When I moved to Washington in 1961, people would tell a joke to each other: If you want good food in Washington, they said, eat in the homes of your friends.  

There was some truth to that.  

I think back to that time, and in my mind, go through the restaurants of that era. It’s true: we really were a backwater. New Yorkers used to say that all the time. But at that time, New York too was a backwater; every city was.  

Restaurants then had a different purpose. In New York, people went out to see important people. It was common then for maîtres de to seat people according to their importance. I remember how, in the summer of 1964, my brother and sister-in-law and I went for lunch to Le Pavilion, the most influential and the snootiest restaurant in New York. When the three of us entered the restaurant for a Saturday lunch, the owner, Henri Soule, looked us over, and told the hostess to lead us to a table at the back of the restaurant – in Siberia, although he didn’t call it that.

Even in Washington there were luncheon places where one could see important people dining with other important people, Senator Everett Dirksen with Senator Wayne Morse, for example. Senator Humphrey playfully acting as a doorman in another restaurant. They were places where journalists like Howard K. Smith could interview their sources.  

I was working for Mr. Smith in 1961.

Howard Smith and his wife would have dinner parties every other week so that he could see and be seen by sources.  Guests looked forward to those parties not for the food, although the food really was very good. They looked forward to seeing other important people. (The Smiths had a routine that I describe in a chapter of my book (still unpublished).

The purpose of restaurants has changed.  We used to go to restaurants to see and be seen.  We used to go to restaurants to spend time with our friends. Now we go to eat fancy food and wine and spend a lot of money.  

Half a century ago restaurants in Washington were enjoyed for lunch even more than for dinner.  I was working at The White House in 1963 on an effort to create a domestic version of the Peace Corps, and I went often to Chez Francois that was then just a block from my office. I was introduced to it by Gerry Studds, a descendent of Elbridge Gerry, a colleague who was a great deal more worldly than I.  He took me there for the first time to introduce me to real French food, Alsatian food.  

I was overwhelmed by it and went back often to learn something about all those dishes I had not tasted before.  (Like many in my generation, I had not, at the age of 25, been to France or any other country, not even to Canada.). But I never went to Chez Francois for dinner. Even I, a young bachelor, entertained people at dinner parties in my little Georgetown apartment.

There were other restaurants I went often to for lunch. There was the Old Ebbitt Grill, at that time on F Street, a restaurant that had been opened in 1856, a narrow, long restaurant, with a narrow long bar. It was dark with old furniture, very quaint. 

There was Sam’s Argentine Bakery on the west side of The White House, on F Street, I believe, then still a street of old town houses. Sam served his borscht and empanadas, more than enough for lunch. I recall that I sat at the window at a bar.

The most elegant restaurants in Washington at that time served French food.  We were in a wave of Francophilia because of Mrs. Kennedy’s love of France. But even before the Kennedys, elegant food in Washington had been French food.

 Rive Gauche at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street was off-putting for me. I was afraid to go there. I thought that if I didn’t speak French – and I didn’t – I would be unwelcome.  

I went instead to Chez Francois and to Le Provencal, a wonderful restaurant where I was always welcomed by the owner, Jacque Blanc, even though he was French.

Only one time I went to the most elegant of Frenchified Washington, San Souci. It was on 17^thStreet, just behind my office on Lafayette Square. I wanted to go there for lunch because it was always the lunch spot of the political humor columnist Art Buchwald whom I had met at the Smiths’ home. I had been seated that evening next to his wife whom I liked very much. I think I imagined myself being summoned to Buchwald’s table when he saw me walk into San Souci. I imagined I would be invited to join him and his friends.  

But he wasn’t there that afternoon, and I was not only not welcomed that day, I was welcomed only with a snarl.  

 From then on, I told myself as I looked out the rear window of my office, that I was looking down on San Souci just as it had looked down on me.

 Italian food in Washington at that time was not nearly so precious. There were two very popular restaurants at the corner of 19^th and M, very close to my office on Lafayette Square. They were Gusti’s and Luigi’s. Both of them served Italian-American food. Both were inexpensive. Both made and served pizza, not then as popular as it became later.

In 1953, Mr. Gusti said, “Some folks come to me after a meal and remark that the dinner was the best they’ve ever eaten. I tell them they haven’t eaten many good dinners if mine are the best. But they are the best for the price.” 

 In 1953 Blackie Augur had opened Blackie’s House of Beef in the west end of the city, not far from the Western Market where I used to shop for my groceries in its many stalls. It was a good time to open a steakhouse because beef had become more available after the rationing of World War II.  

His restaurant was large and informal, and the prices were low. Blackie was there every day to greet customers. 

 That, by the way, was not unusual. Hosts in restaurants were at that time the celebrities of their restaurants. Blackie, Jacques Blanc of Provençale, Francois Haeringer of Chez Francois, Dominique D’Ermo of Dominique’s. The owners, not the chefs, were the people one knew.

Take Duke Ziebert, for example. I have no idea who was in the kitchen there. Certainly not a celebrity.  The celebrity at Duke’s was Duke. He stood at the front of his restaurant greeting people and manning the host’s table. Why not? He was the host. It was he who knew the names of his guests and guided them to the table that he had chosen for them. Senators and Cabinet members in the front of the restaurant and non-entities like me to the back.

When he wasn’t at the host table, he was walking slowly through the restaurant, teasing his guests and making them know how important they were to him.

The other host of Duke’s was Mel Krupin. Duke allowed Mel to become a celebrity too. He was a Jew from Brooklyn with a Brooklyn sense of humor, insulting his guests relentlessly. When Duke’s building was torn down, Mel took a space at another building just a few doors south of Duke’s, and his became the power restaurant of Washington.

The food at these restaurants was conventional delicatessen food – pickles, matzoh ball soup, brisket, chicken. The food was good enough. People came to the restaurants for the experience. Their food was almost beside the point.

Then we moved into the era of celebrity chefs. I am truly not certain that this is progress. I think I preferred celebrity hosts and chefs in their kitchens. Somehow that seemed more appropriate.  

I remember the first time I met a famous chef. I went for dinner to Lutece in 1981. Toward the end of the dinner that evening I heard a man at the table next to ours ask if Andre Soltner would come into the dining room; they wanted to meet him.

A chef wandered in looking uneasy as if he didn’t belong there. It was true: He didn’t belong there. Chefs belonged in their kitchens. That’s where they had always been.

I never knew the name of the chef of my favorite restaurant in Baltimore, Marconi’s. The owner was in the front of the restaurant; I didn’t know her name either. When I went to Marconi’s it was for the food – perfect lamb chops, great Caesar Salad, wonderful crab cakes and lobster. I don’t think that I ever saw a chef.

That began to change in the 1970s. It was television that did that. Julia Child was one of the first, although Madeleine Kamman, notoriously competitive pointing out all the time that she was a real chef, whereas Julia Child was performing a role of chef for television. It didn’t matter; however, Julia was famous. So was Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet. And so were Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay and Jamie Oliver and Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsey. All of these were truly chefs AND television personalities and performers. 

Television changed chefs and made them celebrities. By the 2000s they couldn’t simply stay in their kitchens. They had to be in the dining rooms of their restaurants, meeting their guests and schmoozing with them.

Now it’s far worse. Not only must those chefs be in their dining room; they must be in the world.

Daniel Boulud is a wonderful chef, a real chef. I believe that his restaurants in New York are wonderful – all of them. On the other hand, he has restaurants in Toronto, Miami, Montreal, Dubai, Singapore, Saudi Arabia that are not so wonderful. Daniel can’t touch them as he can all of his New York restaurants.

In the Napa Valley kitchen of my friend Thomas Keller, there are television screens so that he can look into the kitchens of his restaurant in New York and Miami. He does that. I don’t know how many times he speaks to his two far flung kitchens each night or even whether he does.

Certainly, I accept that the chef’s job is now different. And so are the restaurants. And so is the quality of our ingredients. We have so much more now than we did in the Seventies. Half a century ago, we in Washington could eat in restaurants French food, Chinese, Italian-American, delicatessen, and a few others.

Food in Washington when I arrived was bland, and often we went to a restaurant because it was cozy. I remember the restaurants of Blackie called Black Ghetto, Black Tahiti Black Rose, Black Saddle, Black Bird, Black Gun, Black Russian, and Black Frisco. They all really existed, some of them, many of them underground.

Now in Washington we can get Latin American foods from many countries, Thai, Cambodian, Filipino, etc., etc. We have nearly infinite choices. We know so much more about foods than we did in 1980. We rarely, if ever, go to a restaurant simply because we like its host. We nearly always choose a restaurant for its chef’s food even if we don’t know the chef, and don’t even want to know him.

I think back to the restaurants of Washington in the 1970s. Their food, with a few exceptions, really wasn’t very good. But they didn’t have waiters who all the time intruded on my conversations by asking “Is everything all right?” They didn’t have canned music that made it hard for me to listen. They did, on the other hand, have hosts who were showmen. They had a sense of intimacy that was warming. But I don’t miss their food and am excited by the choices we have today.