DIEUDONNÉ'S. PAGANI'S
There used to be two little rooms in London restaurants with walls made interesting by the signatures of great artists of song and colour and sculpture and music, who, some of them, had sketched little scenes above their names, and others had dotted down a few notes of music.
One of these little chambers was the sitting-room of Madame Dieudonné, in Ryder Street. Madame Dieudonné was an old French lady who kept a boarding-house much patronised by the great artists who came over to London from France. In her kitchen was an admirable chef, and the fame of the table d'hôte—a real table d'hôte in its original sense, for Madame always sat at the head of her own table—was so great that people who loved good cooking used to ask permission to be allowed to dine at it. But Madame Dieudonné did not give this permission to all comers, and it was necessary that the would-be guest should be presented to Madame and should obtain from her an invitation to her circle before a place was laid for him. Any special favourites amongst the guests were asked by Madame to come after dinner into her sitting-room, there to drink coffee and to chat, and amongst these favourites were the great musicians, and the great actors and great painters of her own land, who stayed at the boarding-house. When any man, or any lady, was asked for the first time into this holy of holies, he or she placed a signature upon the wall and any further embellishment that came to mind. Gradually the middle portion of the walls became a perfect treasure-house of autographs.
Madame Dieudonné died, and her circle was broken up, the old lodging-house became a hotel, and when M. Guffanti, its present owner, brought his great energy to bear upon it, it soon became prosperous. Alterations were made, the white room on the first floor, with its panel pictures of gallants and ladies in silks and brocades, which is now used for banquets, was constructed, and when Madame Dieudonné's little room was thrown into what is now the entrance hall, the workmen destroyed the signatures on the walls, evidently regarding them as mere dirt, in spite of all the precautions M. Guffanti had made to preserve them, and the only remembrances left of the stately old lady who used to sit at the head of her own table is in the name of the hotel and restaurant.
Dieudonné's has flourished exceedingly, and M. Guffanti, his hair a little thinner on the top of his head than when first I made his acquaintance, but with the same majestic curve to his moustache ends, and possessing the same invincible energy, has increased the size of his hotel by taking in several other houses.
The Dieudonné's of the present day is a large building of white stone and red brick, always very spick and span, and decked out with flower boxes. The restaurant on the ground floor is a fine room in the Adams style, a very light grey in colour, with some of the ornamentation just touched with gold. At one end are three large bow-windows, and at the other end there is a musicians' gallery for the orchestra. On the side walls the ornamentation suggests doorways with mirrored panels, pink shades on the electroliers have subdued the light, which, when the room was first built, I found too white and too brilliant, and the lamps on the tables are also pink-shaded. The carpet is of a deep rose, and the white chairs are also upholstered in that colour. It is a very pleasant dining-room, and the people who dine there are all pleasant to look at, and do good food the compliment of going dressed in becoming garments. I very rarely dine at Dieudonné's without seeing a ladies' dinner-party in progress, for Dieudonné's has always been a favourite dining place of the gentler sex since the early days when Giovanini, the old maître d'hôtel, with bushy eyebrows and Piccadilly weepers, used to consider any ladies without an escort as being put under his special and fatherly protection.
Dieudonné's chiefly relies on two table d'hôte dinners, one the opera dinner, at six-and-six, and the other the Dieudonné dinner, at eight shillings. On the last occasion that I dined at Dieudonné's before going on to the Russian Opera at Drury Lane I ate the opera dinner, the menu of which I give below. It was the day of President Poincaré's state entry into London, and that event is celebrated by two of the dishes in the dinner:
Menu.
Hors d'œuvre Variés.
Consommé à la Française.
Crème de Laitues aux Perles.
Saumon d'Ecosse Poché.
Sauce Mousseline.
Pommes Nature Concombres.
Côtes de Pré-Salé Poincaré.
Canetons d'Aylesbury à l'Anglaise.
Petits Pois Nouveaux.
Coupe Entente Cordiale.
Friandises.
The Dieudonné dinner on this day only differed from the shorter one by the inclusion in it of escaloppes de ris de veau George V.
The other restaurant which created and retains an artists' room is Pagani's, in Great Portland Street, in the immediate neighbourhood of the Queen's Hall and St George's Hall. When, in 1871, Mario Pagani opened a little shop, which became a restaurant, in a house in Great Portland Street, the German Reeds were in possession of St George's Hall, with, I think, Corney Grain, as a newly risen star, in their company. The Queen's Hall had not been built and St James's Hall, the site of which is now occupied by the Piccadilly Hotel, was the musical centre of London. M. Pagani, being an Italian, gave his customers Italian cookery, and very good Italian cookery too, and the journalists and the painters and the singers soon heard of the new little restaurant where there were always Italian dishes on the bill of fare. Pellegrini, the Vanity Fair cartoonist, and Signor Tosti were two of the first patrons of the restaurant. Mr George R. Sims, doyen to-day of literary gourmets, loved the restaurant as it was in its early state, and wrote of the good Italian food to be obtained there, and his portrait, on a china plaque, occupies, rightly enough, the centre of one of the walls up in the artists' room. In 1887 M. Mario Pagani retired, and for a time his brother and his cousin carried on the restaurant; the latter, M. Giuseppe Pagani—left, in 1895, in sole control—taking as partner M. Meschini, the latter of whom eventually became the sole proprietor, bequeathing, when he died, the restaurant to his widow and to his son.
Pagani's in the forty odd years of its existence, has increased in size to an extraordinary extent, and the building, with its elaborately ornamented front of glazed tiles with complicated figures in the pattern and ornaments of Della Robbia ware, its squat pillars of blue and its arches, luminous at night with electric light, differs immensely from the little, stuffy Italian restaurant that it originally was. It has a second entrance now in a side street, and a Masonic banqueting-room, and a lift, and its restaurant on the ground floor is a very large one and always reminds me of those great establishments that I see in the German cities. It is a very comfortable restaurant, and its brown walls, its mirrors with trellis-work and creepers painted on them set in brown wooden frames, and its ceiling painted in quiet colours, all give a sense of cosiness. There is in this downstairs restaurant a dispense bar, which looks very picturesque seen through a glazed screen, and just by this screen is the entrance from which the waiters stream out from the kitchen carrying the dishes ordered by the patrons of the restaurant, which they show as they pass to a clerk. To dine habitually at Pagani's at a table facing the kitchen entrance is to obtain a complete knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of the Italian waiter. He is not run into a mould as a French waiter is, but retains many individualities. He always wears a moustache, and is pleasantly conversational with his fellows and with the customers.
In its early days, the cookery at Pagani's was Italian and nothing but Italian, but with ever-increasing prosperity the scope of the kitchen has broadened, and now most of the dishes on the carte du jour have French names. The head cook, however, is a good Italian, M. Faustin Notari, who has climbed the ladder of promotion to the top during the twenty years he has been in the kitchens of Pagani's, and there are always some Italian dishes on the bill of fare. The following are the dishes that I most frequently see on the card:—Minestrone, minestrone alla Genovese, zuppa alla Pavese, filetti di sole alla Livornesse, spaghetti, and Macaroni done in every way possible, ravioli al sugo or alla Bolognese, gnocchi alla Romana, fritto misto alla Tosti, ossi buchi, arrostino annegato, and I generally finish my dinner at Pagani's with a zambaglione. Pagani's has its specialities of the house apart from Italian dishes, and when I have dined, as I often do, as one of the committee of an amateur dramatic club, in the Artists' Room, I generally find poulet à la Pagani—a very toothsome way of cooking the domestic fowl—on the menu of our little feasts. Filet de sole Pagani is another excellent dish, an invention of the house. Poule au pot and cassôlet à la Provençale and the bisque, and the bortsch at Pagani's are always excellent. The diners whom I see at the other tables downstairs at Pagani's all seem to me to belong to that very pleasant world, artistic Bohemia. The great singers of the opera and the great musicians who play at the Queen's Hall go there to lunch and dine and sup, and their artistic perception is not confined entirely to music, for I notice that they generally bring very pretty ladies with them to eat the good dishes of the restaurant. A little touch of Bohemia that always pleases me at Pagani's is the boy who comes round with a tray selling cigars and cigarettes. The restaurant-rooms on the first floor used, in the early days when Pagani's was quite a small place, to be the rooms to which the sterner sex used to take ladies to dine, and there was a particular corner by a window with a tiny conservatory in it which was the favourite spot in the room. The gentler sex now dines everywhere in the restaurant, but in the first-floor rooms, with pleasant red walls, glazed screens put between the tables give a sense of privacy.
The Artists' Room is on the second floor, just on the top of the staircase. There is not room for many people in it, and the dinner-parties held there must of necessity be small ones. But there is no room in any restaurant in London which is in itself so interesting as this one. The walls are almost entirely covered with signatures and sketches and caricatures; there is a large photograph, framed and autographed, of Sir Henry Irving as Becket; there are drawings by Dudley Hardy and three or four caricatures, including one of himself, drawn by Caruso. There is a photo of poor Phil May in riding kit on a horse; there is the menu of the dinner given by the artists of the Royal Opera at Covent Garden to Mr Thomas Beecham. On the mantelpiece stand some good bronzes of English and French Volunteers, and the menu of a banquet given by Pélissier, the head of the Follies, to his friends, and his invitation to this feast, which commences in royal style: "I, Gabriel," etc., and ends with the earnest request, "Please arrive sober," have been honoured with frames. Mademoiselle Felice Lyne's autograph records one of the latest successes in opera. There are two smoked plates with landscapes drawn on them with a needle, and there is the medallion in red of Dagonet I have already mentioned. The name of Julia Neilson, written in bold characters, catches the eye as soon as any other inscription on one of the sections of the wall covered with glass; but it is well worth while to take the panels one by one, and to go over these sections of brown plaster inch by inch. Mascagni has written the first bars of one of the airs from Cavalleria Rusticana, Denza has scribbled the opening bars of "Funiculi, Funicula," Lamoureux has written a tiny hymn of praise to the cook, Ysaye has lamented that he is always tied to "notes," which, with a waiter and a bill at his elbow, might have a double meaning. Phil May has dashed some caricatures upon the wall, a well-meant attempt on the part of a German waiter to wash one of these out having resulted in the sacking of the said waiter and the glazing of the wall, Mario has drawn a picture of a fashionable lady, and Val Prinsep and a dozen artists of like calibre have, in pencil, or sepia or pastel noted brilliant trifles on the wall. Paderewski, Puccini, Chaminade, Calvé, Piatti, Plançon, De Lucia, Melba, Mempes, Tosti, Kubelik, Tschaikovsky, are some of the signatures.
[XXXVIII]
THE PICCADILLY RESTAURANT
It was a chance remark made by "The Princess," as three of us sat at lunch one Saturday in the open air at the Ranelagh Club, that nowhere in Central London was there an open-air dining place, that led me to ask her and "Daddy," her husband, both of them my very great friends (which is the reason that I permit myself to call them, as the Irish would say, "out of their names"), to dine with me one night in July, weather always permitting, in the open air within fifty yards of Piccadilly Circus.
Walking down Piccadilly, and looking up at the façade of the great Piccadilly Hotel, a building which has something of the nobility of a Grecian temple, and something of the heaviness of a county jail, I had noticed that a grey tent had been put up on the terrace, half-way up to the heavens, behind the great pillars and the gilded tripods, and I knew that this meant that as soon as the evenings were warm the restaurant would cater on the terrace for those who like to dine in the freshest air obtainable in muggy London.
Some form of covering is a necessity for any roof garden in Central London, not as a protection from rain or cold, but to deliver diners from the plague of smuts. Some day, when electricity and gas have between them driven coal far outside the boundaries of the capital, it will be possible for Londoners to breakfast under the plane-trees planted on their roofs, and to look, while they eat, at the roses climbing on the trellis-work which hides their little pleasance from the neighbours on the next roof; but in this present year of grace an open-air meal within the three-mile radius necessitates the blowing of smuts off each plate as soon as it is put on the cloth, and a great portion of the conversation of the table talk centres round the black smudges to be wiped off the diners' noses. The Piccadilly, by pitching its tent on its terrace, has gone as near to open-air dining as is possible in our London atmosphere.
It was well that I had added the provision "weather permitting" to my invitation, for on the evening that my two guests motored up from their old manor-house near Richmond the sky had clouded over, a misty rain was falling, and the temperature had dropped to November level. The dinner-table that would have been reserved for me on the terrace was cancelled, and a table for three laid in the restaurant of the big hotel—that very handsome saloon panelled with light wood, with gilded carving in high relief on the panels, with a blue-and-gold frieze, and elaborately decorated ceiling and casemented mirrors—a saloon which is a noble example of Louis XIV. decoration. I had ordered my dinner beforehand, taking care to include in it some of the specialities of the kitchen of the Piccadilly, and had interested in the designing of the little feast M. Berti, the restaurant manager, and the chef de cuisine, M. Victor Schreyeck; while M. Pallanti, one of the maîtres d'hôtel, who is an old acquaintance, had put me in that portion of the room which is under his special charge. The dishes on which the kitchen of the Piccadilly especially prides itself are its délices de sole and its filets de sole, both named after the establishment, its poularde à l'étuvée au Porto, its poularde Reine Mephisto, its cailles Singapore, and its vasques of peaches, or of raspberries, or of strawberries, all titled Louis XIV. in sympathy with the decoration of the room.
This was the dinner that I ordered, a summer dinner for a hot evening, for I had hoped that the weather would be kind, and that we should be able to eat on the terrace:
Melon de Cantaloup Frappé.
Kroupnick.
Sole à la Piccadilly.
Suprême de Volaille Jeannette.
Caille Royale Singapore.
Cœur de Romaine.
Asperges Vertes. Sauce Divine.
Vasque de Fraises Louis XIV.
Corbeille d'Excellences.
I waited for my guests in the lounge where the orchestra plays, a lounge panelled, as the restaurant is, and with paintings of fruit in the circular wreaths above the doors, with cane easy-chairs and cane tables with glass tops scattered about, with palms in great china vases, with gilt Ionic capitals to the pilasters on either side of the great supports to the roof, and with a great painted ceiling. A glazed screen with windows and doors in it separates the lounge from the restaurant.
"The Princess," when my guests arrived, was wearing a most becoming gown, and had brought her furs with her, in case I, as a mad Englishman, might insist on dining on the terrace in spite of the rain. "Daddy," who is, like myself, an old soldier en retraite, had put on one of his Paris unstarched shirts with many pleats, and was wearing his fusilier studs. M. Berti, his beard pointed like that of a Spaniard, bowed to us at the entrance of the restaurant, and directed us to our table, by which was a second little table with on it all the apparatus for the elaborating of the fish dish before our eyes. Near it stood the maître d'hôtel, pale and determined, feeling, I think, that the reputation of the house was in his hands, and a waiter and a commis under his immediate orders. "The Princess," as I have written, wore a most becoming gown, and it pleased me that she should have so framed her native beauty, and I am sure it also pleased her, for at the other tables all the other guests were exceedingly well groomed and well frocked—a most good-looking company.
The soup, a white Russian soup with barley as its dominating ingredient, is one of those peasant soups the French have borrowed from the Russians, and have refined in promoting it to the haute cuisine. The sole à la Piccadilly is a fish dish which grows to perfection as it is manipulated before the eyes of the expectant diners. A wide bath of mixed whisky and brandy boils up over the spirit lamp, and into this the boiled soles make a plunge before they are carried away to be filleted; then into the almost exhausted mixture of spirits is poured the sauce, which is a "secret of the house," and as this boils up first cream and then butter is added to it. The filets de sole come hot to table, and over each portion of the fish is poured the precious sauce, sharp tasting, with a suggestion of anchovy amidst its many flavours. While this sole was being prepared, "Daddy" at first talked on of polo matches at Ranelagh and golf at Richmond, and did not notice that both "The Princess" and myself had become silent, as gourmets should be when watching a delicate culinary operation, but he, too, after a while felt the solemnity of the moment, and became dumb until the fish was before him, and he could pronounce it to be "very good indeed," an emphatic expression of opinion on the part of all three of us which, I trust, was conveyed to M. Schreyeck in his domains. The suprême de volaille was a noble chaudfroid of chicken with a rich stuffing or farce, I am not sure which is the correct description, in which foie gras was the dominating note. The quails were named after the island of Singapore, because with them in the china dish came a most savoury accompaniment of pine-apple pulp and juice—and there are thousands of acres of pine-apples in Singapore—an admirable contrast to the flesh of the plump birds. To this dish also our council of three gave high praise. The bowl of strawberries and ice and fruit flavouring, another of the dishes of the house, made an admirable ending to a very good dinner, and with this dinner we drank a champagne strongly recommended by the house, Irroy 1904. I paid my bill, the total of which came to £3, 13s. 6d., the charge being 12s. 6d. a head for the dinner, which was a small sum for such delicate fare, and then we went into the lounge, where the band was still playing, to drink coffee and liqueurs, and to allow "Daddy" to smoke one of the very long cigars of which he always carries a supply.
It was still raining when my two guests started in their motor car back to Richmond, but they declared that they were fortified for their journey down into the country by a most satisfactory dinner.
The Piccadilly Hotel of to-day stands partly on the site of the agglomeration of halls and bar and restaurant which all came under the name of St James's Hall, the bar and restaurant being, in the mouths of the frequenters thereof, "Jemmy's." The great hall was in its day the centre of the musical world, and its Monday Pops and its classical concerts were celebrated. In a smaller hall the Moore and Burgess Minstrels flourished for many years until fickle London for a while grew tired of burnt-cork minstrelsy. The big bar of the St James's declined, as did most other restaurant bars, when gentlemen no longer cared to be seen taking their liquid refreshment standing, and the clientele of the restaurant was decidedly Bohemian. When "Jemmy's" was wiped off the map of London there were not many tears shed at its disappearance. The Piccadilly Hotel and its restaurant, when they were first opened, went through their teething troubles, as do most new establishments. The restaurant opened with a great flourish of trumpets, most of its personnel coming straight from Monte Carlo to London, but though the maîtres d'hôtel knew who was who in the principality of Monaco they were not so well acquainted with the personalities of London life. All these matters invariably straighten themselves out. I read in the columns of City intelligence that the hotel, under the management of Mr F. Heim, who is now managing director, is a financial success, and is paying good dividends. The restaurant has gathered to itself a clientele that is smart and well-dressed, and it treats its guests excellently.
To the great grill-room, which lies down in the basement below the restaurant, and which is one of the largest and one of the busiest places of good cheer in London, I allude in my chapter concerning some of the grill-rooms.
[XXXIX]
THE RENDEZVOUS
Behind every successful restaurant there is some personality—a clever proprietor, a great cook, a managing director with a talent for organisation, or a popular maître d'hôtel. The Rendezvous, in Dean Street, has been brought to prosperity and popularity by the work of one man, its proprietor, M. Peter Gallina. He is a dapper little Italian, with a small moustache, a man of good family who ran away from home as a boy and has made his way by his native cleverness and perseverance, and by the possession of an exceptionally keen palate. He grounded himself well in all that concerns a restaurant in a small Parisian establishment not far from the Avenue d'Iéna. When he had learned there enough of the trade to qualify him to be a manager of any restaurant he came to England with his savings in his pocket and took the position of manager in a small Strand restaurant, while he looked about for an opportunity to become a proprietor and to possess a restaurant of his own. He had the name of his restaurant ready before he found a suitable house, for one day after a meal he sat thinking of various matters and idly scribbled on the tablecloth a series of capital "R's." Then, with no special intention, he fitted on names to the "R's"—Rome, Renaissance, Renommé, Rendezvous, and suddenly found that the title he wanted had come to him. And in the same chance way he found the position he wanted for his restaurant. During the period that he was at the restaurant in the Strand he used to go to Dean Street to buy coffee for his little household, and he noticed one day that a house there was to let. It had been used by one of those mushroom clubs which spring up almost in a night in Soho, and the police had terminated its short existence by making a raid on the premises as a gaming-house. M. Gallina saw his opportunity, took it, spent some money in brightening it up, and gave it an old-English window on its ground floor, and that was the beginning of the Rendezvous.
The gastronomic scouts soon discovered that Peter Gallina in his little restaurant was giving extraordinarily good value at very moderate prices, and some of them sent me word concerning it. Mr Ernest Oldmeadow, the distinguished novelist, was one of the first of Gallina's customers, and brought many others to the newly established restaurant. Mr G. R. Sims, the genial "Dagonet" of The Referee, was one of the first among the scribes to tell the general public of the existence of the Rendezvous, and he wrote a ballad in its honour. I, in the early days of the existence of the restaurant, made the acquaintance both of it and its proprietor, who then, as now, affected clothes of an original cut. In his restaurant Peter Gallina wears a small double-breasted white jacket, with skirts and a very wide opening in front. This opening is filled by the most voluminous black cravat that has been seen since the days of the Dandies. A small white apron is another article of his costume. In those early days M. Gallina oscillated rapidly and continuously between the kitchen and the restaurant, first seeing that the dishes were properly prepared, and then watching his customers appreciatively eat the food. He had no licence then to sell wines, and a small boy was constantly sent scurrying across the road to a wine-merchant's shop almost opposite, a shop which should have interest for all readers of books, for its proprietor is a well-known author.
M. Gallina in a little book of "Eighteen Simple Menus," with the recipes for all the dishes, a very useful little book which he used to give away to his customers, but which he now sells to them for a shilling, has in a preface set down some "Golden Rules for Cooks," and the first of these is "Buy good materials only. The best cook in the world cannot turn third-class materials into a first-class dish." This rule M. Gallina has always observed himself.
The Rendezvous has constantly been increased in size. A house next door to it fell vacant, and M. Gallina at once took it and converted it into part of his restaurant. Then with larger dining-room came the necessity for a larger kitchen, and this matter was put in hand. A wine licence granted to the restaurant brought with it all the responsibilities of a cellar, and M. Gallina has now an admirable kitchen and offices, with walls of shining white tiles, and a cellar big enough to hold all the wine that his customers require. A tea and cake shop, with tea-rooms on the first floor, the Maison Gallina, next door but one to the restaurant, was the next achievement of the enterprising little man, and, finally, he rounded off his restaurant by building at the back a new room, all dark oak and mirrors and Oriental carpets, with a handsome oak gallery running round it.
The Rendezvous Restaurant is now one of the landmarks of Dean Street. The wide windows of its ground floor are of little square panes, each window set in a white wooden frame, above a facing of glazed red tiles, and before them stands a line of Noah's Ark trees in green tubs. Over these ground-floor windows the restaurant's name is written in Old English characters on a white ground. A line of shrubs in winter and flowers in summer is beneath the windows of the first floors of the two old houses, and at night a row of globes blazes with electric light above the name of the restaurant.
The interiors of the two front rooms on the ground floor of the restaurant have been decorated to represent the parlours of an Old English farmhouse. There are heavy black beams supporting the ceiling, the walls are panelled with green cloth in wooden frames, the electric lamps give their light in old lanterns, and there are silver wine coolers with ferns in them on the broad window-sill. Upstairs, and there are three staircases in the restaurant, one of the rooms on the first floor is kept in its original Georgian panelled simplicity, while the other is a Dutch room with plaques of Delft ware on the walls. The new room at the back I have already described.
The clientele of the restaurant comprises every class of Londoner from princes to art students. The late Prince Francis of Teck often dined there. I have seen ladies in all their glory of tiaras of diamonds and of pearl necklaces eating an early meal at the Rendezvous before going to the opera; and the youngster who is one day going to obtain Sargent's prices for his pictures, but is still in the chrysalis stage, and the as yet undiscovered Melbas and Clara Butts receive just as much attention when they eat the one dish which forms their lunch or dinner as do the great people of the land who indulge in many courses. The Royalty is but a score of steps away from the Rendezvous, and many playgoers on their way to that theatre dine at the restaurant or sup there after the performance. Messrs Vedrenne and Eadie quite appreciate the advantage it is to have a flourishing restaurant just outside their doors, and gave M. Gallina every encouragement when he first established himself in Dean Street.
The Rendezvous has a carte du jour which gives a great choice of dishes. The long card is covered with items printed in red or written in blue ink, and special delicacies are set down in scarlet. There are various sole dishes and a score of those of other kinds of fish. The entrées take up half the card, and birds and salads, vegetables, savouries and dessert each have a thick little column of written items under their respective headings. The prices, as I have already written, are quite moderate for good material. The fish dishes average eighteenpence, the entrées a little less. I have eaten at a dinner-party given in the new room a very noble feast, and I have dined by myself on soup, sole, a navarin of lamb and an entremet, my dinner, without wine, costing me five-and-threepence.
There are two specialities of the house—the sole Rendezvous and the soufflé Gallina-—which should be included in any typical dinner of the establishment, and the last time that I dined at the restaurant and entertained a lady I included both of these in the menu, which ran thus:
Melon Cantaloup.
Crème Fermeuse.
Soles Rendezvous.
Aile de Poularde en Casserole.
Aubergine à l'Espagnole.
Soufflé Gallina.
Café.
The sole Rendezvous is an admirable method of cooking the fish with a white wine sauce and most of the other good things that a cook can use in a fish dish, all of which make it admirable to the taste but exceedingly rich. The soufflé Gallina is a soufflé with brandied cherries, and it is served in a little lagoon of fine champagne cognac which is set alight. It is by no means a teetotal dish. This dinner for two, with a pint of Vieux Pré, a champagne recommended by the house, and a bottle of Mattoni, came very near a sovereign.
[XL]
THE PALL MALL RESTAURANT
Every Londoner knows the Pall Mall by sight, the restaurant one door above the Haymarket Theatre, and is familiar with the lace-curtained window of its buffet, its entrance and the line of five French windows with flowers before them on its first floor, and there are few playgoers who have not, before spending an evening at the Haymarket or His Majesty's over the way, dined at one time or another at the Pall Mall Restaurant. It is a restaurant which has prospered exceedingly, and has done so because its two proprietors, MM. Pietro Degiuli and Arnolfo Boriani—both ex-head waiters at the Savoy and the Carlton—see to every detail concerning their restaurant and their kitchen and their cellar with untiring diligence and with a complete knowledge. They are both—Degiuli, small and neat and dapper, M. Boriani, broad, wearing a curled-up moustache and looking like a tenore robusto—always in the restaurant at meal-times doing the work of maîtres d'hôtel and giving personal attention to every member of their clientele.
In the ten years that have elapsed since they rechristened the restaurant, which for a short period had been known as Epitaux's, they have made many improvements. The restaurant itself, a high room with a curved roof and two sliding skylights in the roof, which not only let in the light but fresh air as well, is now a white restaurant, with deep rose panels alternating with mirrors between the pilasters. There is a little gilding in the decoration, but as carpet and chairs and lamp-shades conform to the scheme of rose, the restaurant may be described as all white and deep pink. There was originally a musicians' gallery at one end of this dining-hall, a legacy from the Café de l'Europe, as it was called in the fifties, and in the days of the café the doorway was cased in to prevent draughts reaching the worthies who used to sup there after the performance at the Haymarket Theatre. The old wooden screen to the door has been swept away, and people lunch and dine and sup in the gallery which has replaced the domain of the musicians. A little lounge where hosts can wait for their guests, made by absorbing part of the premises of the shop next door, is one of the most recent additions to the Pall Mall, and the Fly-fishers' Club having moved to larger premises, MM. Degiuli and Boriani have been able to construct a banqueting-room on the first floor that, with a private dining-room which can accommodate twenty diners, gives them now quite a large establishment.
As I have written, the two proprietors give personal attention to every matter connected with the restaurant, and they have not forgotten that they are Italians, for in their table d'hôte lunch, the price of which is half-a-crown, one of the dishes is usually an Italian one, and all the coffee made in the establishment is made after the Italian fashion, no metal being allowed to come in contact with the fluid. For their supper menu they always choose simple dishes, which can be cooked directly an order has been given by those who sup. There is a carte du jour, but the dinners that nineteen out of twenty diners order are one or other of the table d'hôte dinners of the day, a four-shilling and a five-and-six one. This was the menu of the more expensive of these two dinners on the last occasion that I dined at the Pall Mall:
Hors d'œuvre Variés.
Consommé Madrilène Froid and Chaud or Germiny.
Saumon Hollandaise.
Cailles Richelieu à la Gelée.
Selle d'Agneau Soubise.
Fonds d'Artichauts Barigoule.
Pommes Château.
Volaille en Cocotte.
Salade.
Fraises Melba.
The soup was good, the quail especially attracted my notice, for its jelly was flavoured with capsicum, giving it thus a special cachet.
The service at the Pall Mall is quick and silent, and, though there is no unseemly hurry, the dinner is quickly served, for most of the people who dine at the Pall Mall are going on to a theatre.
The Pall Mall has an exceedingly comme il faut clientele, and any man who did not wear evening clothes or a dinner jacket in the restaurant would feel himself rather a fish out of water there at dinner-time, and would probably take cover in the gallery. I see at the Pall Mall very much the same people whom I see at the Savoy and the Carlton, and the lady who dines at the smaller restaurant before going to a theatre to-day, probably to-morrow, when a dinner constitutes the entertainment for the evening, is taken to dine at one of the larger restaurants. And perhaps because the Pall Mall stands where the stage of one of the theatres in the Haymarket used to be, the restaurant numbers amongst its clientele many of the great people of the opera and of the theatre, as its book of autographs shows. This is a book full of scraps of wisdom and wit, and the Stars of Song and Politics and the Stage have not been afraid to cap each other's remarks. Thus when Madame Patti leads off on the top of a page with a charming platitude, "A beautiful voice is the gift of God," Madame Yvette Guilbert inscribes below a reminder that "An ugly voice is also the gift of God"; Sir Herbert Tree, taking a different view from that of either of the ladies, asks whether a voice should not be considered "A visitation of Providence"; Miss Mary Anderson sides with her sex, for she opines that "All things are the gift of God"; and Sir Rider Haggard rounds off the discussion with "But the greatest gift of God is Silence." Lord Gladstone, about to depart for South Africa, writes, "Faith in the Old Country" as his contribution, and Mr Lloyd George puts immediately below it a sentence in Welsh, which being translated means "Liberty will conquer"; Mr Ben Davies, also a man of gallant little Wales, writes in his native tongue, below Mr Lloyd George's sentence, "You are quite right, Lloyd George, but your liberality has taken most of my money." Mr John Burns, dining at the restaurant on "Insurance Day, 1911," was not stirred up to any poetic flights by the occasion, "Health the only wealth" being his rhymed contribution.
Amongst the signatures in the book is that of Signor Marconi, who is not inclined to write his name more often than is necessary. His contribution was coaxed from him by a flash of wit on the part of M. Boriani. On the menu of the dinner eaten by the inventor of wireless telegraphy appeared the item "Haricots verts à la Marconi." The great electrician asked why they were so named. M. Boriani trusted that the beans were not stringy, and the inventor having reassured him on this point, he said that in this case they might rightly be described as "Sans fil."
MM. Degiuli and Boriani have chosen as the motto of their restaurant, "Venez et vous reviendrez," and this confident prediction has been justified.
There is much history concerning the site on which the Pall Mall now stands. In the latter years of the Stuart dynasty, when the lane which led from Piccadilly down to the Mall gradually became a street of houses, Charles II. gave permission to John Harvey and his partner to sell cattle as well as fodder in the Haymarket. All along this market, on both sides, inns sprang up, and one of them occupied the site where the Pall Mall Restaurant now stands. The inn was pulled down early in the eighteenth century, and on its site Mr Potter, a carpenter, built a "summer" theatre; this theatre was converted by Samuel Foote somewhere about 1760 into a winter theatre. Mr A. M. Broadley has written for the proprietors of the Pall Mall an interesting booklet which deals at length with this theatre and its managers, Foote and the Colmans, and with the great actresses and actors and musicians who appeared on its stage. Mozart played on the spinet there as an infant prodigy; Margaret Woffington made her first bow to an English audience in the part of Macheath in The Beggars' Opera, "after the Irish manner"; and two actresses who married into the peerage—Lavinia Fenton, who died Duchess of Bolton, and Elizabeth Farren, afterwards Countess of Derby—played on its stage. But on 14th October 1820, the Little Theatre, as it was called, closed its doors with the tragedy of King Lear and a farce. It was not at once pulled down, and was still standing in a battered state when the present Haymarket Theatre, built by John Nash, was opened in 1821, just a fortnight before the coronation of George IV. When the Little Theatre was eventually pulled down shops were erected on its site. Two of these were in the year of the first Great Exhibition converted into the Café de l'Europe, the great hall of which, somewhat altered, is the large room of the present restaurant. Mr William John Wilde, who was Buckstone's treasurer at the Haymarket Theatre, became the proprietor of the Café de l'Europe in the late fifties, and as there was no early-closing law in those days the café naturally enough became the favourite supping place for those who had sat through a long evening at the theatre almost next door, and the sturdy critics who congregated in the first row of the pit ate their devilled bones and tripe and onions, Welsh rarebits, chops and potatoes in their jackets, at the café after midnight and passed judgment on the performances of Buckstone and Liston, Sothern and the other famous comedians of the theatre as they supped. Mr D. Pentecost was the last proprietor of the old café. He was, as "Dagonet" in The Referee has lately reminded us, a nephew of Pierce Egan, the author of "Tom and Jerry," and he was, amongst other things, the refreshment contractor to the Alhambra. He was also the proprietor of the Epitaux Restaurant in the colonnade of the opera house in the Haymarket. When that building was pulled down, in order that the Carlton and His Majesty's Theatre should be built on its site, Mr Pentecost transferred the name of Epitaux to the Café de l'Europe. The building was redecorated and MM. Costa and Rizzi became the lessees. Ten years ago, as I have previously written, MM. Degiuli and Boriani became the proprietors and gave the restaurant its present name and its present appearance.