Lunch at the Mansion: A barometer of social standing.

Up front, maitre d’ Jean-Pierre Albertinetti is welcoming the first of the 103 diners who will lunch at the Mansion on Turtle Creek today. Sixty-four of the 103 will settle on one of the daily specials: breaded Dallas goat cheese on summer lettuce with roasted pepper salad, sauteed salmon and halibut with cucumber-basil sauce and tomato chutney, or smoked pheasant salad with tomato pasta. Although the printed menu is extensive and changes seasonally, most of those who are lunching here today are regulars, and it is because of them that the daily specials are never repeated. Here, in the filtered light, it is cool and the sounds of conversation are hushed. Until 12:30 or 1:00, which is prime time for lunch, it will be relatively quiet.

The kitchen, however, is already a maelstrom of activity, with orders coming in over the loudspeaker-and it is warm enough that Julia Sweeney, who handles public relations for the Mansion, has advised the journalists invited for one of the restaurant’s regular “chefs tables” to dress coolly. Chef Dean Fearing has a bowl of corncake mix under his arm as he greets Sweeney, managing director Alexander de Toth, hotel resident manager Atef Mancarios, and catering director Rudy Eisele. By 12:15, the guests-including Dallas Morning News society columnist Jane Wolfe, writer Leon Harris, Morning News food editor Dotty Griffith, Park Cities People photographer Tom Robertson and his wife Agness, and Park Cities People society columnist Paige Nash-have arrived.

The chefs table menu-spicy cornbread oysters with a chiffon-ade of radicchio and spinach, assorted roast bell pepper salad, smoked sweetbreads on corncakes with artichoke marjoram sauce, and white chocolate ice cream with butterscotch sauce in a ginger-snap cup-consists of items that are being considered for inclusion on the regular menu, which means that for this day, Fearing has come up with six off-the-menu dishes for lunch alone. (He will also devise another three or four for dinner.) As the group toasts Fear-ing’s handiwork, waiters skillfully swerve around the table that has been set up in the middle of the path from kitchen to dining room. The kitchen staff-including sous-chef Robert Reash, four line cooks, one prep cook, two pantry helpers, and one garde-manger- has been on the job since 6:30 a.m. They move rapidly and exude intense concentration on the culinary business at hand.

Meanwhile, in what is referred to in-house as the “Mansionette” the employees who have been assigned the noon lunch shift are sitting down to homemade meatloaf with country cream gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans, oven-baked sweet potatoes, and day-old desserts from the pastry kitchen. The four captains, eight waiters, and four busboys who are working the restaurant have already eaten at 11:00 or 11:30. There are no peach-colored Washington roses on the tables of the Mansionette, as there are in the restaurant, and the tablecloths are blue-and-white checked cotton, not peach linen.

By 1:00, the restaurant’s regulars are in place. Perhaps half are doing business; the rest are ladies who lunch, the majority sporting perfectly frosted and coiffed blond hair courtesy of the beauty salon at Lou Lattimore. The noise level is pitched to an exquisitely modulated roar, Periodically, a waiter brings a telephone to a table or banquette. At 1:10, the main dining room is full. There are still tables available in the library and verandah, but they are decidedly less desirable and indicate a lower place in the precisely calibrated pecking order. When, for instance, a couple is ushered to the verandah, a wickedly astute follower of fortunes is overheard to say: “Who is that? Aren’t they in oil? They must be, if they’re sitting out on the verandah.”

Plainly, although lunch at the Mansion is pleasurable, it is not something to be embarked on lightly. It is more than mere eating. Eating addresses only literal hunger. Lunching addresses more metaphorical hungers: mainly, the age-old desire to strut one’s stuff before one’s peers. As the social commentator Taki has observed, lunch serves as an exquisitely refined barometer of social standing: “Lunch is a status symbol of infinite power. Not only does it separate the haves from the have-nots, it’s also a precise gauge of the difference between the haves and the have-a-hell-of-a-lots.”

Taki continues: “One of my ways of showing disdain for convention and the dreadful Protestant ethic and those who adhere to it has been by indulging in the delightful ritual of lunch. Needless to say, when I say ’lunch’ I do not mean that horrid American invention, the twelve o’clock fast-food meal washed down with milk, nor the corporate three-martini, tax-deductible horror, a lunch indulged in only for the sake of monetary greed, nor, of course the walking affront to one’s instincts of good taste and aesthetics, the BLT on rye. What I mean by lunch is that symptom of decadence and dalliance for which there is no longer room in today’s functional world.”

As the Mansion’s restaurant empties out and Dallas’s have-a-hell-of-a-lots issue forth into the painfully bright midday sun, they wear a dazed look of contentment. They would seem to share Mel Brooks’s sentiment in The History of the World, Part I: “It’s good to be the king.” They have eaten as well as one can in Dallas, or any other city for that matter, but that is not the proximate cause of their contentment.

George Lancaster. Galleria marketing executive and man about town, is one regular who understands that the food isn’t the point of lunch at the Mansion. “Who cares what you order at the Mansion?” he asks. “Who even remembers? I nearly always order the normal food, the simple things like chicken hash or a steak sandwich. The point is it’s a visual feast: it’s beautiful; it’s like dining in a magnificent home; you always see someone you know, at least if you”re in the main dining room, and God forbid if you’re not; and you can see who gets telephone calls. It’s like recess for adults. Besides, where else can you sign the check and have them bill you? The waiters are always attentive, and the valet parker always remembers which car is yours. That feels good. It’s nice to be recognized.”