AT THE IMPERIAL RESTAURANT
My little French cousin who has married the Comte de St Solidor (if that is not his exact title it is, literally, next door to it) has brought her Breton husband across the Channel to make the acquaintance of his English relatives, and is desperately anxious that he shall not be depressed by London. He is a jolly, round-faced Frenchman, with a rather straggly light beard and a great head of intractable light hair, and, were it not that he cannot speak a word of our language, might pass for a young Yorkshire squire. My little French cousin was particularly afraid that Robert, that is his first name, would suffer all the tortures of ennui on Sunday, for her mother, who was English-born, had told her that the English in England spend their Sunday afternoons, when they are grown-up, in singing hymns, and when they are children in repeating aloud the catechism. I told my little cousin to have no fear, that London Sundays are no longer what they were when her mother was a child, and I offered to take charge of Robert and herself on their first Sunday in London, from after lunch-time till bed-time, and to try and keep them amused.
I asked my little French cousin whether rag-time had penetrated to Brittany, and she, pitying my ignorance, told me that at Dinard, last summer, they had talked to rag-time music, and bathed to it, and had even played syncopated chemin de fer to it, as well as danced to it. But, when I asked her if at Dinard she had ever eaten to it, she said, "But no," and gave a mimetic sketch of eating food to the air of "Everybody's doing it now," which was very funny. That settled where we should dine on Sunday, and I wrote off at once to the Imperial Restaurant to secure a dinner-table for four, and asked another cousin, a British one, to complete the partie carrée.
The afternoon of Sunday caused me no anxiety. Robert is devoted to music, so I took him and the Comtesse to the Queen's Hall to one of Sir Henry Wood's concerts, and on to the Royal Automobile Club to tea, and neither of them showed any sign of being oppressed by Sabbath gloom.
At ten minutes past eight I was waiting in the vestibule between the street entrance and the restaurant, where a marble bust of the late King Edward smiles at each customer who enters. I had ordered my dinner, a very simple one—potage Germiny, truites au bleu, noisettes de mouton, new peas and potatoes, ham and spinach, asparagus, and a bombe, and a magnum of Goulet, 1900, to drink therewith. For ten minutes I sat in the window-seat watching pretty ladies and men of all ages and types pass through the vestibule, give up their coats and cloaks, shake hands, and go in little coveys into the restaurant. The orchestra in the distance was sawing away at an operatic overture, the ante-room was comfortably warmed, and as dinner was the only event of the evening I did not fidget because my little cousin delayed in her coming. I was not the only solitary man waiting. In front of the fireplace stood a beautiful young man, with sleeve-links and studs and buttons to his white waistcoat that must have cost a fortune. Now and again he glanced at the clock, a work of art, in which a gilded cupid points with a finger to the revolving girdle of hours on a vase, and when he had ascertained how late she was already he surveyed the other human creatures about him with tolerant pride and slight hauteur. I have no gift of telepathy, but I was quite sure that he was waiting for some very beautiful lady of the stage, and pitied those of us who had no such divinity to be our guest.
The British cousin arrived to time, and not very long afterwards my French cousins appeared. She looked at the clock and declared that they were late because Robert could not find his evening studs, and Robert laughed, as men do when called upon to substantiate a white fib told by their wives. She had asked me whether she ought to dine in her hair, or in a hat, and I had answered that either way would be quite correct. She had decided not to wear a hat in order to be quite English, and she looked entirely charming. I could not help glancing at the beautiful young man who monopolised the fire to see what he thought of my star guest. He was slightly interested, but he answered my glance by one which meant "Wait and see."
I had secured a corner table at a reasonable distance from the band, which occupies a platform about half-way down the room, and we enthroned the little cousin on the chair in the angle, so that she could see everybody and everything in the room. Every table but one was occupied, and that I knew was reserved for the beautiful young man whom we had left looking with a frown at cupid's finger. My little French cousin was in high spirits, and Robert acted as an amiable chorus. She recognised that the room was French—it is a copy of one of the salons at Fontainebleau, and perceived that the pictures of cupids, which are between the round windows and the tall casemented glasses, were inspired by Boucher. She liked the carved marble mantelpiece and the crystal and gold electroliers. I was called upon to tell her who everybody was at the other tables, and I launched out recklessly into fiction. I knew by sight a dozen of our fellow-diners, and the rest I described as M.P.'s and ladies of title, officers of the Household Brigade, and divettes of the Gaiety, Daly's, the Lyric, and the Shaftesbury, which they probably are, celebrated painters and prima donnas, according to their appearance. My British cousin choked over a bone of the trout, so he said, but my little French cousin and her spouse were much impressed by my exhaustive acquaintance with all the celebrities of my native city, which was just the effect I wished to produce.
Little Oddenino, going the round of the tables, saying a word or two to all his clientele, came to our corner, asked if all was as it should be, took up the menu, and lifted his eyebrows. Of course I know that to follow the noisettes by ham was inartistic, but being in the vein of romance I said that my little French cousin was passionately fond of ham, and demanded it at all her meals, and not that I prefer ham to mutton, which would have been the truth. The little man bowed and smiled and passed on; My cousin asked who he was, and when I replied, "Oddy," she inquired if it was he who would presently make the rag-time. Pleased to be on bed-rock truth at last I gave her a shorthand sketch of Oddenino's career; how Turin is his native town; how he opened one of the great hotels at Cimiez, and earned the thanks of the late Queen Victoria and a fine tie-pin when she stayed there; how he was manager of the East Room at the Criterion, and of the Café Royal, and from the latter restaurant stepped two doors farther down Regent Street and built the Imperial Restaurant. I described story upon story of banqueting-rooms that are to be found on the Glasshouse Street side, and how Freemasons—good, charitable British Freemasons, not troublesome political French Freemasons—feast in them in great numbers every night in the year. I sketched out the little man's other ventures, and I ended by telling her that Oddenino is a man of much consideration in the Italian colony in London, and has been decorated by his king. Surely she did not expect a Cavaliere to make rag-time music? And my little French cousin said "assuredly not."
When we had come to the noisettes' stage of our dinner the beautiful young man whom we had left waiting in the vestibule came in—alone. He looked as gloomy as Hamlet, and held in his hand a letter, which he tore into small pieces and thrust into the ice pail beside his table. "The poor animal!" said my little cousin pityingly. "He is dining with an excuse." He drank two glasses of champagne in quick succession, and then felt strong enough to sup his soup.
About this period a change came over the music of the band, which had conscientiously worked off the barcarole from "Hoffman," a Viennese waltz and a minuet. A clean-shaven young man, Mr Gideon, the clever composer of the rag-time successes who had been eating his dinner like the rest of us, took his place at the piano, and the orchestra subordinated itself to his leadership. Mr Gideon can make the piano speak as few men can, and my little French cousin and Robert both pricked up their ears and even let the asparagus get cold in their new-found interest. When Mr Gideon, dispensing with orchestral aid, sang "Honolulu," and here and there a girl's voice joined in the refrain, my little cousin turned sharply to me. "Ought one to sing?" she asked, and I told her that it was as she pleased. She listened with all her ears to catch the words, and at last trilled out with the rest: "Ma onaleuleu oné leu," and then laughed at her own boldness.
A quarter of an hour later my little French cousin, with both elbows on the table, a cigarette between her fingers, and sipping at intervals some crème de menthe, was singing "Hitchy Koo" with the best of them, and Robert was booming away harmonising a bass bouche-fermeé accompaniment. It was curious how this general singing brought together those who dined. We had been separate little parties before, but the humanity of song made us into one big friendly audience. Even the beautiful young man recovered his spirits sufficiently to try to start an eye flirtation with my little cousin.
The heat in the room grew and the atmosphere thickened with tobacco smoke, but we all sat on till close on eleven o'clock, when the vestibule doors were opened to let out the smoke and let in the cold air, and the ladies put their stoles round their necks, and the men called for their bills. Mine, including cigars and liqueurs, came to exactly a guinea a head.
Before bidding me good-night my little cousin, speaking for herself and Robert, said that they had well dined and had amused themselves, and that the Britannic Sunday was not frightening. But I told her that all our Sunday entertainment was not yet at end, that Robert, when he had taken her home to their hotel, was going to drink a whisky-and-soda with me at the club, and that then I would take him on to an hospitable house, where chemin de fer is played, and that if there was no police raid she would see him back about five a.m.
My little French cousin looked at me to see whether I was serious, laughed in my face, and taking Robert by the arm led him to the taxi that was waiting for them.
[VII]
THE CAFÉ ROYAL
One of the questions people are fond of asking and, like "jesting Pilate," do not stay to have answered, is, "Which is the best place in London at which to dine?" This is generally only a prologue to their opinion on the subject, but when it is an inquiry, and not an overture, I always reply by another question, "Whom are you going to take out to dine?" for there are so many "best places" that the selection of the right one depends entirely on what are the tastes of the person, or persons, you wish to please.—If a man were to answer my question by saying that he wished to entertain some bachelors of his own ripe age and ripe tastes, and that he would like to go somewhere where the food is very good, the rooms comfortable, and where there is no band to interfere with conversation, I should diagnose his case at once as a Café Royal one.
The Café Royal is pleasantly conservative, and it is more like a good French restaurant of the Second Empire than is any other dining-place I know in London. Its fame has reached to all other countries in the world, and a French waiter who hopes to become in due time a manager looks on an engagement at "The Café" as a step in his career. Therefore, if ever you feel inclined to be tight-fisted in the matter of tips to the waiters at the Café Royal, reflect that you may meet them again where their good word can help to make a meal comfortable for you. Once in Paris, when I went to dine at Maire's, far up the boulevards, a restaurant into which I had not been for years, I was surprised to be received as though I was the prodigal son of the establishment, a maître d'hôtel taking especial care to find a pleasant table for me, and suggesting various dishes from the carte du jour, which shaped into a dinner after my own heart. I asked him if I had ever seen him before, and he replied: "I waited on monsieur at the Café Royal in the days when he used to drink the Cliquot vin rosée." I pause here to sigh regretfully over the memory of that cuvée of Cliquot, at which many men shied because of its colour, but which was the most delightful wine that ever came from the great house of the widow of Rheims. On the first occasion that I entered the restaurant of the Esplanade Hotel in Berlin, feeling rather like a boy going to a new school, I was received by a maître d'hôtel who knew that I liked a table at the side of the room, suggested to me three of the lightest dishes on the carte as my dinner, and told me that he remembered that at the Café Royal I always asked for the table in the far corner of the first room and that I liked short and light dinners.
It may be that in a few years, when the Quadrant of Regent Street must be rebuilt, and all the other houses in it will be obliged to conform in some respects to the Piccadilly Hotel, the sample building of the new style, the Café Royal as we know it to-day may be altered in appearance and in the arrangement of its rooms, but I hope that this will not happen in my time. It was the first restaurant at which I learned the joys of dining out in pleasant company—a sole Colbert, a Chateaubriand and pommes sautés, an omelette au rhum and a bottle of good Burgundy was my idea of a suitable dinner in those my strenuous days, and I have for the house all the affection I have for old friends. The influence of Madame Nicols is against any unnecessary change. An old lady with white hair and dressed in black walks every day through the rooms of the Café Royal, and the habitués know that this is Madame Nicols on her tour of inspection. She still gives personal supervision to the work in the linen-room, as she did in the early days of the café, and her wish is that everything should remain as much as is possible as it was when M. Nicols was alive.
There is a romance in the history of most restaurants that have existed for any length of time, and the rise of the Café Royal from small beginnings is interwoven with the Franco-Prussian War and with the rise and destruction of the Commune. On 11th February 1865 M. Daniel Nicols, who had been in the wine trade at Bercy, that part of Paris where the great wine depots are, opened a modest little café-restaurant in the lower part of Regent Street. It occupied the space where the entrance and hall now are. A photograph of the front of the house at that time is extant, showing the plate-glass window with a broad brass band below it, and on the glass in white letters announcements of the good things to be found within. In front of the modest doorway stands M. Nicols, looking very proud of his establishment, while two of his friends lean gracefully against the pilasters of the entrance, and the head waiter stands respectfully a step or two farther back. On the little balcony before the windows of the entresol stand the ladies of M. Nicols' family. The interior of the window was in those days decked with salads and with any foods that looked tempting, to catch the attention of the passer-by. In fact, it was just such an unpretentious little restaurant as any young foreigner coming to London and determined to make a competence might start nowadays hoping that Fortune would turn her wheel in his direction. But most young foreigners do not have the chance, or the judgment, to establish themselves in Regent Street. I have a dim memory when I was a schoolboy of being impressed by some stuffed pheasants in the Café Royal window, and at the time of the great war I was first taken inside it to meet there a distant connection of my family, a Buonapartist, who had been one of the Empress's ministers during the short period when the Government of France fell into her hands and had gone into exile when the Republic was proclaimed. Those are my first two recollections of the Café Royal.
It was the flood of non-combatants and political exiles, business men, authors and actors; Red Republicans, Monarchists, and Buonapartists, whom the war and the political upheavals in France sent over to this country, that made the fortune of the little restaurant. However they might differ as to the colour of their politics, they were all Frenchmen, they all sighed for the blue skies of France; they found in the Café Royal a little corner of their beloved native land, and they naturally all gravitated to it. The house was much too small for the number of its frequenters, when, fortunately, the old Union Tavern in Glasshouse Street came into the market, was bought, and converted into the café as we know it, with its painted ceiling and its wealth of gilding, and the restaurant and the private dining-rooms were established on the other floors. This was the first of many extensions and alterations. A building on the Air Street side was absorbed, and a billiard-room established on the ground floor, but very soon the billiard-tables were given marching orders, and the space they occupied was turned into a grill-room. An enlargement of the kitchen, the installation of a lift on the Air Street side, the making of a little ante-room and cloakrooms outside the restaurant—before this improvement any man waiting for a lady who was going to dine with him did so in the passage leading to the café or on the stairs—and the construction somewhere very near the roof of a masonic temple and a ballroom were all additions.
M. Nicols and Madame Nicols gave personal attention to all details, and the experience M. Nicols had gained at Bercy was of great use to him in laying down the fine cellar of wines, particularly of red wines, which is the great pride of the house. To draw a very fine distinction, I would say of the Café Royal that it is a restaurant to which gourmets go to drink fine wines and to eat good food therewith, while at other first-class restaurants gourmets go to eat good food and to drink fine wines therewith. The only cellar of red wines that I know which can compare with that of the Café Royal is the cellar of Voisin's in Paris. The wine-list of the Café Royal is splendidly comprehensive, and in its pages are to be found all the fine wines grown in Europe, even Switzerland being recognised, and the wines of the Rhone Valley above the Lake of Geneva being given a place in the book. M. Delacoste, the first manager I remember at the Café Royal, under M. Nicols, was a great authority on wines, and he bought so largely that there came a time when M. Nicols recognised that his clients with the utmost good will could never drink all the wine laid down for them, and sold a portion of it by auction. Other managers of the Café Royal have been Wolschleger; Oddenino, who was appointed when M. Nicols died in 1897, and during whose tenancy of the post many of the improvements in the house were made; Gerard, mighty of girth, who had been in the kitchen of the Café Anglais under Dugleré, and who moved on to the Ocean Hotel, Sandown; and now Judah, who had been manager of the Cecil, and who keeps a very steady hand on the tiller. M. Judah, on the occasion of the visit of the President of the French Republic to London in 1913, was created an officer of the Order of Mérite Agricole.
Sportsmen have always had a special affection for the Café Royal. The men who were prominent in the revival of road-coaching were all patrons of the restaurant, and any night you may see half-a-dozen well-known owners of race-horses dining there. The Stage, the Stock Exchange, and Literature also have a liking for the old house, and hunting men love it.
When I mentioned it as the ideal place for a dinner of bachelor gourmets, I did not mean that men do not bring their wives and sisters and sweethearts there. They do. But the Café Royal does not lay itself out to capture the ladies. I never heard of anyone having afternoon tea there, and when a lady tells me that she likes dining at the Café Royal I always mentally give her a good mark, for it shows that she places in her affections good things to drink and good things to eat before those "springes to catch woodcock," gipsy bands in crimson coats, and palm lounges.
In the great gilded cage of the restaurant and the big room the windows of which open on to Glasshouse Street, the custom is to eat the lunch of the day, or to select dishes from it, while dinner is an à la carte meal. If one entertains a lady at dinner one probably orders a dinner which canters through the accepted courses, and I have by me the menu of such a one:
Hors d'œuvre Russe.
Pot-au-feu.
Sole Waleska.
Noisette d'agneau Lavallière.
Haricots verts à l'Anglaise.
Parfait de foie gras.
Caille en cocotte.
Salade.
Pôle Nord.
And with this dinner we drank a good bottle of St Marceaux.
But men when they dine together think little of the rightful sequence of courses, and order what their taste prompts them to eat. I have dined at the Café Royal, and dined well on moules Marinières—and one can eat moules at the Café without fear, half a cold grouse, a salad and a petit Suisse cheese. When the ham is a dish of the day it always tempts me, for the Café Royal hams are princes of their kind, and the cold mousses that the chef de cuisine, M. François Maître, makes are beautifully light. The specialities of the cuisine of the Café Royal are œufs Magenta, œufs Wallace, homard Thérmidor, sole Beaumanoir, filet de sole Simone, darne de saumon à l'Ecossaise, truite Dartois, turbotin Paysanne, poularde bisque, faisan Carême, perdreau à la Royal, caille Châtelaine, poulet sauté Sigurd, suprême de volaille à la Patti, tournedos Figaro, noisette de pré salé moderne, côte d'agneau Sultane, filet de bœuf Cambacères, selle d'agneau favorite.
Down in the café a table d'hôte meal is served, wonderful value for very few shillings, but I am not smoke-proof, and I like eating my meals without the taste and smell of tobacco added to them. The grill-room is always full, and perhaps more solid eating, of juicy fillets and grilled chops and cutlets, is done there than anywhere else in the house, except in the banqueting-rooms. I have banqueted with the Bons Frères, a club of cheery connoisseurs who like their dinner to be light and the songs that follow it also to be airy, in the great gilded banqueting-room with, as part of its decoration, many crowned N's, which might stand for Napoleon, but really indicate Nicols; I have dined in smaller rooms with the Foxhunters' Lodge, and with many other groups of good Freemasons and good diners; I have assisted at "Au Revoir" banquets without number, and I know when I am bidden to feast in a private room at the Café Royal that I shall be given a good dinner on sound if perhaps conservative lines. This menu of a banquet given not long since, which is typical, will convey more what I mean than many words of description:
Natives.
Petite Marmite.
Saumon Sauce Genévoise.
Blanchailles.
Caille à la Cavour.
Jambon d'York aux Petits Pois.
Caneton de Rouen à la Presse.
Salade d'Orange.
Asperges Sauce Divine.
Bombe Alexandra.
Friandises.
Os à la Moëlle.
Café.
Dessert.
Vins.
Graves Monopole, Dry.
Heidsieck and Co., 1898.
Louis Roederer, 1899.
Ch. Le Tertre, 1888.
Martinez Port, 1884.
Denis Mouniés, 1860.
Liqueurs.
As a final word of praise for the Café Royal, let me record that just as many of its waiters grow grey-headed in its service, so the steps of any man who is a lover of good cheer and who has been an habitué of the restaurant seem unconsciously to lead him to its doors. It was my first love amongst the restaurants, and—well, you know how the proverb runs.
[VIII]
OYSTER-HOUSES
The great catastrophe of my life, I think, was that the first oyster I ate was a bad one. I was at school for a year or two at Dedham, as a preparation for Harrow, and Dedham is in Essex, and not far from Colchester. An old man used to wheel a barrow of oysters to the playing field, and dispensed his shell-fish at a penny an oyster. One day when I was in funds I thought that I would begin to enjoy the luxuries of life, and bought an oyster. That oyster was a bad one. Not just an ordinary bad oyster, but of a superlative badness, the most horrible oyster that any small boy ever tried to swallow—and failed. The memory of that oyster kept me for many years from making a second attempt. When I was first bidden to a Colchester oyster feast and sat amidst Cabinet Ministers and mayors and aldermen in their robes of office, and generals and admirals all pitching into the bivalves like winking, I, to the great surprise of the waiters, ate twice as many oysters as any alderman present. Had I been given an opportunity of making a speech after lunch I should have told the assembled company that my unparalleled feat in the absorption of Colchester natives that day was my revenge for the horrors of the first Colchester oyster I tried to eat one sunlit spring afternoon on the Dedham playing field. I have not yet been invited by a Mayor of Whitstable to accompany him to sea to eat oysters afloat on the first day of the dredging season, but I have eaten many oysters plain and oysters scalloped at the "Bear and Key," and I never have had a grudge against any individual Whitstable oyster, so there is no injury to redress.
All this, I know, should be reserved for my autobiography; but as I am never likely to autobiograph myself it has to be set down here.
And now to talk of some of the oyster-houses of London. If on the "Roof of the World," the great tableland of Thibet, one British explorer met another British explorer, and the first man suddenly said "Scott's!" the second man inevitably would answer "Oysters," for Scott's window at the top of the Haymarket, with its little barrels of oysters and its crimson lobsters reposing on beds of salad stuff, and its big crabs lying on their backs and folding their vandyke-brown claws, as if in pious meditation, over their buff stomachs, is one of the landmarks of London. The old Scott's, before the fire that gutted it, has faded from the memory of most Londoners, and the new building, with its pillars, which are apparently of mother-o'-pearl pressed into black marble, with bands of ornamental brass about them, and its red blinds and red-shaded lamps in the upper storeys, is accepted as being the hub of the West End of London, just as the old one was. Inside the doors are the two marble-topped counters with piles of plates upon them, and on their fronts long napkins hanging from rails. Behind the counters men in white jackets are busy opening oysters and pouring out tumblers of stout and glasses of Chablis all day long. There are on the counters stacks of thin slices of brown bread and butter and other stacks of sandwiches of various kinds of fish and plates of prawns of coral-pink. I know of no better place than this wide oyster hall of Scott's for a theatre-goer to eat a very light meal before going early to a theatre when he intends to sup luxuriously after the show. Scott's, though its shell-fish are its trump cards, desires to be all things to all men, and to all women. It possesses a "dive" in its basement with tiled walls, on which Japanese fish swim in and out through Japanesy weeds, and behind the oyster hall is the grill-room, shut off from draughts by a great glass screen, in which a white-clothed cook stands with a table of viands at his elbow, turning the chops and steaks, sausages and rashers on the big grill. Upstairs there is an à la carte restaurant, where all kinds of luxuries are obtainable, and Scott's is a very popular place at which to sup after the theatre.
If you would like to see how popular oysters are with Londoners at lunch-time, come with me to the Macclesfield in the street of that name leading out of Shaftesbury Avenue. When "Papa" De Hem first took over the Macclesfield it was just a public-house in the Soho district, but "Papa," who is a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, and who was through the Siege of Paris, brought the thorough methods of an old soldier to bear upon the house. He turned all the old clientele out of its doors, and, though he kept a bar in the premises, it was by selling very large quantities of Whitstable oysters at a price that left him a very small profit that he saw his way to a fortune. Journalists and actors and artists and other dwellers in the realms of artistic Bohemia soon learnt of the new resort. Dagonet chatted of it in Mustard and Cress, Pitcher told tales concerning it in Gals' Gossip, and took the chair at the smoking concerts for charities held in the grotto upstairs, and as the prices have been kept rigorously low, and as the oysters have always been excellent, the Macclesfield is now one of the most popular oyster-houses in London. Come in through the glass door, and you find on one side the long bar, and on the other side little tables, at which every seat is occupied by lunchers who are eating Whitstables on the deep shell, or oyster stew, or oysters fried, or oysters grilled, or broiled lobsters, or the mayonnaise of lobster which is one of the specialities of the house. There are luncheon dishes of meat and fowl also obtainable, but when I go to the Macclesfield I go there to eat shell-fish, and am not to be turned from my purpose by any roast chicken or grilled chop. We are not in the least likely to find a vacant seat at any of these first tables, so we will move on into the wider space where is the oyster bar, with men in white behind it, busy with their oyster knives, and behind them a background of barrels of Meux's stout. Here is the entrance to the grotto—an entrance beautified by trellis-work and Japanese lanterns. The walls of the grotto are of oyster-shells, with here and there an irregular piece of mirror showing through, and all Papa De Hem's best customers have written their names on the oyster-shells. The tables in the grotto are set close together, and there are two of them in a snug corner, towards which every customer first makes his way, only to find nine times out of ten that there is no place for him. The waitresses bustle about, and the proprietor has a word to say to all old friends. Upstairs on the first floor is another grotto, larger than the downstairs one, and quieter, and here ladies are often brought to lunch.
Stout is the classic accompaniment to oysters, and it is possible to eat the bivalves actually in the shadow of Meux's great Horseshoe Brewery, for the Horseshoe Tavern next door has an oyster dive down in the basement, just below its grill-room. On the way down to the dive you pass the great spirit casks of the Horseshoe safely placed behind a grille, the biggest cask of all being that of the ten-year-old "Annie Laurie" whisky, which holds 1000 gallons. The oyster bar resembles a horseshoe in shape, and behind it is a wall of small kegs of Meux's stout. The Horseshoe is a good old-fashioned British house, with one of the largest open fires in London, and I remember that once when there was an especially splendid haunch of venison to be cooked for a party of gourmets Mr Baker was approached, and the venison feast was held at the Horseshoe.
Rule's Oyster-house, in Maiden Lane, in the window of which are two huge shells from Singapore and many big champagne bottles, is a house of many associations with the men of the pen of Victorian days. Albert Smith was the demigod of the establishment. Mark Lemon, Douglas Jerrold, Henry Irving, Besant and Rice, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Yates and Sala were some of the men who used to eat oysters in Maiden Lane and who have accorded appreciation of them. There are busts and portraits on the walls of the rooms of many theatrical celebrities, and in one room is a fine collection of Dighton caricatures.
White's and Gow's, in the Strand, both old-established fish and oyster houses, each deserve a word, and the Chandos, over against the National Portrait Gallery, gives its oyster-eating patrons six oysters, a glass of stout, and bread and butter for a shilling.
Sweeting's, in Fleet Street, is especially dear to me, because of its sawdusted floor. The front of the house has been set back in the widening of the street, but the house remains very much as it was. By the marble-topped counters are wooden stools, on which the lunchers perch like sparrows, and besides the oysters there are fish snacks and big lobsters, and on one of the counters is a selection of sandwiches of all kinds. Upstairs there are two floors of dining-rooms for people who want something more solid than oysters or sandwiches.
No chapter on oyster-houses would be complete without reference to Driver's in Glasshouse Street, and Wilton's in King Street, both houses which supply the clubs and great restaurants with oysters, and which, as well, open oysters for hungry customers at their counters. At Driver's a little screen of stained glass only partially conceals the oysters which are spread out on the broad space behind the glass. On the door is the simple legend, "Driver, Oysterman," and inside are three black-coated men opening oysters behind the counter. In a little glass box sits a lady cashier. This in old days used to be where Mrs Driver sat, and could always spare time for a smile and a word to an old customer. On the wall behind the counter is a board with the orders for oysters contained by clips, and two shelves, on which are rows of big shells, showing wide surfaces of mother-o'-pearl. A little staircase leads to an upper room, where sybarites can sit and eat oysters and caviare and bread and cheese, and there is a little table downstairs tucked away behind the staircase; but I am one of the stalwarts who have always stood at the counter at Driver's to eat my oysters and to wipe my fingers afterwards on the pendant napkins.
Behind Wilton's plate-glass windows there are warrants suitably framed, and the proprietor is generally to be seen either behind his counting-desk or the little oyster bar in the spacious shop. Wilton's at one time used to purvey Irish oysters, as well as other British varieties, but the supply was so uncertain that they have been taken off the list.
If I have omitted to give the prices of the oysters at the various oyster-houses, it is because they vary so much. One can buy native oysters in the shops at Whitstable for 1s. a dozen, or 1s. 9d. for twenty-five. By the time they arrive in London their cheapest price is 1s. 6d. a dozen, and the specially selected ones, which are sometimes called "Royal Natives," cost as much at some oyster-houses as 3s. 6d. a dozen. Seconds, Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Portuguese are each a step lower down in price. American oysters are to be obtained in Paris at Prunier's, but I know of no house in London at the present time which imports them. Ten years ago they were obtainable at two of the houses.
[IX]
WHITEBAIT AT GREENWICH
Gone are the great days of the whitebait dinners at Blackwall and Greenwich. No longer does The Morning Post ever publish such a paragraph as this, "Yesterday the Cabinet Ministers went down the river in the ordnance barges to Lovegrove's West India Dock Tavern, Blackwall, to partake of their annual fish dinner. Covers were laid for thirty-five gentlemen," which appeared on 10th September 1835. No longer is there a great rivalry between the two Greenwich taverns, the Trafalgar and the Ship. The Ship still remains and the whitebait have not deserted the Thames, but though at intervals I read paragraphs that fish dinners are still to be obtained at the Ship, I never meet anyone who has journeyed to Greenwich to see whether this is so, and the last time that I went there to dine my reception was so chilly that I have not experimented again. But the account of that dinner may interest as showing what a Greenwich fish dinner was in the days of good King Edward.
It was pleasant to see Miss Dainty's (of all the principal London theatres) handwriting again. She had been very ill—at the point of death, indeed—owing to a sprained ankle, which prevented her going to Ascot, for which race meeting she had ordered three dresses, each of which was a dream. When was I going to take her out to dinner? The parrot was very well, but was pecking the feathers out of his tail. She had some new pets—two goldfish, whose glass bowl had been broken and who now lived in a big yellow vase. The cat had eaten one of the lovebirds, and was ill for two days afterwards. The pug had been exchanged for a fox-terrier—Jack, the dearest dog in the world. Jack had gone up the river on the electric launch and had fought two dogs, and had been bitten over the eye, and had covered all his mistress's white piqué skirt with blood; but for all that he was a duck and his mother's own darling.
This, much summarised, was the pretty little lady's letter, and I wrote back at once to say that the pleasure of entertaining a princess of the blood-royal was as nothing to the honour of her company, and if the foot was well enough, would she honour me with her presence at dinner anywhere she liked? And, as the weather had turned tropical, I suggested either Greenwich or the restaurant at Earl's Court.
For Greenwich the fair lady gave her decision, and then I made a further suggestion: that, if she did not mind unaristocratic company, the pleasantest way was to go by boat.
This suggestion was accepted, and Miss Dainty in the late afternoon called for me at a dingy Fleet Street office. I was delighted to see the little lady, looking very fresh and nice as she sat back in her cab, and I trust that my face showed nothing except pleasure when I perceived a small fox-terrier with a large muzzle and a long leash sitting by her side. Miss Dainty explained that as she had allowed her maid to go out for the afternoon she had to bring Jack, and of course I said that I was delighted.
We embarked at the Temple pier on a boat, which was as most river boats are. There were gentlemen who had neglected to shave, smoking strong pipes; there were affable ladies of a conversational tendency and there were a violin and harp; but there were as a compensation all the beautiful sights of the river to be seen, the cathedral-like Tower Bridge, the forest of shipping, the red-sailed boats fighting their way up against the tide, the line of barges in picturesque zigzag following the puffing tugs; and all these things Miss Dainty saw and appreciated. There was much to tell, too, that Miss Dainty had not written in her letter, and Jack was a never-failing source of interest. Jack wound his leash round the legs of the pipe-smoking gentlemen, was not quite sure that the babies of the conversational ladies were not things that he ought to eat, and at intervals wanted to go overboard and fight imaginary dogs in the Thames.
Arrived at Greenwich, at the Ship (the tavern with a rather dingy front, with two tiers of bow windows, with its little garden gay with white and green lamps, and with its fountain and rockery which had bits of paper and straws floating in the basin), I asked for the proprietor. Mr Bale, thick-set, and with a little moustache, came out of his room, and whether it was that Fleet Street and the Thames had given me a tramplike appearance, or whether it was that he did not at once take a fancy to Jack, I could not say, but he did not seem overjoyed to see us. Yet presently he thawed, told me that he had kept a table by the window for us, and that our dinner would be ready at six-thirty as I had telegraphed.
In the meantime I suggested that we should see the rest of the house. "Would it not be better to leave the dog downstairs?" suggested Mr Bale, and Jack was tied up somewhere below, while we went round the upper two storeys of dining-rooms—for the Ship is a house of nothing but dining-rooms. It is a tavern, not a hotel, and there are no bedrooms for guests. We went into the pleasant bow-windowed rooms on the first floor, in one of which a table was laid ready, with a very beautiful decoration of pink and white flowers, and in the other of which stand the busts of Fox and Pitt. We looked at the two curious wooden images in the passage, at the chairs with the picture of a ship let into their backs, and at the flags of all nations which hang in the long banqueting-room; and all the time Jack, tied up below, lifted up his voice and wept.
I asked if Jack might be allowed to come into the dining-room and sit beside his mistress while we had dinner, giving the dog a character for peacefulness and quiet for which I might have been prosecuted for perjury; but it was against the rules of the house, and Mr Bale suggested that if Jack was tied up to a pole of the awning just outside the window he would be able to gaze through the glass at his mistress and be happy.
A fine old Britannic waiter, who looked like a very much reduced copy of Sir William Vernon-Harcourt, put down two round silver dishes, lifted up the covers, and there were two souchés, one of salmon and one of flounder. I helped Miss Dainty to some of the salmon and filled her glass with the Pommery, which, after much thought, I had selected from the wine list. But she touched neither; her eyes were on Jack outside, for that accomplished dog, after doing a maypole dance round the pole, had now arrived at the end of his leash—and incipient strangulation. Miss Dainty went outside to rescue her pet from instant death, and I, having eaten my souché, followed. Jack wanted water, and a sympathetic hall porter who appeared on the scene volunteered to get him a soup-plateful, and tie him somewhere where he could not strangle himself.
The souchés had been removed, and some lobster rissoles and fried slips had taken their place. Miss Dainty took a rissole and ate it while she watched the hall porter put Jack's plate of water down, and I made short work of a slip and was going to try the rissoles when Jack, in a plaintive tone of voice, informed the world that something was the matter. His mistress understood him at once. The poor dear would not drink his water unless she stood by; and this having been proved by actual fact, Miss Dainty, with myself in attendance, came back to find that whiting puddings and stewed eels had taken the place of former dishes.
Miss Dainty took a small helping of the eels, looked at it, and then turned her eyes again to Jack, who was going through a series of gymnastics. I ate my whiting pudding, which I love, in fevered haste, and had got half-way through my helping of eels when Miss Dainty discovered what was the matter with Jack. The boys on the steps below were annoying him, and the only way to keep him quiet would be to give him some bones. The sympathetic hall porter again came to the rescue, and Jack, under his mistress's eye, made fine trencher play with two bones.
There was a look of reproach in the veteran waiter's eye when we came back and found that the crab omelette and salmon cutlets à l'indienne were cooling. I tried to draw Miss Dainty's attention away from Jack. I told her how Mr Punch had called her Faustine, and had written a page about her; but when she found there was nothing to quote in her book of press notices she lost all interest in the hump-backed gentleman.
With the advent of the plain whitebait a new danger to Jack arose. A turtle was brought by three men on to the lawn and turned loose, and Miss Dainty had to go out and assure herself that Jack was not frightened, and that the turtle was not meditating an attack upon him.
The turtle was found to be a harmless and interesting insect, and having been shown, with practical illustrations, how the beast was captured by savages, Miss Dainty took great pity on it, collected water in the soup-plate from the fountain, poured it over its head, and tried to induce it to drink, which the turtle steadfastly refused to do.
The veteran waiter was stern when we returned and found the devilled whitebait on the table. I told him to bring the coffee and liqueurs and bill out into the garden, because Miss Dainty, having been separated from her dog so long, wanted to nurse and pet him.
This was the bill: Two dinners, 14s.; one Pommery, 18s.; two liqueurs, 1s. 6d.; coffee, 1s.; attendance, 1s.; total, £1, 15s. 6d.
We sat and watched St Paul's stand clear against the sunset, and Miss Dainty, her dog happy in her lap, suddenly said: "If you give this place a good notice, I'll never speak to you again."
"Why?" I replied. "The whitebait was delicious, the whiting pudding capital, the omelette good. I liked the fried slips and the rissoles."
"Yes, perhaps," said Miss Dainty, with a pout. "But they wouldn't let me have my dog in the dining-room!"
[X]
THE CECIL
I wonder whether Jabez Balfour, the genius who jumped at Park Lane and landed on Broadmoor, ever comes to London from his country retreat, where, under another name, he earns his daily bread, and looks at the great palaces which were one of his money-spinning schemes and notes the changes that are made in them. He certainly would scarcely recognise to-day in the modern Hotel Cecil the great red-brick and stone block of chambers and flats which first grew up, some seventeen or eighteen years ago, next to the Adelphi Terrace overlooking the Embankment Gardens. A company with some very distinguished gentlemen on the list of the directors was formed to buy the great building, and they have worked with indomitable perseverance to make a house that was not intended to be an hotel into one of the most comfortable hotels in London, and to popularise a restaurant which at first refused to respond to their efforts.
The Cecil Restaurant opened with a great flourish of trumpets, with M. Bertini, a clever, quick-eyed, bearded Italian as manager, and M. Coste, who was one of the greatest of the great chefs of the close of the Victorian era, in command of the kitchens. But the company had been in too great a hurry to begin to earn money, and the arrangements were not yet working quite smoothly when London that dines and thinks about its dinners was first asked to sit in judgment on the new dining-place.
The first roughnesses soon wore off; M. Bertini was an admirable maître d'hôtel—I have lost sight of him of late years, but I think he went for a time to South Africa, and he made a short appearance as proprietor of a small restaurant in the Haymarket—and M. Coste, "the old man," as the rest of the staff affectionately called him behind his back, sent out through the doors that separate the kitchen from the restaurant little dinners that delighted the palates of connoisseurs. This propinquity of kitchen to restaurant is a great advantage. As you sit at your table in the Cecil Restaurant you can, if you listen for it, hear the voices of the men who call out the orders to the cooks—an unceasing chant, a hymn to Gastronomy, and as a result no dish ever comes cold to table at the Cecil Restaurant.
What, however, was radically wrong at first with the Cecil Restaurant was its decoration. It is a very large, very high pillared hall, with a glazed balcony overlooking the Victoria Gardens, and big windows on the west giving a glorious view of Westminster; but its decorations were at first too sombre in colour. The panelling was of walnut wood, a large square of deep crimson velvet was embroidered with the Cecil arms, the great mantelpieces of purple-grey Sicilian marble conformed to the quiet scheme of colour, and the pillars and great window casings all harmonised in the minor key. The mantelpieces are all that remain to-day of the original scheme of colouring, and they are scarcely noticeable amidst the shimmer of pink and white and gold. A minor drawback was that the restaurant had no ante-room, and that a dinner-giver had to await his guests in the bustling hall of the hotel. People who dined at the Cecil Restaurant in those days praised the cooking, and had nothing except good words for the attendance and wine, but they said it was not "cheery." Nine out of ten ladies or men did not trouble to analyse their feelings, but it was the coldness of their surroundings that affected them.
To tear down all the decorations of a newly built hall is an heroic remedy which no board of directors would willingly face, and before this was done other less expensive remedies were tried. A separate entrance for the restaurant was made in the courtyard, and a lounge built and quite charmingly decorated. M. Paillard, the great Parisian restaurateur, crossed the Channel and became for a time manager of the restaurant, making with M. Coste in the kitchen a remarkable combination of talent. A Roumanian band, fierce-looking gentlemen in embroidered garments, who had been sensationally successful at one of the great exhibitions in Paris, were imported, were perched up on a rostrum and made the roof reverberate with their czardas. The services of "Smiler," a curry-cook of great renown, were exclusively retained for the Cecil. (Sherry's in New York offered "Smiler" large sums of money to transfer his services, and he crossed the Atlantic with a little band of underlings of his own nationality. "Smiler" travelled first class, and the reporters on the other side not unnaturally took him to be an Indian Prince on his travels. "Smiler" did not undeceive them, and enjoyed for some days all the privileges given to royalty in a republic. Then he reported at Sherry's.) Mr Hector Tenant, the managing director of the Empire, joined the Cecil board, and a series of variety performances after dinner on Sundays filled the big restaurant to its holding capacity on those evenings. Harry Lauder, concerning whose talent and fine voice everybody was talking at that time, sang, I remember, on one of those occasions. But there must have been some excellent reasons for not continuing these variety performances, for after a time they ceased.
At last the board took its courage in both hands and redecorated the restaurant from floor to ceiling. It is now a hall of white and gold and pink. The panels are of Rose du Barri silk, the pillars are gleaming white, while the frieze is of the lightest blue. A dark rose carpet gives relief to this shimmering, shining restaurant, and in its centre is a handsome table of many tiers for fruit and sweet things, a table of gilt sphinx heads and many electric lamps. The waiters wear knee-breeches; the band plays in an ante-room. The redecorated restaurant at once jumped into the affections of the world that dines, and further to add to the good temper of this place of butterfly colouring, the directors engaged as the maître d'hôtel in charge of the restaurant, M. Califano, who is known to the patrons of the Cecil as "Sunny Jim." One of the advantages with which M. Califano has been endowed by Nature is a smiling face, and some wit at the time that "Sunny Jim" was a favourite figure on all the hoardings, gave M. Califano his nickname.
To complete their work of betterment, the board added to the restaurant and hotel the new palm court, a sumptuous lounge, upholstered in powdered blue and gold, which has eaten up more than a half of the great forecourt of the Cecil. This forecourt, which was almost of the size and shape of a Roman hippodrome, was a great comfort in past days to the cabdrivers of London, for there was unlimited room in it for them to wait to take up guests at the hotel; but it was a great waste of space. The new palm court is a very splendid place, and besides giving the restaurant a noble reception-room, it has shut away from the hotel all the noise of the street and all the bustle of the reception hall. It has, however, done away with the most American spot in London, the space of paving outside the front entrance of the Cecil which used to be known as "The Beach." Here used to be cane chairs and rocking-chairs and piles of luggage, and a newspaper stall, and in the summer-time pretty girls sunning themselves, and waiters hurrying to and fro with cold drinks and long straws in them; and the American guests of the hotel who loved the brightness and the bustle of the spot christened it "The Beach," and preferred it to any of the gilded parlours inside the hotel. The new palm court, however, in a stately manner, has taken the place of "The Beach" as a meeting-ground for the hotel guests. Mr Kaiser, the general manager of the Hotel Cecil, tells me that the building of this fine lounge has been of benefit to the restaurant as giving a finishing touch to its comforts, and I have no doubt that this is so, for dining in the restaurant, I found it comfortably filled by people staying in the hotel, and guests from outside, and "Sunny Jim" told me of the vast numbers whom on such special occasions as Christmas and New Year's Eve he manages to accommodate in the restaurant and balcony.
I ate the Cecilian dinner, a seven-and-sixpenny table d'hôte meal, which I found quite excellent. This is the menu:
Huîtres Natives on Hors d'Œuvre.
Consommé Princesse.
Crème Parisienne.
Filets de Sole Carême.
Quartier d'Agneau Arléquine.
Pommes Macaire.
Caille en Cocotte au Jus d'Ananas.
Salade.
Asperges, Sauce Hollandaise.
Glacé à l'Andalouse.
Friandises.
The delicate sauce with the sole, the neatness of the garnish of the vegetables with the quarter of lamb, the plumpness of the quail and their contrast of taste with the pine-apple, would have assured me that the kitchen is in first-class hands, even had I not known that M. Jean Alletru, a chef who stands very high in the estimation of his brother chefs, had succeeded M. Coste, when that great man retired.
I might have spent a shilling less and have eaten an alternative dinner without the oysters in it, or I might have taken advantage of an arrangement by which anyone dining at the Cecil can pay a fixed price for his or her dinner, and choose practically anything they like from the carte du jour, which is a very ample one, and which generally contains some of the spécialités created by M. Alletru. This is the list of these spécialités and a couple of very pretty little dinners can be arranged from amongst them, the only thing needed in addition being a soup. Tomate en surprise au caviar, turbotin Prince de Galles, filet de sole Clarence, timbale de truite froide Norvégienne, ris de veau St Cloud, caille à la Salvini, poitrine de volaille Providence, selle d'agneau Cecil, poularde à la Jacques, fraises Tetrazzini, bouteille de champagne en surprise.
I have given high praise to M. Alletru, but the highest praise that a maître-chef can receive is that which comes from his brothers in art, and no higher compliment could be paid to the management of the Hotel Cecil and their chef de cuisine than that the Ligue des Gourmands, the association of all the principal French chefs in England, when they held their first Dîner d'Epicure under the presidency of M. Escoffier, placed themselves in the hands of the Cecil and of M. Alletru, who, with his brigade of cooks, sent to table the dinner that M. Escoffier had designed. If I print the menu of this banquet, a banquet at which there were three hundred guests present, in preference to that of any of the many banquets at which I have been a guest in the great banqueting halls of the Cecil, it is because in my opinion it is the perfection of a dinner of ceremony. The Dodine and the Fraises Sarah-Bernhardt were the two sensational dishes of the feast, but it is not a dinner of many courses of rich food, and is interesting without being heavy:
Hors d'œuvre.
Petite Marmite Béarnaise.
Truite Saumonée aux Crevettes Roses.
Dodine de Canard au Chambertin.
Nouilles au Beurre Noisette.
Agneau de Pauillac à la Bordelaise.
Petits pois frais de Clamart.
Poularde de France.
Cœur de Romaine aux Pommes d'Amour.
Asperges d'Argenteuil Crème Mousseline.
Fraises Sarah-Bernhardt.
Dessert.
Café—Liqueurs.
Bénédictine.
Whether the Cecil was the first of the great banqueting houses to effect a reform in the service of public banquets I am not sure, but it was at the Cecil that I first found that such a reform had taken place. In old days it was the custom for the waiters to trail a dish along the whole length of a banqueting-table, and the salmon, which went up the room a noble-looking fish, came down five minutes later to starvation corner, a head, a tail and a skeleton. It was at the Cecil that I first noticed the breaking up of the tables into manageable sections of guests, with a waiter and his aids to each section, and the dinner served straight from the kitchen to that section. The restaurant and the banqueting halls and the private dining-rooms by no means exhaust the list of the accommodations of those who dine that the Cecil affords. There is below the Rose du Barri room another one, the Indian room, decorated in Oriental fashion with blue and yellow tiles, and in this a grill dinner and a table d'hôte dinner are both served, and when this room overflows another equally spacious room is opened and becomes the grill-room.
(As I correct the proofs of this chapter news comes to me that "Sunny Jim" will in 1914 become a joint partner in the management of the St James's Palace Hotel in Bury Street and will give special attention to its restaurant.)
[XI]
CLARIDGE'S
I reach back in memory farther in touch with Claridge's than with any other hostelry in London, One of the stories of her early life that my mother often told me when I was a small boy was how my grandfather, as crotchety an elderly widower as ever ruled an Indian district, when he finally retired from the service of John Company, arrived in London with his bullock trunks and sandalwood boxes lined with tin, his bedding rolled up in bundles, his guns, his fly-whisks, and palm-fans, and all the strange paraphernalia that an Anglo-Indian official gathered about him in those days. With him came his faithful bearer, and an ayah, and his little pale daughter, and they all descended at Claridge's Hotel—though perhaps in those days it might have been Mivart's. The first great grief of the little girl's life was that the "Nabob," as my grandfather was called in the family, delivered a "hookum" to the manager of the hotel that an English nurse must be provided directly for his small daughter, as the ayah ought to return at once to her own country, and my mother was obliged to say good-bye to her devoted Indian attendant. My first personal introduction to Claridge's was when, as a schoolboy, I was invited by another schoolboy, who wished to show off, to go with him to visit a German Graf, a nobleman with a very long string of minor titles, whose greatest glory was that he owned a castle on the Rhine. The Graf was very polite to the two little English boys, and talked to us in very bad English; and when we took our departure he saw us to the door as though we had been persons of the greatest importance. Mr Claridge, wearing a skull-cap of velvet, happened to be in the hall as we passed through, and I remember well the beautiful bow that he gave to the Count. Mr Claridge's bows were celebrated; they were of a different depth, according to the rank of the person to whom he bowed, and there was even a delicate difference in the salute that he gave to a Serene Highness to that with which he welcomed a Royal Highness. Claridge's in those days consisted of half-a-dozen houses connected with each other, and the best rooms in these houses formed the suites where the various royalties who patronised the hotel lodged, Mr Claridge and his staff of servants being always on the watch that the privacy of his guests should not be invaded. On one occasion, when a famous caricaturist took a room at the hotel, Mr Claridge waited on him and informed him that he must transfer his custom elsewhere, for, though he, Mr Claridge, was a great admirer of the artist's talent, and decorated the walls of some of the rooms with his work, he could never allow a royal personage to be caricatured within the walls of his hotel. Not that Mr Claridge himself always spoke too respectfully of the great ones of the earth. Archbishop Temple used to tell a story that when in 1846 the Pope seriously thought of taking refuge in England, Mr Claridge remarked that he was so full up with kings and royal dukes that he could only offer his Holiness a small back room, but that, being a bachelor, he, the Pope, would probably not mind.
The old Claridge's was pulled down and the new Claridge's built in the nineties, and I remember the opening day, when a great crowd of fashionable people came to look at its salons and ballroom and restaurant, and the royal suite. The india-rubber roadway in the entrance, then a novelty, was much admired, and the six footmen in the hall, in their state livery, looked mighty splendid. Mr D'Oyly Carte, who more than anyone else had been the moving spirit in the creation of the new hotel, was wheeled about in a chair through the crush of pretty ladies and distinguished gentlemen, for he was then very ill.
The new Claridge's soon found its own particular atmosphere, an atmosphere of perfect serenity. The little army of footmen, who were too gorgeous for ordinary occasions, were reduced in numbers, and now only one superb being in plush and silken calves moves about the hall and arranges the papers in the reading-room. The inner hall, with its pillars and walls of white, and its reflected light, is a most comfortable lounge in which to sit after dinner and listen to the orchestra, and out of this open two rooms, one of Wedgwood blue with Wedgwood designs on it, and the other of old gold. The restaurant has been considerably altered since its first opening, for it has been divided into two rooms, the colouring of it has been brightened, and at night an abundance of light is now thrown on to the painted ceilings from cunningly concealed lamps. The bases of the great arches which support the roof are cased in dark oak, with an inset of olive wood; the carpet is of rose and grey and the chairs are of green leather with the arms of the hotel stamped upon it.
It is a restaurant in which dinner takes its right place as one of the tranquil pleasures of life. The music of the band is never too loud, the fine napery and the admirable glass are pleasant to the touch, the flowers in the silvered stands of the table lamps give an agreeable touch of colour, the cut glass of the pendent electroliers sparkles, and the first and the second maîtres d'hôtel, M. Invernizzi, who comes from the Palace Hotel, at St Moritz, to London for the season, and M. Castelani, who is a permanency at Claridge's, are tactfully attentive, while M. Gehlardi, the manager of the hotel, walks through the rooms during the course of dinner to bow here and there at a table, and to assure himself that all is well. It is the clientele of Claridge's that has made its atmosphere, for the well-dressed, good-looking, quiet people who dine at the tables, put a comfortable distance apart, are folk whose names bulk largely in the Society columns of the newspapers, and the list of the diners on any given night in Claridge's Restaurant would be for the most part a string of titles. Good manners are in the air, and I do not think that even the rawest plutocrat could be unmannerly amidst such surroundings.
On the night that I last dined at Claridge's, I had written beforehand asking that a table for three should be reserved for me, and I had intended to give my guests the larger of the two dinners of the restaurant, the twelve-and-six one, which runs through the usual courses, and which is by no means a set dinner, for any dish which does not exactly match the fancy of a dinner-giver is changed for another to suit his whim or his palate. But I found that a special little feast had been ordered for me by M. Gehlardi, and the menu of it was as follows:—
Melon Cantaloup.
Bortch à la Russe.
Filets de Sole Newnham-Davis.
Noisette d'Agneau aux Fines Herbes.
Petits pois frais. Pommes Noisettes.
Coq en Pâte.
Salade de Romaine à l'Estragon.
Fraises Parisienne.
Friandises.
The chef de cuisine at Claridge's is M. Maurice Bonhomme, who had passed through the kitchens of two great Parisian restaurants, the Café de Paris, and Ledoyen's, in the Champs Elysées, before he came to London. He is a chef of high repute, and these are the specialities of his kitchen:—filet de sole Tosca, suprême de sole Pré Catalan, Coulibiac de saumon, suprême de volaille d'Orléans, cailles Hacchi Pacha, Coq en Pâte Claridge's, pêches Caprice, fraises Delphine.
Of the dishes of my dinner, the excellent Bortch à la Russe was served as it is in Russia, with little pâtés to break into it. The list of these pâtés in the menu of a Russian dinner is often a long one. The filet de sole, which M. Bonhomme paid me the compliment of christening to my name, is a quite admirable sole poché au Madère, with all the fumet of the fish retained and served with sliced champignons and pointes d'asperges. I sent my very best compliments to M. Bonhomme on his masterpiece. The coq en pâte is an ornamental dish, for the fowl stuffed with all manner of rich things is encased in a paste shaped like a cock, crest and all. The outer covering is broken before the bird is carved. It is a dish of almost terrifying richness.
Quite a number of the great people of the land give their banquets at Claridge's, and out of the sheaf of the menus of these feasts I select one of the Surrey Magistrates' Club Dinner, which shows that our Solons across the Thames dine and wine with much discretion and taste:
Royal Natives.
Hors d'œuvre.
Consommé Monte-Carlo.
Bisque de Crabes.
Turbotin braisé au Champagne.
Whitebait diable noir.
Selle de Béhague à l'Estragon.
Haricots verts de Nice.
Pommes nouvelles au Beurre.
Timbale à la Galoise.
Caneton d'Aylesbury à l'Anglaise.
Salades d'Oranges.
Asperges vertes Sauce Hollandaise.
Pêches Melba.
Friandises.
Bonne Bouche.
Vins.
Oloroso Fine Old.
Piesporter, 1904.
George Goulet (mag.), 1900.
Moët et Chandon.
Dry Imper., 1904.
Dow's 1896.
Courvoisier Brandy.
Fine Champagne, 1865.
I wonder how a club dinner of magistrates of fifty years ago would contrast with such a dinner as the above.
[XII]
THE EUSTACE MILES RESTAURANT
Old "Rats," which is the disrespectful title by which most of his friends call Major-General Sir Ulysses Ratbourne, late of the Bundlekund Fusiliers, was holding forth to his crony, Colonel Bunthunder, late of the same distinguished regiment, in the hall of the Cutlass and Cross-bow Club as I passed through it, and the General paused for a second in his denunciation of Radicals and Socialists to say that he wanted to have a word with me, and then finished his peroration. Colonel Bunthunder muttered: "Very true, very true," and went on into the smoking-room shaking his head sorrowfully, and the General turned to me.
"Look here, my lad"—anyone under seventy is "my lad" to the General—said he, "I want you to give me a bit of advice."
I said the correct platitude, and awaited developments.
"My nephew Bill, the one in the Hussars, has just married, and he and his wife are coming up to town, and I want to know where to take 'em to dine."
I reeled off the list of the half-dozen most fashionable restaurants; but the General cut me short. "Ay, my lad, that's all very well; but the girl that poor old Bill's been and married is a vegetarian. What d'ye say to that, now?"
The General had put into the word "vegetarian" just the tone of astonished disgust he would have employed had he told me that the young lady was a militant suffragette; but I did not echo that at all. "Take them to the Eustace Miles Restaurant in Chandos Street," I advised; "and whatever your niece's fads may be, you can give her what she wants there."
Old "Rats" thanked me with the chastened thankfulness that men show when given the address of a specialist for some obscure disease of which they think they are a victim, wrote the address down on a card, and went after Colonel Bunthunder into the smoking-room to tell him all about it.
It occurred to me, however, directly the old General had left me, that I was sending him to a restaurant into which I had never myself been, and concerning which I knew nothing, except that I always look into its windows and at its bill of fare whenever I pass down Chandos Street; and, therefore, in order that I might be able to give the old man some detailed information from my own experience, I went next day to Chandos Street to lunch.
Before I set down what my experiences were, I wish to express my personal admiration for the single-mindedness of Mr Miles and his wife in doing the work they have set themselves to do. That Eustace Miles, half trained, went into a tennis court to defend his title of amateur world champion against a young American gentleman trained to the second, and that he made a fine fight for the championship with the odds desperately against him, shows that a diet of non-flesh food doesn't kill pluck or stamina. And before the authorities asked Mrs Miles not to send the E.M. soup barrow down to the Embankment on winter nights, as they wished to clear that thoroughfare of derelicts, she and her helpers had done much to feed the hungry and to reclaim some of those who were not irreclaimable, which shows that a kind heart thrives on Emprote and Protonnic and Compacto, and the other meatless foods with strange names. Lastly, that the Eustace Miles Restaurant celebrated last year the seventh anniversary of its opening, shows that London wanted such a restaurant, and that it has kept its clientele.
The big windows of the Eustace Miles Restaurant are "dressed" as if they were shop-windows. Sometimes they are full of tins and packets of the non-flesh foods arranged in piles and pyramids; sometimes they look like the windows of a book shop, piles of literature and charts of the human frame being in evidence; and sometimes boxing-gloves and foils and pictures of young men holding themselves upright and sticking out chests as full as those of pouter-pigeons draw attention to the fact that a physical school high up in the building is one of the Eustace Miles activities. Sometimes the windows look like those of a pastry-cook's shop, and sometimes they bristle with copies of Healthward Ho! the monthly magazine which Mr Miles edits. Always outside the door in a glazed case is the bill of fare for the day printed in red and green type, and I have often wondered what "Egg and Mushroom Fillets and Duxelles Sauce with Asparagus and New Potatoes (N.)," or "Pinekernel Quenelles and Onion Sauce with Spring Cabbage and Potatoes (N., F.U.)," or "Hazel-nut Sausages and Gravy with Cauliflower and Roast Potatoes (N., F.U.)," taste like, and what the capital letters after each dish mean. Now, however, there was no reason to linger and look at the card. I was about to plunge into the great unknown, to sample the dishes with strange names, and to learn the secret of N.N. and F.U.
A commissionaire, looking just like other commissionaires, though he, like all the other employees of the restaurant, eats the food of the restaurant, opened the door to me and gave me a card for my bill, and my first impression was that I was in a Food and Cookery Exhibition, for in front of me was a stall piled high with tins of Emprote and a cash desk with a little model of the E.M. barrow by it, a stall for pastry and biscuits, and a book-stall; but beyond this first line of defence I saw little tables with white cloths on them, and many people sitting at them, and I walked on looking for a vacant seat. I came to a table with only one occupant, and sat down; a little waitress in a neat brown dress put the red and green printed bill of fare into my hand, and I found myself suddenly faced by a puzzle to which the purple ink carte du jour of a small provincial French restaurant is as ABC is to a jig-saw puzzle. However, in larger print than anything else on the card was the announcement that a half-crown table d'hôte luncheon and dinner was served, so I said to the waitress in an offhand manner, as though I were an habitué: "I'll take the half-crown lunch, please." She never budged. "Compacta croûtes or roasted cashews?" she asked me, and I gasped out, "Compacta," and wondered what on earth I was going to eat.
Then, while the little waitress had gone to get me the first instalment of the unknown, I looked down the menu and made up my mind which of the two soups, the two entrées, the two sweets and two savouries I would order when the waitress came back again, and then turned my attention to the room and the people at the tables. There is a suggestion of a gymnasium about the restaurant, for it is a high room with a broad gallery running round it about half-way up its height, and it is lighted by a great space of skylight. All the boarding, and there is a good deal of it, is painted dark green, and on the walls is a dark green and white paper. A tea-stall, green and white, and a long buffet of green wood, with pots of flowers on it, are at one end of the restaurant; the floor is covered with oilcloth, with strips of crimson cocoa-nut matting laid over it, and there are flowers in vases on the little white-clothed tables which occupy all the floor space below and in the gallery. There is a sense of airiness and spotless cleanliness about the place. Big notices draw attention to the Normal Physical School and other of the Eustace Miles activities, and a request to gentlemen not to smoke till after six p.m. was just above my head.
The people at the tables were just like the people one sees at any other restaurant where the prices are not high—ladies who might be stenographers, or country cousins up for a day's shopping, young men who, I daresay, are bank clerks—a good, level, healthy-looking gathering. A man with clear blue eyes and a close-clipped white beard sat down in the seat opposite to mine, and ordered something without looking at the menu; a youngster in golfing kit took the other unoccupied place at the table, and a wrinkle came across his forehead as he plunged mentally into the intricacies of the à la carte sheet, until the waitress helped him by pointing with her pencil to some dish printed in red ink, and he joyfully assented to her suggestion. A young man brought in a bull-dog on a leash, and the dog was petted on his progress up the floor by all the little waitresses.
The waitress who had me in her charge returned with the Compacto croûtes, two little angles of hot toast with something spread on them, and she took my order for the next course, of lettuce and sorrel potage, and for some ginger ale, which I ordered as having a vague feeling that it would be in keeping with the meal. The Compacto had a far-off taste of potted meat, and I had noticed that it was labelled N., F.U., which a note at the top of the menu told me meant nourishing and free from uric acid. The dishes marked N.N. are "Very Nourishing." The lettuce and sorrel soup, when it came, was distinctly to be commended, a trifle thin, perhaps, but having the taste of the vegetables in it, and being excellently hot. This also, I was pleased to see, was noted as N. and F.U.; and had I been subject to gout, which—"touch wood," I am not, I should have been eating an admirable non-gouty meal. Then came what on the menu was described as a main dish. It was asparagus and lentil timbale, cucumber sauce, stuffed vegetable marrow and new potatoes sautés. I rather hope that this will not be the main dish that old "Rats" will stumble up against when he takes his niece to dine at the Eustace Miles Restaurant, for the timbale did not seem to me to have any strong taste of asparagus in it—perhaps the lentils had killed it. The stuffed vegetable marrow was rather a watery delicacy, but I ate up the sautés potatoes, feeling quite glad that I knew what their taste was going to be. The next dish, however—honey shortbread and stewed apricots—I can unreservedly praise; the shortbread was excellently light and the stewed apricots were good things of their kind. I had told the waitress that as a savoury I would have matelote eggs on toast, but I cancelled that order, for I look on savouries as superfluities, and ate some cheese as a finish to my repast.
The little waitress totalled up my bill on the card that the commissionaire at the door had given me, and I was making my way to the pay-desk when I saw in a corner by the book-stall a lady engaged in opening letters; and, thinking that this must be Mrs Eustace Miles, I asked her if such was the case, and when she said "Yes," introduced myself. She welcomed me to the restaurant, explained that her husband was away playing a championship game at tennis, and said how sorry she was that she had not met me before I lunched, as she would have liked to suggest to me the dishes that best suit anyone making their first essay on non-flesh foods. I told her, however, that I had wished to make my first attack just as any other meat-eating member of the public would do, and I was very glad to be able to compliment her on the cook's soup and the shortbread. I had bought at the book-stall the May number of Healthward Ho! and had carried off from the dinner-table a sheaf of leaflets giving information concerning the restaurant and the salons, and in addition to these Mrs Miles gave me a leaflet describing the exhibit that the then chef of the restaurant, Mr Blatch, N.C.A., sent to the Food and Cookery Exhibition in 1910, and which won a gold medal there, and an account of the déjeuner at which M. Escoffier and the editor of Food and Cookery and The Catering World were present, and which was described by the latter in glowing terms, "excellent," "delightful" and "delicious" being adjectives used for every course. This was the menu of the feast:
Milk Cheese and Celery Mayonnaise.
Salsify and Barley Cream Soup.
Cashew Nut Timbale and Cranberry Sauce.
Nut and Vegetable en Casserole.
Vegetables (Conservatively Cooked).
Jamaican Fruit Salad.
Devilled Compacto.
It was recorded that M. Escoffier very much enjoyed the devilled Compacto, and praised the work of the chef who had prepared the hors d'œuvre and the entrées. As, however, since the date of this déjeuner, which was in March 1910, M. Escoffier has given the world his famous Dodine, and his not less famous Poularde Poincaré, he was evidently not weaned from the errors of flesh-eating by his visit to the Eustace Miles Restaurant, nor shall I be lured away by any stuffed vegetable marrow from creamy salmon and plump quails.
But I shall say no word to dissuade old "Rats" from going to dine at the Eustace Miles Restaurant, for I am quite sure that what he will eat there will certainly do him no harm, and if he chooses F.U. dishes may probably do him a lot of good, but I should like to be present when the old man first looks down the green and red bill of fare of the day and finds himself faced by all the strange new dishes, for his remarks will be worthy of the occasion.
[XIII]
THE PRINCES' RESTAURANT
When the house for the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours—that classic stone building with busts of great painters in the ovals that ornament its façade, busts on which the sparrows perch and watch the traffic in Piccadilly—was put up in the early eighties, there was space below the galleries for some shops and for a large hall. It occurred to somebody, probably M. Benoist, whose great charcutier's shop was just over the way, that Princes' Hall was eminently suitable to be a dining-room, and Princes' Restaurant came into existence, M. Benoist being the moving spirit, his brother-in-law, M. Fourault, being the manager, and M. Azema, a chef of much fame, being at the head of the kitchen.
Princes' Restaurant, as I first remember it, was not the beautiful room it is now. The painted ceiling with its concealed lights, as fine an example of this kind of art as we have in London, was a later addition; the garden outside the windows of the restaurant had still to be made, and I think that the windows which look towards St James's Church were not in the great room when it was first built. The hotel, which has an entrance in Jermyn Street, and in which there are some noble rooms for banquets and balls, was another afterthought. The lessees of some of the shops on the Piccadilly front were bought out before the palm garden, in which impatient gentlemen wait for ladies who are late, and where satisfied diners smoke their after-dinner cigars and drink their coffee, could be made, and comparatively lately communication has been established between the restaurant and the galleries above, in order that when there is a ball in the picture-hung halls the dancers can troop down to sup below.
If Princes' Restaurant and Princes' grill-room and Princes' Hotel are like Rome in that they were not built in a day, they are very good to look upon in their finished state. The restaurant has a great height, and the early diners can smoke there without the least taint of tobacco greeting the later comers. Its ceiling is, as I have already written, a beautiful example of decorative art, and a bill of exceeding length, the sum total of which astonished me when I was told how many figures it comprised, was paid for this embellishment. Its walls are creamy in colour, the curtains are of soft pink, and the tall windows south and east are reflected in mirrors, looking like other windows on the northern side, where the space is not occupied by the Palm Lounge. A musicians' gallery runs along the western side, and the doors into the kitchen are below this, but the red-coated musicians have forsaken their aerie, which now forms a way to ballrooms and galleries, and have found a snug corner on the floor of the restaurant. There are some fine marble statues of nymphs on pedestals and palms and banked-up plants and flowers in the restaurant, and the general effect suggests that one has stepped out of London greyness into some Southern clime where all is light and bright and spacious. At night the electroliers are shaded so as to give a mixed golden and pink light, which is most comfortable to the eyes, and is, I am sure, very becoming to the complexions of the ladies, and the carpets and the upholstering of the chairs carry on the harmony of deep rose and pink.
The history of the present success of the Princes' Restaurant is the story of the triumph of the short dinner over the long one. As a lunching place Princes' was a great success from the day its doors first opened. The ladies of Mayfair and Belgravia and Tyburnia found that it was comfortably near their shopping centres, and the little ladies of the stage also liked to lunch there. The musical comedy ladies monopolised the first half-dozen tables to the right as one entered, leaving the rest of the tables to the other ladies, and Stage looked at Society's hats, and Society looked at Stage's furs, and no doubt each envied what the other wore. But for quite a while—it seemed a long while to the shareholders—Princes' did not find its destiny as a dining place. M. Benoist wished it to be a great à la carte restaurant such as he has made the restaurant of the Hermitage at Monte Carlo, but for some unexplainable reason diners did not flock to Princes' to eat expensive dinners, nor did a long table d'hôte dinner tempt them. At last it was determined that new methods should be tried and new men came on to the Board of Directors to try them, that very energetic and very successful organiser, Mr Harry Preston, of Brighton, being one of them. A short theatre dinner became the trump card of the restaurant in the evening, the Princes' ballrooms became the scene of most of the dances organised in theatreland, and when the company began to earn an annual dividend for its shareholders the advantages of brief dinners became very apparent to them.
This was the dinner of the day that I took a lady to eat at seven o'clock on an evening on which Sir George Alexander produced a new play at the St James's:—
Hors d'œuvre à la Russe.
Petite Marmite Henri IV.
Crème Lamballe.
Suprême de Saumon Doria.
Agneau de Pauillac à la Grecque.
Boutons de Crucifères aux Fines Herbes.
Chapons à la Broche.
Salade.
Biscuit Glacé au Chocolat Praliné.
Friandises.
This was the six-and-six theatre dinner of the day, not too long to be eaten during the hour that theatre-goers allow themselves for a meal, and quite long enough for those for whom dinner is the one event of an evening. M. Roux, the maître d'hôtel, who has been at the Princes' for eighteen years, also showed me the menu of a half-guinea dinner which the Princes' holds in reserve should the little dinner not be impressive enough for some of its clients. The dinner was excellently cooked, and the tiny pilau which came to the table with the lamb would have caught the appreciative attention of any gourmet, and assured me that M. Génie, the present head of the kitchen, who had previously won his spurs at the Carlton and the Brighton Metropole, and had at one period learned all there is to learn in Egypt, the land of pilau, is a worthy successor to M. Azema and M. Granvilliers. The lady who dined with me was much impressed by the two Pierrots sitting on the moon, a work of art which came to table with the biscuit, and was enthusiastic as to the playing of the orchestra. I thought myself that the musicians insisted a little too much that their music and not my conversation was what the pretty lady had come to Princes' to hear, but the question of music in a restaurant is a matter on which the gentler sex and the denser one are never in accord and the managers of most establishments find it a thorny question. If an orchestra of distinction is engaged nothing in the world will persuade its head that his music should be merely an accompaniment to conversation, and the opinion concerning music of a young man who has so much to say to a pretty girl that a dinner never lasts long enough to allow him to say it all, is very different to that of a bored husband, who has nothing in particular to remark to his wife after they have reached the soup course.
At seven, when we commenced our dinner, two other tables were already occupied. By half-past seven the room was comfortably full, and at a quarter to eight, when we left to go to the St James's, diners were still coming in to their tables. Most certainly what the dwellers in the leafy lanes of Mayfair and by the snipe-ground of Belgrave Square required was a restaurant in Piccadilly, where they can dine well and at not too great a length, nor at too great a price, on their way to the theatre, and Princes' has at last given them what they wanted.
[XIV]
THE CRITERION
The East Room at the Criterion is a trophy of one of woman's victories over man, for it was one of the first, if not the very first, restaurant-rooms designed and decorated to harmonise with feminine frocks and frills, and made beautiful that mankind should bring beautiful womankind there to eat things delicate. In the sixties, restaurants were few and far between, and were mostly places where men dined without their feminine belongings. But all this was changed in the seventies, and the East Room did its full share in persuading man that it added pleasure to a good dinner in a restaurant to be faced by a pretty woman. The East Room of to-day is twice the size of the one that Messrs Spiers and Pond first built, and its decoration of white and gold, and panels painted with Watteau subjects, its harmony of greys and pink in carpets and furniture and curtains, its ante-room with old French furniture, and the satisfactory arrangement by which the music of the orchestra, perched in a gilded cage above the big entrance hall, comes softened by distance to the diners in the East Room, are all happy second thoughts. But the East Room was, in 1873, when it was first opened, the dining place to which every lady asked her husband to take her, and it has held its own against ever-increasing competition through the years. Its windows look down on the rush and swirl of Piccadilly Circus, a wonderful scene either by day or night, and it adds to the pleasure of an unhurried meal to watch the hurry of thousands of one's fellow-creatures.
At one period, after the extension of the building, there were two East Rooms, a dividing wall being where the arches and curtains now are. The one of these nearest the grand staircase was a strictly à la carte restaurant, while in the other, approached through a corridor, a table d'hôte meal was served. The East Room of to-day smiles on both classes of diners. When a man sits down at his table there at dinner-time, M. Kugi, the maître d'hôtel, puts before him the carte du jour, an ample one, with any special delicacies in larger print than the others, and also lays on the table the menus of the half-sovereign and seven-and-six table d'hôte dinners, and it is his experience that the greater number of diners look at the carte du jour and then, mistrusting their own judgment, order one or the other of the table d'hôte meals.
This was the menu of the seven-and-six dinner one night when I dined at the East Room at a tiny dinner-party, before going to the theatre down in the cellars of the big building to see the play running there:
Hors d'œuvre.
Consommé Rossolnick.
Crème aux huîtres.
Truite de rivière Dona Louise.
Selle d'Agneau Mascotte.
Pommes nouvelles.
Poularde du Surrey à la broche.
Salade.
Parfait au moka.
Friandises.
Dessert.
It was a very well-selected, well-served dinner. Had we chosen the half-guinea dinner we should have had an addition to this menu of cailles à la Grecque and chou de mer, sauce vierge. The Rossolnick, with its flavour of cucumber, was excellent, the trout were fresh and firm, and the Surrey fowl as plump as any foreigner from Mans. M. Auguste Pannier, the chef of to-day, is worthy of the great men who have preceded him in the kitchen of the East Room. And not only have there been great cooks, but great managers as well at the Criterion, with the East Room as the particular object of their care. Oddenino, Mantell, Gerard, who all moved on to other posts, were predecessors of M. Emile Campenhaut, the manager of to-day, as was also M. Lefèvre, whose health broke down, but whom I remember as being an enthusiast on the subject of the art of cookery, a man who brought plenty of brain power to bear on the subject of delicate food. I think that the best of the many dinners I have eaten à deux in the East Room was one ordered in consultation with him, and I subjoin it as a good specimen of an East Room à la carte feast:
Caviar.
Consommé à la Diane.
Filets de sole aux délices.
Suprêmes de volaille grillés.
Carottes nouvelles à la crème.
Laitues braisées en cocotte.
Cailles à la Sainte-Alliance.
Salade de chicorée frisée.
Croûtes à la Caume.
Soufflé glacé à la mandarine.
The caille à la Sainte-Alliance, in imitation of Brillat Savarin's faisan à la Sainte-Alliance, consisted of a truffle in an ortolan, the ortolan being in the quail. The Croûte Caume is an admirable banana dish in which the tastes of the banana and pine-apple and apricot and kirsch all mingle.
The East Room is, of course, only one of the many restaurant-rooms in the great stone building. Immediately under the East Room are the Marble Restaurant and the grill-room. The Marble Restaurant, in old days, when men of position did not think it undignified to stand at a bar and drink brandy and soda, was the Long Bar, and a wonderful sight this bar, running the whole length of the building, used to be at midnight, crowded with Londoners of all the leisured classes and with a score or more of good-looking barmaids in black behind the bar. When the habits of the men of London began to change, and the Long Bar did not draw so many devotees, the firm of Spiers and Pond was not quite convinced for some time that the "palmy" days of the bars were gone, and they made the Long Bar one of the most beautiful saloons in London, decorating it with marbles and inlay of Venetian glass. That beautiful saloon is now the Marble Restaurant, in which a five-shilling table d'hôte meal is served, and where singers on Sundays discourse music to the diners.
The American Bar had its period of great success, and in the grill-room, which formed part of the bar's surroundings, chops and steaks, unsurpassed anywhere in London, used to be grilled. But the character of some of the habitués of the American Bar was too pronouncedly sporting to be altogether satisfactory, and the American Bar passed away from the front part of the building as the Long Bar did. There is a buffet now at the Jermyn Street side, but it is no longer the haunt of the gentlemen who were so overwhelmingly devoted to sport. The grill-room, without the American Bar, is a very flourishing section of the Criterion. It differs from most other grill-rooms in having plenty of sunlight and fresh air, and has this distinctive feature, that there is an American cook in its kitchen and that American dishes can always be obtained there even when they are not on the bill of fare. I have eaten clam broth, terrapin, dry hash, scalloped sweet potatoes, and Graham pudding, when dining there with Americans.
The Criterion contains a score of banqueting-rooms, including a huge one at the top of the house, where a statue of Shakespeare looks down upon the diners. The West Room, which is now one of the banqueting-rooms, has been used by the management for many experiments. For a long time a Dîner Parisien was served there, and as its cost was only five shillings, and as one got a great deal of very good food to eat for that sum, I used to patronise it very regularly in my subaltern days, when a dinner in the East Room could not be budgeted for. At one time it was given over to the vegetarians, and good-looking damsels in art clothing brought the diners dishes of nut cutlets and vegetable steaks; but the nut-eaters did not hold possession of the room for long.
It is not easy to-day to associate the great stone building in Piccadilly Circus with the revels of miners in an Australian township. But it was in Melbourne, during the gold fever, that the seed was sown which blossomed into the big stone house in the centre of London. Felix Spiers and Christopher Pond were both young Englishmen. Felix was born in one of the old houses on Tower Hill, which was then the office of the General Steam Navigation Company, whose agent his father then was. The family of the Spiers moved to Paris, and young Felix was put into a banking house, where he remained until he was eighteen. Then he went to Melbourne, with the gold fever upon him, to make his fortune. In Melbourne, he met young Christopher Pond, also an Englishman, and also determined to make his pile. Spiers had become, for the time being, a wine merchant, an experience which later was to serve him to excellent purpose at the Criterion, for he laid down some admirable wine there, amongst it some hock which as long as it lasted I used to drink in preference to any other wine on the Criterion list. The miners were spending money in Melbourne as though it were water, and the Theatre Royal, Melbourne, received much of the golden shower. It occurred to young Spiers and young Pond that it would be a profitable undertaking to start a restaurant next door to a theatre, and they established, in Collins Street, the Café de Paris. Their next enterprise was to become caterers for the Melbourne and Ballarat Railway. They were full of ideas in those days, and one of these was to bring out to Australia a team of English cricketers and to tour them as a speculation. This was the thought of which the test matches were born. Spiers and Pond came to England intending to persuade Charles Dickens to make a great reading tour in Australia, and then it was that they espied the nakedness of the land in regard to railway catering. Dickens came to their aid with his attack on Mugby Junction, and he wrote an article in All the World entitled "The Genii of the Cave," in which he described the then novelty of the "Silver Grill" under the arch at Ludgate Circus, which Spiers and Pond established. The Criterion was the pet child of the two great caterers. It rose on historic ground, for it occupied the site of the old "White Bear," which had been a celebrated coaching-house, one of those fine old inns of many galleries. The theatre was opened four months later than the restaurant; but it was not until 1879 that Sir Charles Wyndham, with whom so many of its successes are associated, took over sole management, though he had been a partner for the previous three years with Mr Alexander Henderson in its control.
[XV]
SOME CHOP-HOUSES
Many of the City chop-houses nestle together in the alleys and courts between Cornhill and Lombard Street. There, on either side of one of the narrow little passages, you will find Simpson's Chop-houses, with pleasant grey-green walls to their rooms and a window in which simple food, cooked and uncooked, is shown as bait to draw in the hungry passer-by; and there in Castle Court is the George and Vulture, which is also Thomas' Chop-rooms, which dates back to 1660, is proud of its Dickens' traditions, and is more ambitious in its bill of fare than most of the chop-houses.
There also, in Chance Alley, is Baker's Chop-house, which, that there may be no mistake as to its pretensions, describes itself on a board at the Lombard Street entrance to the alley as a tavern, and a chop-house, a coffee-house, and soup-rooms. It is a dignified little house, which bears its years well—it was founded in the seventeenth century—and which, with its two bow-windows with small panes of glass and its glass door in between, commands confidence even before one has crossed the threshold. Inside one of the windows are wire screens to give privacy to the company in the house, but the other window begs all men to look in and see the fish and the joints, the vegetables, the salad stuff, and, perhaps, a loin of cold beef, samples of what the larder contains. Beyond this rampart of good things edible you may see dames and damsels attired in black, busy in a glassed-in little room drawing beer, taking payment from satisfied customers for what they have eaten, and a grave gentleman, with white hair and beard, making entries in a large ledger; for the little portioned-off space you are looking into serves as bar and counting-house, some old punch-bowls on a shelf giving it its right old-world note.
Once inside the door you find yourself in as snug and cosy an eating-house as you can find in London. The ground floor is partitioned off into many boxes. There is one to your left as you come in, the counting-house being on your right, and two, one of them with a curtain to give it privacy, facing you, and another just beyond the grill, and yet another one below the round clock in a black frame which is on the back wall. The partitions and the walls are of wood panelling painted and grained to resemble light oak, but whoever the craftsman was who worked at it with feather and comb, he must have passed away long ago, for the painting, like everything else in the house, has been mellowed by time. The partitions are carried up high wherever there is any possibility of a draught reaching anyone sitting in one of the boxes, and in the high partitions the top panels are of glass. There are pegs for hats and coats on the wall and a stand for umbrellas near the fireplace. The fireplace, a big grill in a stone frame, is in one of the side walls, and close in front of it, his body partially sheltered by a wooden screen, stands the cook, white-bearded and in white cap, white jacket and apron. At his elbow is a compartment, a big box without a lid, in which are chops, steaks, and all other things grillable, and any man who thinks he is a judge of a raw chop or steak, looks over into this box before he finds a seat for himself, and indicates to the cook which particular fragment of red meat he wishes to have prepared according to his liking. Above the fireplace is a framed water-colour picture of the outside of the house, and on either side of this work of art are pewter plates in a splendid state of polish. The other interesting work of art on the walls is a portrait of "James," who was a waiter at Baker's for thirty-five years. James was, I imagine, early Victorian. He has a benign appearance, and his watch-chain is almost as large as a cable. The waiters of to-day are as British as James was, and they go about their business with much quickness and dexterity. To complete my description of the lower room at Baker's, I should add that there is sawdust on the floor, and that a narrow staircase, the steps of which are covered with lead, leads up to the rooms on the other floors.
You will have seen written in little frames on one side of the counting-house window looking into the chop-room some of the dishes of the day that are ready—curried chicken, Irish stew (one-chop and two-chop portions), stewed steak, and the like, and your waiter will tell you of other good things—pies and puddings, each a portion for one—that are ready. If you are for something from the grill, you make your selection from the cook's stores. If a cut from the joint is to your taste, you go upstairs to the big room on the first floor, where there are red walls and no partitions.
A basket of great chunks of household bread is on the white-clothed table at which you find a place; your chop, if you have selected a chop, will come to you on a willow-patterned dish, and you will transfer it to a willow-patterned plate. In old days all meat at Baker's used to be served on pewter. But if the four plates over the fireplace are the only survivors of the pewter set, your beer will be brought you in a pewter tankard, and most of the glass is of old pattern. When you come to the cheese stage your slice of Cheddar and pat of butter are both excellent. Indeed all the food at Baker's is good. No eating place which does not give good food at reasonable prices ever survives in the City, and Baker's has seen nearly three hundred years pass away. Who the original Baker was who gave his name to the chop-house no one knows, but a guess is made that he was a relation of that Mr Baker who was Master of Lloyd's Coffee-House in Lombard Street in 1740, and who carried to Sir Robert Walpole the news of Admiral Vernon's taking of Portobello, being suitably rewarded as a bringer of good tidings.
The customers of Baker's Chop-house are excellent walking advertisements of the house. They all seem to be prosperous City men, young and old; they are well groomed and they look well-fed and contented.
When you have finished your meal at Baker's you leave twopence by your plate as the waiter's tip, you give the grill-cook another penny, if you have eaten grilled fare, as you pass him on your way out, and then, pausing at the wicket of the counting-room, you recite to the lady who faces you the things you have eaten and what you have imbibed, and she, doing a sum of mental arithmetic, tells you instantly what you have to pay. As a souvenir of the house she will give you a post card, if you ask for it, carrying a miniature copy of the work of art over the fireplace.
But there are chop-houses in London outside the City limits, and I know of three of them within arrow-flight of Piccadilly Circus. There is Snow's, for instance, in Sherwood Street, almost in the Circus. Snow's has a reputation for its steaks, and I know men who declare that the best bacon and eggs in the world are those brought in between two plates from the kitchen and placed on the tables at Snow's. It has lately been rebuilt, and is a modern reproduction of a Tudor house, its three little gables and the green gallery before its upper windows being very picturesque. The old tables and the old partitions are in their old places in the lower rooms, but the walls of glazed tiles and the curved brass hangings for coats and hats are scarcely Tudor. The company at Snow's at its busy times of the day is a curious mixture. Your neighbour at table may be a clergyman up from the country, or the man who shaves you at Shipwright's round the corner, or a young artist, or a taxi chauffeur.
Stone's in Panton Street, which dates back to 1770, is another chop-house, though it is better known as a wine-house. It has its coffee-room, where good, plain grilled food is obtainable, though it rather sinks the title "chop-house" in the more aristocratic "à la carte restaurant." Stone's has always been a favourite resort of men of the theatre.
Not very many Londoners know of the Sceptre Chop-house, Number 5 Warwick Street, a little street which runs parallel, on the east, to part of Regent Street, for it is not in a main thoroughfare. It is a typical early Victorian chop-house, and it used to be a haunt of Charles Dickens when he was making his first successes as an author. The front of the house has been newly painted, but the interior remains as it was in 1830, when it first opened its door. Its window is frosted half-way up to obviate the necessity for blinds, with a pattern and announcements that the house supplies chops and coffee left in plain glass amidst the frosting. I warrant that window created considerable enthusiasm in Warwick Street in 1830. At least three of the proprietors, past and present, of the Sceptre have their names recorded on the front of the building. Sanders' name is almost obliterated on the length of brass that forms the window-sill, and shows faintly on the glass of the door. Gosling is preserved to memory by his name in gold letters over the door, while Purcell's is very large above the window. Inside, the long room is a harmony of quiet colours. There is brown boarding half-way up the walls, and above that green that rests the eye. By the door is an enclosed cosy corner, with a mirror in an old black frame over the fireplace. All down the room are low mahogany partitions with seats cushioned in black. The tables are of mahogany, polished by constant rubbing of the waitresses' napkins, and no tablecloths ever hide the deep colour of the old wood. At the end of the room is a screen of three arches of dark wood. The two side arches are filled with panelling and mirrors; but through the centre arch can be seen the kitchen with its sawdusted floor, its ranges of plates and dishes, and the cook and the cookmaids in print dresses going about their work. The waitresses in black dresses and white aprons and caps bustle up and down the room and in and out of the kitchen. A stove heats the long room, and glazing in the roof gives it light. A staircase of black wood leads to the upper rooms, and by the doorway into the street is a little compartment, no larger than a sentry-box, which is the pay-desk.
The food at The Sceptre is of the simplest kind, and a haricot chop or roast chicken are about its highest flights. Your soup, mutton broth, or mock turtle or kidney costs you 4d. or 6d., according to the size of the soup plate. You can pay 9d. or 10d. for your chop and 10d. for your steak. A cut from the joint, for The Sceptre gives you a choice of three joints, is a 9d. matter; but you can get a very ample helping of apple tart for 3d. It is under the heading of entrées that The Sceptre puts such high flights of cookery as curried mutton and rice, boiled tripe and onions, Irish pie and mixed grill.
Many men distinguished in art and music and literature have felt, and still feel, the fascination of The Sceptre Chop-house. You may, very likely, amongst the company at the old mahogany tables, see one of the brightest writers on Punch, or our greatest living painter of battle pictures, or the man who composed "In the Shadows."
Upstairs are two delightful old rooms, browned by time and the London climate, with old wooden shelves, old clocks, old brass candlesticks, old chairs and tables. In one corner of the front room, by a window, stands Dickens' chair, for it is here, so the tradition of the house has it, that Dickens used to come in his early days to write, and it was in this corner that many of his "Sketches by Boz" were jotted down on paper. The Sceptre was a spruce, new little house at this period of Dickens' life, and probability as well as tradition is on the side of its having been one of his early haunts.
[XVI]
SOME GRILL-ROOMS
The modern grill-room we owe, I think, to the Americans, for the travelling American, who has his own very sensible ideas as to what comfort is, does not wish every night of his life to attire himself in a "claw-hammer" evening coat, but he feels that without that garment he would be out of place in the restaurant of any of the fashionable hotels. The grill-room gives him an excellent dinner, just as long or just as short as he likes, served quickly, in luxurious surroundings, and he can dress as he likes, to eat it. An American always knows what he wants, asks for it, and keeps on asking until he gets it. Quite a number of Britons of both sexes wanted all the conveniences of the grill-rooms long before the modern grill-room came into existence. (Hard-working men of business who had not time to go home to the suburbs to change their clothes, men of the theatre, authors and managers who work late in the evening, actors and actresses who like a very light meal before going to the theatre, and to sup after their work without wearing gorgeous raiment, and a host of other people who get their living by their brains.) But they had not the pertinacity of the American in demanding what they wanted.
Quite the beginning of the modern grill-room was that silver grill which Messrs Spiers and Pond established some time in the sixties under the arch at Ludgate Hill; but I look to the little grill-room in the old Savoy Hotel in the days before the new building had pushed through to the Strand as being the ideal of a modern grill-room, and I always measure any grill-room of to-day by the standard of that little place of good eating. It was small, and its windows looked up an unlovely cul-de-sac of which it formed the end. The people who controlled the Savoy Hotel and the Savoy Theatre all used it as their own dining-room; the general public scarcely knew of its existence; the food there was excellent. Besides the chops and steaks and other real grill-room fare, there were always one or two savoury entrées kept hot in metal pots and pans on a miniature hot plate in the middle of the room, and when the maître d'hôtel brought over one of these and took off the cover under one's nose, the savour of its contents alone gave one an appetite.
The present Café Parisien at the Savoy, which the russet-bearded Gustave steered to a great success, is the legitimate successor to that other grill-room which was hidden away in the midst of the building, but it has not the charm of discovery felt by those who used the old grill-room. The Café Parisien, which has its entrance in the Savoy forecourt, where gorgeous servitors in French-grey uniforms of State take one's coat and hat just as they do if one is going to spend one's money in the restaurant, is a great Adams room painted a very light grey, with portières of light pink, and with chairs and carpets of a deeper rose. It has a little space outside, a terrasse, as the French would call it, which is railed off from the courtyard by a white trellis, over which roses are trained. This is a very pleasant spot in hot weather, if so be that no motor sighing out deep breaths of petrol is standing in the vicinity. This Café Parisien is a place of pleasant, clean-shirted Bohemianism, much patronised by the aristocracy of the theatre. There is an elaborate à la carte menu with stars against those dishes which are ready. A man in a hurry can eat a four-course dinner here in half-an-hour without risking indigestion, but a couple who wish to talk over their meal can make a cutlet and an ice an excuse for sitting out an hour.
The grill-room of the Princes' Restaurant, to which one descends from an entrance in Piccadilly, is a comfortable white room, with white pillars and mirrors in the panelled walls, where quite good food is served, and where there are always the dishes of the day ready as well as the chops and steaks, kidneys and sausages, and other legitimate grill fare. The Brussels carpets and the dark leather of the chairs are restful to the eye, and the lights in the crystal bouquets which hang from the ceiling are not too glaring.
Almost across the way, in the great building of the Piccadilly Hotel, quite an unpretentious entrance and a small staircase with marble walls lead down to the grill-room. There is a lift by the stairs which is much used by the people coming up from the grill-room, though only lazy folk use it to go down there. This unpretentious entrance and staircase are the portals to a suite of very high, very spacious rooms, running the full length of the building. There are pilasters with gilt capitols; and casemented mirrors in the walls. The electroliers holding imitation candles give abundant light. The grill is behind a great glass screen; carvers in white wheel about big joint waggons and a Turk in gorgeous raiment is ready to make Oriental coffee. The deep rose of the carpet contrasts with the white of the walls. At a multitude of tables are hundreds of people of every comfortable class in life, from the bank clerk to the field-marshal, and from the typist to the duchess, eating meals simple or elaborate, just as they will. This grill-room, like most of the others, caters for every taste; for there is an elaborate carte du jour, two table d'hôte luncheons at half-a-crown and three-and-six, and a table d'hôte dinner at five-and-six. Electric fans keep the atmosphere pure. This grill-room is all day long a very busy place, and as many as five hundred dinners are served nightly.
Of the Criterion grill-room, the great airy hall on the ground floor of the building, I have already written in another article.
On the other side of Piccadilly Circus the Monaco has a grill-room with light buff walls and light buff marble pilasters. Its entrance gives on to Shaftesbury Avenue. Near by is the Trocadero grill-room, down to which a staircase of green and grey marble descends, and which, with its walls of grey marble and gold and buff, its mirrors, its hammered copper-work, its great grill and its orchestra, is handsome almost to the point of gorgeousness. A table d'hôte dinner is served here, as it is now in most modern grill-rooms.
In Regent Street the Café Royal possesses a heavily gilded grill-room, with entrances through the café and from Air Street, a grill-room in which the best entrecôte and the best pint of Burgundy in London are obtainable; and on the other side of Regent Street, its entrance hidden away in that dead little road, Haddon Street, is the grill-room restaurant of the New Gallery Cinema Theatre, in the basement of that establishment. It consists of two rooms, panelled with oak and hung with copies of old tapestries. From these it takes its name Les Gobelins. Mr Goetz, of the Vienna Café, opened this little place of refreshment, and there were always Austrian and German dishes on its bill of fare, but it has now changed hands, and M. Victor, late of the Imperial and Les Lauriers, is in command. Its cookery remains very good.
The Carlton grill, which has its own entrance in the Haymarket, is as good a specimen of the grill-room of to-day as one could select to show to anyone who wished to understand the differences between the chop-houses of yesterday and the grill-rooms of to-day. The staircase which leads down to it is oak-panelled. In the little ante-chamber where hats and coats are given up there is a newspaper stall, and in another ante-room are easy-chairs, dark green in colour, and small tables with tops of burnished copper. The grill-room itself is all white, little pilasters breaking the smooth sides of the walls. Blue china stands on the shelves, a Cromwell clock ticks on a bracket, and at one side of the room are arched recesses with stained glass windows at the back of them. The lights in the electroliers burn here day and night, but the atmosphere is never stuffy. A glass screen keeps the heat of the grill from the room, and in front of this screen are piles of crimson tomatoes, and chops and steaks of deeper red, and mushrooms yellow, grey and warm brown, a harmony in reds and greys. Its carte du jour is all-embracing, and some of the dishes are always ready. M. Ventura is the presiding spirit in this grill-room. He knows the tastes of his clientele and which tables they prefer, and when there are no unoccupied tables and people have to be turned away, as sometimes happens, or asked to wait in the ante-room until tables are free, his grief is really heartfelt.
At the very gateway of the Strand the Grand Hotel has a popular grill-room, walled with shining tiles of white and buff; the Cecil has a great Indian room of blue and yellow tiles; and, indeed, every big hotel from the great pile of the Kensington Palace, in the west, to the hotel of the Great Eastern Railway in Liverpool Street in the east, has its grill-room, the simplicity of the fare and the fact that the raw material is always on view to the diner before it is placed on the grill being a guarantee of the quality of the meat.
Most of the restaurants also have their grills.
Romano's turned its old kitchen into a reproduction of a room in a Russian farmhouse with horns on the walls and an icon up in a corner, and even at one time carried realism to the point of putting the waiters in this part of the establishment into white blouses with red sashes at the waist, the dress the Tartar waiters in Moscow wear. You get the restaurant food in this grill-room at about half the restaurant prices. A new electric grill has been installed in this Russian room which grills just as well and far more quickly than a charcoal or a coal grill.
The Frascati, in Oxford Street, has a grill-room on the ground floor with walls of white marble veined with grey, and with mirrors in Oriental frames; and at the entrance to Tottenham Court Road the Horseshoe has an excellent grill above its oyster saloon.
The Holborn shows originality in devoting a grill-room to ladies, and in the old Freemasons' Tavern in Great Queen Street, which now calls itself the Connaught Rooms, there is in the basement a large grill-room, with a choice of three joints at luncheon time as well as an extensive carte du jour, a grill which is much patronised by the lawyers from Lincoln's Inn Fields. In the evening a dinner is served in a smaller room, and I have dined there before going across the way to the Kingsway Theatre. Those who dine are, I think, mostly connected in some way or another with Freemasonry, and the talk that goes on at the tables has reference to high offices in the Craft and Mark, to "raising" and "passing," and to that ancient and sacred ritual which ladies still believe to be in some way connected with a red-hot poker.
[XVII]
ROMANO'S
Alfonso Nicolino Romano, a head waiter at the Café Royal, in 1874 bought with his savings a small fried fish shop in the Strand, converted it into a bar and restaurant, and in addition to his own name on its front added Café Vaudeville, for it was, and is, almost next door to the Vaudeville Theatre. Romano's in those days possessed a central window flanked by two doors, one leading into the bar and the other to the rooms above. In the window as an ornament was a small aquarium which contained goldfish, and those fish must have lived exciting, if short, lives, for the patrons of the bar tried to feed them with cigar ash, lemon rind, burnt almonds, and torn-up notepaper, and it is even said that "Hughie" Drummond, one of the most amusing and most reckless of the clean-shirted Bohemians who made "the Roman's" known all the world over, tried to take a swim with them.
Romano was a curly-haired, humorous, quick-witted little Italian who talked a strange Anglo-Italian jargon—"Pore ole Romano e got badda addick this morning" his usual morning greeting, was an example of it—and who was on the easiest terms of familiarity with most of his clients without ever overstepping the line. He had not very many rules as to the conduct of his business, but one from which he never departed was that he would under no circumstances make a reduction in the total of a bill. He would give an aggrieved customer some of the very best "cognac" of the house or split a bottle of the most expensive champagne with him or ask him to dinner next day, but what he would not do was to reduce any item in the account. One of the most frequent forms of verbal invitation given by "The Roman" was to a Sunday midday inspection of his cellars in the Adelphi arches. "You coma see my cellars, Mister So-and-So Eskwire, best in London" was the actual wording. Romano had come from a good school, and he laid down an excellent cellar. The food in the restaurant was also beyond reproach.
Behind the bar, a bar which was always full of racing men, journalists, coaching men, men from the Stock Exchange, men about town—for those were the days when no man in the movement thought it undignified to be seen standing up in a place of refreshment—was the restaurant. It was little more than a corridor, a long, narrow room with space for one line of tables only; but at those tables used habitually to sit the merriest gathering of good fellows, and I include the ladies in that term, that ever came together in a London restaurant. There were witty journalists such as Shirley Brooks, "Pot" Stephens, "Jimmy" Davis, and "Shifter," and there were men of the theatre—Cecil Raleigh, for instance, and "Charlie" Harris, who when the waiter called the order for his dinner down the speaking-tube always added himself "pour le patron," for Romano, who lunched and dined at the table nearest the bar door, was not likely to get a tough steak or a thin quail. There were Guardsmen, such at "The Windsor Warrior," "Billie FitzDitto," "Haddocks," and "The Bonetwister," and men about town, of whom Hughie Drummond and Fred Russell were perhaps the best known, and coaching men, "Dickie the Driver" and "Swish" and "Partner," who used to delight in bringing jolly old Jim Selby to dine; and Arthur Roberts, then at the very top of his form, and "Mons" Marius, as representatives of the actor fraternity. And around this kernel of good-fellowship formed a fringe of other good fellows who came and went, men from the country, men from the far parts of the world, soldiers, sailors, planters, explorers, country squires. It was rather a clannish gathering, for everybody seemed to know everybody else at the line of tables, and people who were not taken into companionship, no difficult matter if they were kindred souls, felt "out of it," and went elsewhere.
Between the Gaiety Theatre and Romano's there grew up an indefinite alliance, and golden-hearted Nellie Farren would lunch there when a new burlesque was in rehearsal, and "the Child" and dear "Jack" St John and others of the principals looked with favour on the restaurant, and on Lord Mayors' days made a brave show of beauty at the windows of the first floor. The Gaiety Girls of those days, splendid women and jolly good fellows, who enjoyed life, and by their beauty and sociability helped other people to enjoy life, lunched and supped at the Roman's. I have a dozen names at the tip of my pen, but if I wrote them down I should stray into a gossip over the ladies of the burlesque and light opera stages in the seventies and eighties, and should require columns and columns of space to deal adequately with such a subject. Most of them married, and, as the fairy tales have it, "lived happy ever after." And the "halls," we didn't call them variety theatres then, were also represented at the Roman's. Jolly, humorous Bessie Bellwood lunched there five days out of six, though she kept the Roman humble by asserting that she preferred the tripe and onions at Chick's to anything his kitchen could produce, and when she was in good anecdotal form kept everybody near her tremulous with laughter. And the sisters Leamar, who used to sing a duet as to Romano's being "a paradise, sure, in the Strand" and added the information that "the wines and the women are grand," naturally paid frequent visits to the restaurant to assure themselves that the description was a correct one.
The Roman gathered about him a staff which exactly suited the tone of the restaurant, proof thereof being that so many of them remain in its service to this day. M. Luigi Naintre, the manager of Romano's, has climbed the ladder of promotion steadily through all the grades at the restaurant, and though for a while after Romano's death he wandered into other folds, one of the first acts of the company which now controls the restaurant was to ask him to come back to it. Long experience has taught him the art of making each frequenter of the restaurant believe that the establishment is maintained entirely to meet his or her taste and whims, and he is essentially the right man in the right place. M. Minola, his second in command, also graduated in the "Roman" school. The cellarman, L. Bendi, and the wine-butler, L. Villa, have been in the restaurant as far back as I can remember.
I must pass quickly over the fire which burned down the old Romano's and its rebuilding on the site of the old restaurant and on that of another house next door. The panelled hall and, in the restaurant, the Moorish arches with the pictures of the Bosphorus seen through them were features of the new building, and remain to-day as they then were. In the nineties Romano died of pneumonia, contracted by standing one cold winter day outside the restaurant door with no great-coat on, and the restaurant came under the Court of Chancery.
The Court of Chancery was not at all sorry to hand over its duties to a company, with Mr Walter Pallant, the then chairman of the Gaiety Company, as its chairman, which was formed to purchase the restaurant. Mr "Teddy" Bayly, who as a patron of the restaurant had helped materially in making the fortune of the Roman, became manager, and Luigi was appointed as second in command. When Mr Bayly left Romano's for a restaurant of his very own M. Luigi mounted one rung more of the ladder of promotion and was appointed manager.
The first business of the company, after giving the building "a wash and brush up," was to find a chef of celebrity and experience to take charge of the kitchens. They found in M. Ferrario exactly the man for whom they were looking. M. Ferrario had learned his art under M. Coste in the kitchens of the Cecil, and when he himself became the commander of the kitchens of a restaurant of the first class he showed that he had used his powers of observation, that not only did he know all that there was to be learned concerning the haute cuisine française, but that he had an open mind with regard to the cookery of all other nations. The mouzakkas that M. Ferrario sends from his kitchen are the best I have eaten outside Bucharest. He makes a ground-nut soup, the one delicacy that Nigeria has added to the cookery book, quite admirably, and Romano's is the only restaurant that I know of in Europe where one can eat a Malay curry cooked as it is cooked in Malaya and served in the Malay fashion, with sambals and with shining Malayan shell spoons for the rice. What substitute M. Ferrario has found for the fresh cocoa-nut pulp which is the foundation of all Malay curries I do not know, but he has found something which replaces it admirably. In the winter at lunch-time north countrymen say that Romano's Lancashire hot-pot is the real thing, and there is another British luncheon dish, gipsy-pot, which I eat at Romano's, a savoury stew of chicken and cabbage and other vegetables and other meats, which I find exceptionally good.
But perhaps I had better give you in detail what are the specialities of Romano's kitchen. They are, for lunch: Malay curry of chicken, Lancashire hot-pot and gipsy-pot. For dinner: poule au pot, bortch à la Russe, potage Normande, potage Nigérienne, filets de sole Romano, filets de sole Sportive, sole au plat aux courgettes, sole à la crème, truite George V., poulet nouveau Valencienne, perdreau Romano, mousse de volaille au curry, the last being an admirable mousse with just a far-away reminiscence of India, a sort of dream of all the good curries of the East, in it.
If I gave you the menus of all the nice little dinners for two of which I have been one of the participators at Romano's I should fill a fat volume. But here is a little spring dinner which will serve my purpose very well:
Crevettes Roses.
Fumet de Volaille aux œufs Filés.
Filets de Sole Sportive.
Epaule de Pauillac Bergère.
Petits Pois Nouveaux à la Crème.
Asperges d'Argenteuil.
Sauce Divine.
Fraises Diva.
And the wine I drank with this was a bottle of 1900 St Marceaux, which was the choice of the lady who honoured me with her company. The filets de sole Sportive are soles which bring to table with them just a dream of Chablis, and which are nobly backed up by crayfish.
The old Romano's in its first period was very clannish. The new Romano's, though it is a comparatively small restaurant, finds room for all men and all ladies who love good food and who like the slightly Bohemian, pleasantly Parisian, atmosphere of the "Paradise in the Strand." I have seen a duchess dining at one of the corner tables, and I do not suppose that there is a man about town, from dukes to the latest emancipated Oxonian, who does not know Romano's and its ways. The clientele varies with the different meals. At lunch-time, particularly, if there are rehearsals in progress at the Adelphi or the Gaiety or any of the other light opera or revue theatres, a host of pretty little ladies go to Romano's and very probably the "Governor" and the librettists and composers, and a stage director or two, will be lunching at a corner table. Half-a-dozen other managers are sure to be somewhere in the restaurant, and there will be ladies not of the stage, and solicitors, and barristers from the Law Courts and a plaintiff or two, and a journalist or two, a very interesting salmis of the stage world and the business world and the world of Law, with a good seasoning of men from the far parts of the world, and men about town and soldiers and sailors. At dinner little parties going on to the theatre finish their feasts about the time that the habitués of the restaurant, who are going on nowhere or to a variety theatre, make their appearance. At supper-time the stage is once again the most strongly represented element, and there is no restaurant in Paris which can show at this hour prettier faces or more unforced gaiety. The bright young spirits from the 'varsities all love Romano's, but Luigi has a wholesome fear of the "Twenty-firsters," as the boys call their coming-of-age feasts, and the numbers at these gatherings at Romano's are kept within very strict limits.
There is one happy young Oxonian who absolutely defeated Luigi at a birthday feast. He had been solemnly warned that the spirits of his party must not rise too high, and he and they had all behaved with quite suspicious decorum during supper. The band had finished playing, and the bandmaster, on departing, had locked the door of the pulpit-like Moorish bandstand that projects high up into the room. When closing hour came and all the guests were moving out except the party of young Oxonians Luigi told them that they also must take their departure. But their leader begged to be allowed to sit on for a few seconds longer, even though the lights were turned out. Out went the lights, and then here and there a single light was put up again that the waiters might see to pile the chairs on the tables and put the restaurant into its night attire. Luigi, looking at the supper-party, thought that their numbers had diminished, and from the bandstand came the sound of someone playing the piano. In the two seconds of darkness the giver of the feast had performed a really wonderful gymnastic feat. Jumping off from the back of one of his guests, he had climbed up into the bandstand and had taken his seat at the piano. The door was locked and the key gone home with the bandmaster; his fortress was unstormable, and he was in complete possession. For a quarter of an hour or so he played little selections at the piano, inquiring of Luigi, who stood below, what were his favourite airs, and it was only when his musical repertoire ran out that he climbed out of his aerie and dropped to the floor.
On occasions, generally on the evening of first nights at the theatres, when an extension has been obtained, suppers at Romano's sometimes end in little dances. But the great dance of the year at Romano's is the "Twelfth Night," one which is not so much a party given by the restaurant as a party given to themselves by the habitués of the restaurant. All the tables for this night are secured weeks in advance, each host pays for his own party, but Romano's supplies all the toys and the presents, the masks and tambourines, and anything new in trifles that is to be bought in any city of the world. The shops of Paris and Vienna are ransacked to provide novelties for this evening. The spirit of Paris always hovers above Romano's, but this particular night in its fun without rowdiness is the most Parisian night of the year.
Romano's as it now is is very different in its arrangements from the restaurant that the company took over from the Court of Chancery. What was the linen room is now a gallery, which is nicknamed the "Bird Cage," looking down on to the restaurant. The kitchen has been taken away from below the restaurant and put behind it, and where the kitchen was is now a grill-room with lattice-work arbours decked with vines and a vista leading up to a little fountain. The whole scheme of decoration of the restaurant is now of the lightest of light Moorish design, the details being copied from the Alhambra at Granada. The most important change of all is the disappearance of the old bar, a bar which in its day made history, its place being taken by a little waiting-room, which is a reproduction in most of its details of the Henri IV. room in the Victoria and Albert Museum. A good deal of loving care has been bestowed on all the details of the decoration and equipment of the restaurant. Look at the brass handles on the doors leading into the hall, and you will see that they are admirable works of art. In the same way the napery put on the table at dinner-time before coffee is served is well worth a glance. Some of the china is quite beautiful in pattern, and the gilt finger-bowl brought you at dessert is very probably a copy of some of the loot taken by Attila and now preserved in the Budapest museum.
Banquets are sometimes given at Romano's in the private room looking down on the Strand, which has been shut off from the balcony, and no better indication of the type of these could be given than by setting down the menu of the latest dinner of the Wine Connoisseurs' Club, at which there were forty guests:
Cantaloup Glacé.
Tortue Claire.
Velouté de Volaille Duchesse.
Truite George V.
Ris de Veau aux Perles Noires.
Selle de Béhague aux Primeurs.
Pommes Ideal.
Granite au Clicquot.
Poularde Flanquée D'Ortolans.
Salade Romaine.
Asperges Vertes, Sauce Divine.
Pêches Orientales.
Mignardises.
Paillettes au Parmesan.
Dessert.
The Truite George V. which has a place in this menu is one of the specialities of the house. It is a salmon trout, braized in port, served cold on ice with sliced oranges and a luscious jelly.
Little Romano used to allude to his cellars, as I have written, as "best in London," and the restaurant has always had a celebrity for the great choice of champagnes of the great brands and great years it offers its patrons. Most of the profits made during the last few years have been expended on champagnes, and no restaurant in London is better prepared to face that champagne famine which will so soon be upon us.
[XVIII]
IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
One of our legislators had very kindly asked me to dine with him at the House of Commons, at eight-fifteen p.m., and had told me that he would meet me at the public entrance. When I mentioned his name to the civil young policeman at the outer door he touched his helmet and said that my host had just gone through, so I followed on his tracks. I went past Westminster Hall, which was in splints, for the ceiling was under repair, and along that other great hall where statesmen of the past stand looking their very best in marble. There were two lines of the public sitting on the benches in between the marble statues, no doubt hoping eventually to obtain admission to the Strangers' Gallery, for it was the winding-up night of the Marconi debate. I mentioned my host's name to every policeman I came across, because I found that when I did so they touched their helmets and looked pleased, and I am always delighted to give inexpensive pleasure to any policeman.
In the public lobby the legislator, who, incidentally I may mention, is Chairman of the Kitchen Committee, found me and took me in the direction of the dining-rooms. We passed the new fireplace that the House of Commons has presented to itself, quite the most tasty thing in fireplaces I have ever seen, with a sort of glorified ingle-nook seat on either side of it. I peeped through the glass door into the members' dining-room with its handsome panelling, and the Ministerial Room, where some fine portraits hang on the walls, and eventually we went down the staircase with the good napkin panelling on either side, looked at that other staircase which was in course of construction for the convenience of lady guests, came to the long corridor where the photographs taken by Sir Benjamin Stone hang, and going down it had glimpses through open doors of dinner-parties in which ladies predominated, all mighty merry, and twittering like the birds in an aviary. From the chairman's own room, which he occasionally lends to his brother members, sallied forth a Ministerial Whip, who seized my host by the arm, held an open wine list before him as though they were going to sing hymns out of the same book, and asked him what champagne he ought to order for his guests. That knotty point being settled I gave up my hat and coat to an attendant, and followed my host, who threaded his way through the tables in the largest Strangers' dining-room to his own particular dining spot in a recess which commands a view of the whole of the room.
It is an exceedingly pleasant dining-room. The walls are of panels of grey and white, framed in light wood, with on them good prints in black frames, the gifts of M.P.'s who love their House just as ordinary men love their pet clubs. The four-square pillars which support the roof are painted cream colour; light is thrown up on to the ceiling from glass electroliers, shaped like round shields, and here and there a palm and some green screens give a restful note of cool colour. At one end of the room a clock on the wall reminds M.P.'s of the passing time, and at the other end, on a roll of paper, which passes through a wooden frame, is printed the name of the member who at the moment is addressing the House. The windows of this pleasant dining-room look out on to the terrace and across the river to the great hospital, behind which the sky still held some of the rose of sunset. There were dinner-parties innumerable being held in the room, and the manager informed us later that he had been obliged to tell many would-be hosts that he could not find room for their parties.
A great debate means a gala night in the dining-rooms of the House, and had I not known where I was, looking at the pretty and smartly dressed ladies and their smiling hosts, I should have thought that I was in one of the smaller dining-rooms of one of our great restaurants. Here and there amongst the guests and the dinner-givers were faces I recognised, and the legislator told me during the course of our dinner who were the other hosts at the different tables, for he probably knows personally more men of all the different parties than does any other member of the House.
"I have ordered a very small dinner," said my host, as a waiter brought us a pot of caviare ensconced in a basin of crushed ice, and this was the menu of the said small dinner:
Caviare.
Consommé d'Aremberg.
Homard Sauté Paillard.
Noisettes d'Agneau aux Primeurs.
Pommes Suzon.
Cailles de Vigne sur Canapés.
Salad Cœur de Laitues au Citron.
Asperges Anglo et Française.
Sauce Mousseline.
Pêches Flambées.
Dessert.
The lobster was an admirable dish, the rice served with it being a corrective to the exceeding richness of the liquid, and when the chairman and myself had eaten it with great relish I suggested to him that part of the pleasure it had given us was the fact that neither of us ought to have touched it at all, for the chairman had only just recovered from a second bout of influenza, and my tame doctor would have had a fit if he had known that I made a clean plate of such a rich delicacy. The dinner throughout was admirable, and I asked my host who was the chef de cuisine, and what was his history. The chef to the House, he told me, is M. Roux, who looks to M. Escoffier as the great master under whom he learned his art.
My host had told me to ask him any questions I liked concerning the catering and the management of the kitchens and dining-rooms, and I learned that the committee consists of sixteen members drawn from every party in the House, and that it meets once a week; that the allowance made by the House for the upkeep of its dining-rooms is £2600 a year, and that the turn-over is usually about £17,000 a year, but that in 1912, being an exceptionally busy one, it rose to £25,000. I also learned that there is always first-class specialist advice ready to be called in, for no matter what subject is under discussion—be it tablecloths, or cutlery or glass—there is sure to be amongst the members of the House someone who is the highest authority on the subject, and who willingly comes to the assistance of the Kitchen Committee.
When I began to ask questions about the regular House dinner and about that celebrated shilling dinner of which the outside public hear so much, the Chairman sent for the manager, a young man who has stepped from the post of assistant into the full-blown dignity of the managerial frock-coat, and asked him to show me the menus of the day and the wine list. There was a tone of pride in the manager's voice when he said that 300 dinners had been served that evening in the upstairs rooms, and he also told me the number of the guests in the downstairs rooms—186, I think he said, in all. The shilling dinner, of which about 150 are served each night, consists of fish or entrée, or joints, two vegetables, bread or plain toast, a pat of butter and Cheddar or Cheshire cheese. There is also a vegetarian dinner ready at a quarter of an hour's notice, from six till nine o'clock, which on that particular night consisted of crème d'asperges, œufs a la tripe, carottes à la crème, or haricots verts au beurre or macaroni Milanaise, and cheese and butter. And there is a half-crown dinner of the day of four courses, vegetables and cheese and butter. Sixpence table money is charged for guests. This is the menu of the five-shilling dinner of that day, and it reads to me a very good one:
Melon Glacé.
Consommé Froide or Crème d'Asperges.
Filets de Sole Dejazet.
Quartier d'Agneau à la Broche.
Pommes Fondantes.
Petits Pois au Beurre.
Cailles de Vigne Casserole.
Salade Romaine.
Bombe Fraisalia.
Croustades Maltaises.
Dessert.
There is also a grill menu and a long list of cold joints. To make the list of menus complete, the manager showed me that of the two-shilling dinner, which is ready at six o'clock, served in the dining-room of the Press Gallery. Later on in the evening I was shown the separate kitchen which serves the dining-room of the Gallery and saw that it was as well organised as is everything else in the kitchen department of the House. Looking through the wine list, I noticed that some of the sherries have come from Windsor Castle, Marlborough House and Sandringham; the most expensive of these being that—bottled 1875—from Windsor, for which 12s. 6d. a bottle is charged. But a glass of Amontillado costs no more than 4d. Sixpence a glass is the lowest price charged for any port, and the most expensive on the list is Cockburn's 1847, bottled 1850, which is a guinea a bottle. There are some 1898 champagnes still on the list, and some 1900. The wines of 1904 make the longest list, Veuve Clicquot heading the roll at 13s. 6d. a bottle; Heidsieck Dry Monopole, Pommery and Greno, Pol Roger, Moët and Chandon, Krug and Monte Bello varying in price from 13s. 6d. to 10s. a bottle. The brand Deutz and Gelderman is represented by pints at 6s. 6d., and the magnums of Monte Bello cost 18s. 6d.
Our dinner finished and all the questions that I could think of asked and answered, my host took me out on to the terrace to drink our coffee. All the light of the sunset had died out, and the long lines of lamps on the Embankment across the river were shining brilliantly. Across Westminster Bridge the tramcars, all blazing with light, were passing and repassing each other, an effect I commend to Mr Arthur Collins for use in some future Drury Lane production. The terrace itself is dimly lighted by gas lamps, but this half light, pleasant and in keeping with the solemn mystery of the great, dark river that flows past, seems to frame fittingly the brilliance of the wonderful night scene. Little groups of ladies were about the tables in that centre space where members may dispense hospitality. The talk of the men who came to speak to my host was all of what was in progress in the chamber of debate upstairs, of the pity of it that no agreement had been come to and that a division was necessary, of the admirable speech that Mr Balfour had made in the afternoon, and such-like matters.
I felt that I had kept my host too long from his place and wished to bid him good-night there and then, but he said that though he had failed to obtain a ticket for me in the afternoon to hear the debate, he would try again; so upstairs we went, and he left me in charge, in the Members' Lobby, of a benign old gentleman with a pointed white beard and wearing knee-breeches, while he went inside to see what he could do. He returned waving a card, the white-bearded gentleman looked even more benign, and took my hat and coat, and I was sent with the card up a little flight of stairs. In perfect comfort I listened to Mr Bonar Law making his points on the Unionist side, rapping with his finger-nails on the big box on the table as he did so, and then heard Sir Edward Grey, tucking his right hand under his frock-coat as though that garment pinched him below the arm, reply for the Government; watched the members stream out for the division, heard the numbers read out, and saw the end of an historic debate.
A most pleasant and interesting evening.