One evening recently:
In the ballroom (an ordinary-looking ballroom, with large star-bursting-up-shaped lamps hanging from the ceiling) of the new Vista International New York Hotel (situated at the World Trade Center, and the newest United States hotel in the chain of Hilton International Hotels), there were two hundred and eighty people, most of them the managers of Hilton hotels and their wives, and then there was Catherine Tritsch, the managing editor of Successful Meetings, which is a magazine for corporation and association people who plan meetings. The Hilton managers and their wives had spent the last few days meeting each other in a business-conference way and meeting each other over meals. Now, in the ballroom, they were meeting to eat a dinner of clam chowder, steamed clams, boiled lobster, boiled ears of corn, and watermelon.
Catherine Tritsch, the managing editor of Successful Meetings,
said to us, “People think that the people who go to conventions don’t eat well. The theory is that they are rubes, they don’t know good food. But it’s not true. People who go to conventions are high-income people, and they are very professional.”
The Woody Herman orchestra was there, and it was led by Woody Herman himself, and it played some songs, all of them popular old American songs. “A good convention banquet will create the atmosphere of a good restaurant,” said Catherine Tritsch. “A good restaurant has to have a theme. This has a theme. American food. American music.”
There was a waitress wearing knicker-style pants and there was a waitress who looked more or less like a colonial maiden, but all the rest of the people who were waiting on the tables were waiters, and there was no mistaking them.
“Did you know that waiters who serve at banquets have their own union?” Catherine Tritsch asked us. “If you have so many people, you have to have so many waiters. Union rules.”
A man got up from his table and, taking up a small American flag, led a number of people halfway around the ballroom. Then he came back to his own table, and he and the men sitting with him tied their napkins around their heads as if they were pirates.
“These people are upscale people,” said Catherine Tritsch. “High-income people. Very cosmopolitan. This is a successful meeting.”
Among them, Catherine Tritsch and the two hundred and eighty other people, most of whom were hotel managers and
their wives, ate and drank eighteen gallons of clam chowder, three hundred lobsters, three thousand clams, four hundred ears of corn, fifteen cases of wine, seven barrels of beer, and sixty watermelons.
—September 14, 1981