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This brings up another matter: what is good bread? The commercial, factory-made breads with their sugar and preservatives, soft crust, and softer interior or crumb, are pale imitations. Good bread should have a fairly crisp crust and a soft interior, generally with irregular, slightly glazed holes. Almost no bread should be served hot, and rye bread—the loaf—is best when slightly stale. Warm, freshly baked bread from the oven is one thing, but previously frozen and heated loves are not. Cool, sweet butter is the finest accompaniment.

WAITERS

The vast majority of waiters don’t think of the job as a career but a way station, a means of making some money on the way to something else. But there’s another tradition, the professional waiter who trains for his job, performs it with style, and who, if asked about goals for the future, cites not acting but perhaps the ownership of a restaurant.

Aside from the basics—cleanliness, fluency in the language, knowing which side to serve and clear from, how to set a table, how to time the arrival and removal of dishes—what should be expected?

• A knowledge not only of the items on the menu, but their ingredients and how they are prepared.

• A memory that allows easy recitation of specials or changes in the menu. An ability to suggest items on the menu and the wine list—the vast majority of customers ask the waiter for his recommendations. He should be a salesman to the degree that the client wants help in choosing, but not to the point of trying to make a bigger tip from the cost of the meal.

• Also, a memory for the customers he serves, including the drink they like before dinner and their favorite dishes and wines. A good waiter knows this after the second visit.

• An understanding of how to move through a restaurant’s crowded space with an eye for the big picture, just as a hockey or basketball player sizes up not only his own position, but also that of every other player.

• An eagerness to do everything possible to ensure a pleasant, relaxing evening for the patron. It is far more likely that customers will remember the quality of the service than that of the food when they decide where to go for dinner. A towering figure in French cuisine and chef/owner of the restaurant in Paris named for himself, Joël Robuchon once said, “I like waiters to be attentive and smiling, as if they were having good friends over to their own house.”

• But that doesn’t mean actual friendship. If a waiter’s first words are “My name is …,” you can blame the owner. Still, a good waiter is sensitive to the customer and grants him the extent of conversation and its tone.

• A passion for food and wine, or as one waiter-turned-restaurateur put it, “They have to work with their hands and legs, with their brains, but especially with their hearts.”

PEA SOUP

In Berlin in 1928, Elias Canetti, a twenty-three-year-old writer struggling with shattered idealism, met Isaac Babel, eleven years older and one of his literary heroes, who was visiting from Russia. Babel weaned him from the “blabbering vanity” of the decadent Weimar Republic and took him to lowly restaurants where, Canetti, said, “we stood side by side, very slowly eating a pea soup. With his globular eyes behind his very thick eyeglasses, he looked at the people around us, every single one, all of them, and he could never get his fill of them. He was annoyed when he had finished the soup. He wished for an inexhaustible bowl, for all he wanted to do was to keep on looking.”

Babel, falsely accused of espionage, was executed in Moscow in 1941. Canetti, who retired to London in his early thirties, lived there quietly for the rest of his life, writing the books that earned the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.

ARCHESTRATUS

The best ingredients straightforwardly prepared is the infallible doctrine of many great chefs and restaurateurs. It is a formula that goes back at least as far as ancient Greece and the writings of Archestratus, a widely