It was over lunch at the old Warburton Hotel that Scott told me his story. The Warburton is an antiquated jumble of brown stone and striped canvas on New York's upper west side, a particularly suitable setting for that sort of tale. It is steeped in its own peculiar amalgam of gloomy history and faded nostalgia, so the cosmopolite who finds himself on the premises had better be a resident, a chance traveller with a penchant for the bizarre, or simply (like myself) a fellow with a taste for Claude Benoit's odd blend of French and American cooking.