quantity that appalled him—“So gross.”  As a not-yet-fully-reformed gourmand I was not overly sympathetic.  And even he was reduced to uncharacteristic gluttony by an ambrosial oeuf a la neige, spooning up the last drop of rum-spiked crème anglaise.

        A second flirtation with unaccustomed pampering came at lunch with Joe Baum, only a few days painfully deposed from the presidency of Restaurant Associates.  At a status corner table he sipped his Lillet as an attentive Bruno guided me tactfully away from the Dover sole (hinting, but not actually saying, “frozen”) to the lemon sole (fresh) and debated the virtue of a dugléré sauce with or without cream.  There was a thoughtful discussion of Pouilly-Fuissé, whether a Louis Latour of a lesser year (’67) was to be preferred to a Joseph Drouhin selection of a better year (’66).  It was.  Depitted lemons appeared with the eel and tartines, elegantly thin slices of exquisitely buttered bread—never even seen in my backroom idling.  The sole was tender, firm and sweet in its thin herb-flecked sauce, nicely sparked with the slight acid of tomato.  And the Dijonaise with Mr. Baum’s baked bass was an intoxicating mustard-spiked mayonnaise.  Not that pampering guarantees no flaws.  The bass itself was singed and the cheese was shabby: a not-yet-ripe Brie and slightly weary Gruyère.  With them we drank a regal voluptuous Ausone, ’55 ($40) and sat talking till five, never once feeling the welcome diminish.

        Between these two star feedings came several plebeian outings.  Always the warm welcome at the door; the service sometimes civilized, usually a bit primitive. At dinner (bread and butter charge $1, entrees from $6.75) the waiter had obviously apprenticed with Sid Caesar.  His response to a request: “Avec plaisir et avec assiette.”(with pleasure and with a plate).  Overhearing our wine musings, he volunteered: “Red wine is passé anyway.” And “You can spoil the fish but not the wine.”  “Here’s the bird,” he announced, serving the pigeon Clamart.  He brought a Caesar salad instead of cresson.  “It sounds alike,” he observed, a comment, not an apology.  And though the room was still half-occupied with diners, he said it was too late for soufflé.

        There is no esthetician in the kitchen, such as the perfectionist hand that creates the edible still lifes at La Caravelle…no showman classicist offering to dazzle you with 60 entrees, as at the Café Chauveron…no master of trompe l’oeil like Soltner at Lutece, wrapping viands and finny pastes in pastry package.  The food is mostly good, the sauces usually expertly made.  The rack of lamb ($8.50) is pink and tender, sliced the long way like lamb saddle and spread across a plate with a few bones to the side.  The ris de veau grand-mère ($7) was an admirable simplicity of tender sweetbreads sautéed with bits of blanched bacon and served with tiny white onions and potato cubes.  But the vegetables were soggy, the zucchini tasted old and the pigeon, with its careless scattering of peas, was uninspired.  With hors d’oeuvre—crab princesse (in an artichoke heart), crabmeat in avocado and a fine full-bodied petite marmite—we drank a favorite white wine of the Loire, Pouilly-Fumé, La Doucette ($9).  And after, a Grand Echezeaux ’64 ($20), full and rich.

        One late summer lunch (bread and butter 75 cents, entrees from $3.25) was shockingly demoralized.  The back room was deserted, our own salon privé.  The eel in green sauce was unpleasantly bitter, the turbot tasted as if it should have been discarded the day before and the vitello tonnato, so exquisite to look at in its pale faintly-tuna-flavored cream, proved to be founded on stale, dry veal.  Even a fine, delicate crêpe in a heavenly curry sauce was stuffed with seafood cooked past its prime. 

        As he poured our coffee, the waiter was singing to himself, “What do you want?  Good grammar or good taste?”
Quo Vadis, I suspect, is not for beginners.  Not for the docile and the non-crotchety.  The antagonist of my recent expedition, financier George Nelson, a man with very heavy serious eating credentials, was not happy about Quo Vadis.  “It’s my last meal in New York before departing for Europe,” he said.  “Let’s go to Lutèce.”  But duty prevailed.  Unhappily he took the menu’s measure: sole bonne femme, omelette maison, lamb chops, red snapper, bay scallops.  “There’s no  effort here,” he complained.  “Nothing.”  And then to Bruno, “What is Salisbury steak maison?” he asked.  The reply was needfully modest.  “There is nothing cuisiné,” Nelson complained.  “What would you like?” Bruno asked.  “Something light?”

        “No,” Nelson snapped, “we don’t want something light.  We want something complicated.”

        “Perhaps a rack of lamb,” Bruno ventured.  “Or pheasant.  Or some venison.”  Nelson’s eyes open wide.  “With cepes or morilles.  And marrons purés.”  A grunt of triumph.

        “Venison,” Nelson ordered.  “But you will do it my way.  With a sauce smitane.  And morilles.  No marrons.  No wild rice.”

        The smoked trout with its horseradish-spiked sour cream sauce was dry, the vichyssoise unseasoned and the apricot tart slightly boring, but the venison was superb, tender, and rare.  A serious game-lover might have found it a bit tame…not particularly gamy.  But in its exquisitely subtle sauce with a treasury of wrinkled black morels, I found it quite dazzling.  With a half bottle of disappointing Volnay (its bouquet was so much bigger than its taste), drinks and coffee and tips, lunch was $44.76.

        And Mr. Nelson went off to Geneva, a lesson in truculence triumphant.

26 East 63rd Street, 838-0590.

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