Party Melt

I have always been a great fan of novelty restaurants, places with oddball décor or theatrical themes and servers in costumes. The weirder the better. Back in my hometown, there was no place as extraordinary as Fritz’s Union Station, where an elevated “Skat Cat” train system delivered burgers and fries. But there was a drive-in with carhops on roller skates (I longed to be one when I grew up) and, out near the fairgrounds, a restaurant located inside a giant concrete tepee.

As a young waiter, I loved being part of the faux Francaise world of the Magic Pan, where a pretty girl in a dirndl skirt peeled hot crêpes off a revolving crêperie each night. Serving plates of mandarin-orange-and-almond salad and chicken divan crêpes, I learned that my tips improved if I pretended I didn’t speak English. In the disco days a few years later, I got an even more exciting job at a restaurant that was half dance floor, half silver lamé dining room — and it wasn’t uncommon to get tipped with drugs instead of cash. Way too decadent for its own good, the place lasted about as long as an extended mix of “Boogie Oogie Oogie.”

Sometime between the crêpe craze and the death of disco was the far-out fondue phase, which entered the pop-culinary consciousness about the same time as orange roughy, white Zinfandel and quiche. Most Midwestern cities had at least one restaurant where melted cheese bubbled in metal pots perched over cans of awful-smelling Sterno or flickering votive candles. But the novelty didn’t last. I suspect it’s because fondue is a labor-intensive dish that requires skewering, dipping, swirling and closely watching raw meats boil in hot bouillon or wine.

“I just got so tired of having to cook every bite I ate,” sighed my friend Marilyn after her first visit to The Melting Pot: A Fondue Restaurant. I had been intrigued and eager for her reaction since hearing that the Florida-based chain was opening a location in a basement on the Plaza.

But Marilyn had more to say about her attractive waiter than about the restaurant’s food: “Oh, the food was all right. We had a cheese, a meat and a chocolate. And it was expensive.”

That’s what all of my trendy friends said after they made their initial visits to the restaurant. No couple is going to fork over less than $60 for dinner, and that’s not including a glass of vino from the respectable list of reasonably priced vintages. Even a meal with my nine-year-old goddaughter, Alexandra — we shared a cheese fondue, salads and a dessert fondue — set me back the cost of a utility bill. But it was worth it to give the kid a totally unexpected culinary experience. “Melted cheese? For dinner?” she asked, hesitantly dipping a piece of tart apple into a mixture of grated cheddar (dusted with flour to retain its saucy consistency), garlic and beer. (“The alcohol cooks right out of it,” the waitress had assured me.) Alex thought the whole interactive concept was too fabulous. And when our server set a match to the Flaming Turtle, she was in chocolate nirvana. But even she had her doubts.

“I think it’s the kind of place where you need to take a lot of people with you,” Alex said. “We couldn’t eat everything.”

She was right. Fondue is a collective dining experience. According to a 1969 fondue cookbook by Margaret Deeds Murphy, it began in Switzerland as a way to make use of hardened cheese and bread during the frugal winter months. “Some long-forgotten innovator discovered that [by] melting the cheese in wine, a delicious mix was made in which to dunk the bread and soften it. Each hungry peasant would dip his share of bread in the communal pot,” Murphy wrote.

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But that’s ancient history. At The Melting Pot, the pregrated cheese is never hard, and the chunks of soft bread have been freshly baked by Fairway’s Breadmaker. It’s an unlikely modern-day peasant who will survive The Melting Pot’s complicated telephone reservation system (prospective diners stay on hold for what feels like an Alpine winter), its uneven service and prices that might actually mean spending the next week living on stale bread and hard cheese.

Yet I did spend an exquisite night with three friends in a cozy booth, enjoying the conviviality that occurs when everyone eats from the same pot. Not everyone was delighted, though. My friend Bob, who for weeks had been nagging me to eat at The Melting Pot, thought that dipping raw meat into a pot of boiling wine and herbs had all the allure of “eating like hoboes around the campfire.”

He also thought our waiter was overbearing; I found him perfectly charming if totally disorganized (he brought out several items we hadn’t ordered), but I felt more sympathy than irritation. The Melting Pot’s servers must mix the ingredients for the fondues and cooking sauces, and not all of them are up to the task of being cook, waiter, floor-show entertainer and practical nurse. (“Now don’t touch this metal plate. It gets hot!”) There’s not much to a cheese fondue, even a snazzy version with nutty Gruyère and mellow Emmental cheeses, a bit of garlic and white wine and a splash of cherry liqueur. The show is in adding the ingredients to a shiny metal double-boiler, whisking them together and bringing out cubes of bread and sliced green apples, carrots and celery curls.

We had a grand time eating that and could have stopped there. But we wanted the whole sensual experience, so Bob and Lou Jane shared one of the three “fondue for two” dinners: the “classic” version with tenderloin, shrimp, teriyaki sirloin, chicken and fresh fish fillet. Marilyn and I decided we would be more discreet and split one of the eight entrée choices. We decided against the fiery “French Quarter” (with its hunks of andouille sausage and Cajun-spiced chicken) and settled on the seafood trio.

Dinners include one of three salads. The mushroom version is little more than a mountain of sliced fresh mushrooms heaped on a spartan layer of iceberg lettuce and sprinkled with a lifeless parmesan vinaigrette. The chef’s salad is only a shadow of the traditional version but tidily arranged with sliced eggs, bits of ham and more of that ubiquitous Emmental. The third possibility, a “California” number, mixes iceberg and wild greens with chopped walnuts and crumbles of gorgonzola in a piquant raspberry-and-black-walnut vinaigrette.

Then comes the work. Servers bring out platters of raw meat, uncooked potatoes, mushrooms and seafood, along with tiny bowls of sauces meant to give the cooked meats and shellfish a full palette of flavors: cocktail sauce with lots of horseradish, sweet teriyaki, basil pesto, ginger plum, a bland yellow curry, a tart lemon pepper, Green Goddess and mesquite barbecue. Printed cooking directions at each table suggest two minutes for meat and poultry and slightly less time for the seafood.

Even for a leisurely group like ours, the ritual became tiring after twenty minutes. Lou Jane — our table’s resident chef — finally dumped the rest of the meat and seafood into the pot at once. “Let’s not make this such an event,” she said. It wasn’t correct fondue procedure, but it let us focus on our conversation rather than on the stuff at the end of each skewer. Everything cooked in roughly the same amount of time, and we could choose what we liked. But we were getting full fast.

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“I can’t eat dessert,” groaned Bob. But Lou Jane wanted to try the dark-chocolate fondue (dessert fondues aren’t melted at the table), and she and I giggled like children when the pan arrived with a plate of tiny brownies, nutty marshmallows, a miniature wedge of cheesecake, cubes of pound cake, fresh strawberries and sliced bananas. Even Bob loosened his belt, speared a couple of strawberries and swirled them in the rich, glossy pool of burbling chocolate. Ending on such a sweet note put me in something resembling an insulin coma: I didn’t even blink when I saw the astronomical bill.

“It was worth it,” Lou Jane said the next day, after my head cleared. “It was more than a dinner — it was a party!”