NOT VERY CHEAP.

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 70, 24 March 1938, Page 18

NOT VERY CHEAP.

EATINGIN NEW YORK""

HOTCH-POTCH MEALS «

Prices are a little difficult to follow m the United States until the clue to the dinner is found, states a writer in an English paper. There is the usual medley ot tomato juice, soup, oysters, hors d'oeuvre, Jfish, meat. The meat course is labelled a dollar or more at a fairly good restaurant, or thirty or forty cents when the restaurant is cheap. This looks as though dinner, with all the other items, will be very expensive indeed. It is less bad than 1;t seems. The dollar or the'dollar plus is noi merely the price of the meat dish, it includes everything else, and this is usually a lot, including coffee.

Dinner may consist of tomato juice or soup, or sometimes two or three excellent oysters, for oysters remain moderately cheap; a huge plate of meat with probably three vegetables. In Ihe middle'of this a trayful of salad will be brought .round, made of anything provided that^ the cheese, pineapple, jam, jelly, wh nat not, rests upon a lettuce leaf. After this comes the sweet or cheese with biscuits, and the sweet is often a huge helping of ice cream, and spmewhere else in the middle of it all will come coffee, frequently on,a pot with two cups in it. Americans have three vegetables where the British.have two, and these are bewildering in their variety. Sweet corn, sweet'potatoes, and prickly pear —if that can be counted a vegetable instead of a salad—are perhaps the least common in England. Four shilling commands a large dinner in England and the American dinner does not fall short of this. For thirty cents —that is, Is 3B—oi forty cents—about Is Bd—it is possible to get a good plate of'meat with tluee vegetables —peas, cariots, spinach peihaps now— two big rolls, and two pats of butter. But places where this is found are generally cafeterias, where you serve yourself. In the better restaurants little can be-hati for this amount... The best value is to be obtained at the drug stores, where you sit up at a high counter and consume enormous 1 sandwiches, which may be full of anything—whether tongue or hot bacondrink malted milk or other- milk, watery coffee, perhaps grape-juice or I apple-]uice. Ice cream in. various forms may be obtained here, and it is good and cheap. Even the most elaborate sandwiches pall, however, in a .short time, and 25 cents—or a shilling—even if it provides quantity, does not provide appetite to cope with the breadiness prevailing. At the automatics appetisingness takes the Place^of substance, ..which really means that it is ridf ver/che^p to have something to eafein New York.