The Drama of Dinner: How to Fine-Dine at Home

Fare swanky enough to warrant a proper name began popping up at grand American hotels during the early 1900s, before Prohibition, the Great Depression, and two world wars conspired to stymie the trend. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the postwar boom—plus home-ec “innovations” like Swanson TV Dinners and Duncan Hines cake mixes—transformed eating out into an exercise in accessible extravagance. Suddenly, flambé ruled the day as sirloin (Steak Diane) and tropical fruit (Bananas Foster) were doused in alcohol and set afire tableside. Indulgences that had been denied in the lean years, such as shellfish, now came topped with bacon and butter (Clams Casino) or rich rémoulade sauce (Crab Louie). Since then, times have changed and changed again, especially as of late. But being stuck inside with your spouse on a Saturday night needn’t dictate sweats, Diet Coke, and DiGiorno. Dress to the nines, pour a stiff drink, and gild a few culinary lilies. These five classics from the Saveur vault prove that, even in the worst of times, more really feels like more.

Former Saveur editor Kelly Alexander, who covered Clams Casino for our October 2003 issue, pointed readers to Inns and Outs, the 1939 autobiography of Julius Keller, once the maître d’hôtel of Rhode Island’s now-defunct Narragansett Pier Casino hotel. In his memoir, Keller claims to have first served the littlenecks topped with bacon and bread crumbs sometime around 1917, to a patron who had simply requested clams. “Seizing the opportunity,” he wrote, less than humbly, “I prepared a dish which I had tried on my own cultivated palate.”

Considered a signature entree at Manhattan’s late, great Drake Hotel, Steak Diane is widely attributed to Beniamino Schiavon, the Drake’s maître d’hôtel from 1942 to 1967. The hitch? Schiavon probably invented the sirloin’s flambéed cream sauce in collaboration with chef Luigi Quaglino during the 1930s, when the two worked together in Belgium. And though many assume the name references the Roman goddess of the hunt, The New York Times, in its 1968 obituary of Schiavon, described the titular Diane only as a “beauty of the 1920s.” Saveur’s take on the steak, originally published in March 1997, upgrades the beef to filet mignon.

There are plenty of theories about Crab Louie’s name, including a tall tale involving the outsize appetite of Louis XIV. A recipe for the dish first appeared under the title “Crabmeat a la Louise” in chef Victor Hirtzler’s 1910 The Hotel St. Francis Cookbook. The hotel, now the Westin St. Francis, still stands on San Francisco’s Union Square, but it doesn’t serve the city’s best Crab Louie. For that, you must wait in line on Polk Street to nab one of 20 seats at Swan Oyster Depot. Peggy Knickerbocker raved about Swan in Saveur’s March 1998 issue—and convinced the place to divulge its Louie secrets, including the dressing, comprised of mayonnaise, ketchup, pickle relish, olives, and onions.

Before the stately Hotel Chatham (designed by Warren & Wetmore, the same firm behind Grand Central) was razed in 1966, Anthony Lagasi, chef at its Divan Parisien restaurant, forever changed the way Americans viewed chicken and broccoli. By the early 1940s, Lagasi had debuted a dish that bathed and baked the otherwise bland ingredients in a rich bechamel sauce, creating the casserole we now know as Chicken Divan. Although the original recipe was never divulged, the restaurant’s maître d’hôtel hinted that Lagasi used poached chicken; Saveur’s version, which ran in Irene Sax’s December 2006 feature “The Age of Casseroles,” sautées the poultry instead.

Ah (or maybe ugh), to be the sole female sibling running a family-owned business some 70 years ago. In 1951, the late Ella Brennan, manager of the still-famous Brennan’s restaurant on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, found herself saddled with one older fruit-broker brother unloading his banana surplus, and another one demanding she devise a dessert to honor of his crime-commissioner crony, Richard Foster. Ella’s epiphany—bananas sautéed in brown sugar, butter, and combustible liquor, then torched—remains a top reason to eat in the Crescent City. Our Bananas Foster, which first appeared in the April 2013 feature “New Orleans” by Lolis Eric Elie, uses banana liqueur in addition to classic rum, heightening the banana flavor in this caramelized dessert.