THE CONNAUGHT ROOMS
When it was decided by the contributors to Printer's Pie to entertain their editor, "The Pieman," a little committee of artists and writers, with the editor of The Tatler as secretary, considered various plans for giving Mr Hugh Spottiswoode a dinner with unusual surroundings.
A decision was arrived at that the contributors to the Pie should become Pi(e)rates, for one night only, and in that guise should entertain the Pieman in a pirate haunt, and then the next question was the choice of a dining place and the difficult matter of finding the proprietor or manager of a restaurant who would enter thoroughly into the spirit of the burlesque and would provide a real pirate feast with blood-curdling piratical surroundings. A member of the committee suggested Mr George Harvey, who controls the Connaught Rooms in Great Queen Street, as the very man, and to the next meeting of the committee Mr George Harvey came, quiet, humorous and resourceful, and when he heard the outlines of our scheme he smiled, and said that he thought he quite understood what we wanted.
It was essential to the success of our little joke that the guest of the evening should know nothing of the reception he would get, and when the Pi(e)rates were informed that the dress of a bold buccaneer was to be the wear at dinner at the Connaught Rooms, they were entreated to keep this a secret from the Pieman. Strangely enough, the secret was kept; he had no inkling of what was going to happen to him. When, heralded by a commissionaire, he came up the grand staircase of the restaurant, faultlessly attired in his best evening clothes, he gave a jump when the Master-at-Arms of the Pirates, attired in the levee uniform of a pirate king, suddenly appeared before him with drawn cutlass and a ferocious look, and told two stalwart members of the pirate gang to "Arrest that man!"
If it would interest you to know who the pirates are, when they are not pirating, you have only to look at the contents pages of Printer's Pie and you can there read the list of the authors and artists who were busy between seven and eight o'clock one Friday, in a little room in Great Queen Street, transforming themselves from fairly respectable members of society into the most shocking criminals that ever went to sea. There were pirates of all kinds, all centuries and all classes. There were gentlemen pirates with nickel-plated revolvers; one pirate of particular ferocity from the Barbary Coast had given himself an emerald-green complexion; another pirate, who feared that his good-natured face might belie his costume, carried on his breast a large placard with a photo on it for identification purposes, and the legend "I am an [adjective] pirate." Some of the pirates wore long false noses; many of them had the skull and crossbones on their jerseys; cocked hats with feathers were quite fashionable wear, and no belt had less than three pistols stuck into it. One writer of humorous short stories came as an old growler cabby, explaining that cabmen were the only pirates that he had ever met. The chairman of the dinner, who had been selected for that onerous post because, as the designer of the covers of all the Printer's Pies he had always come first amongst its contributors, had added an Afghan sheepskin coat to his other piratical garment—luckily for him the night was very cold—and was attended by a minor pirate, who carried on a long stick a triangular lantern as a sign of authority.
When the pirates' prisoner was arrested he was requested to step into a little boat on wheels, the doors of the ante-room were flung wide open and the boat was dragged into the presence of the pirate Captain, who stood in the centre of the room, with the pirate band playing "Down Among the Dead Men" on silvered papier-maché instruments to his left, and to his right the pirate crew flourishing pistols and cutlasses. The little boat paused for a moment while the pirates gave a blood-curdling boarding yell, and then continued its career at hydroplane pace into the dining-room, with the pirates following after.
The Crown Room had become a pirates' lair prepared for a feast. The walls had been shut out by scenery representing sea and mountain; the floor was an inch deep in sawdust; in the corners of the room were plantations of palm-trees, with parrots in cages in the midst of them. These parrots missed the opportunity of their lives, for they were so stunned by the noise the pirates made at their meal that they never uttered a single scream.
At one side of the pirates' lair was a great dhow, such as one sees sailing in and out of Aden. It was really a stage for the band and the after-dinner performers, but it had been converted into a dhow. In its tall stern a piano was housed; it had high bulwarks, a tall mast and a great lateen sail. From the mast-head flew the "Jolly Roger," and in the rigging was a huge red lantern.
A dozen round tables had been prepared for the pirates, with sheets of brown paper laid on them as tablecloths. The room was lighted by candles stuck into bottles and set on the tables. Of knives and forks there were none apparent; the salt was great lumps of the rock variety, the mustard was in teacups and the pepper in screws of brown paper. The menu, which is reproduced at the head of this chapter, was written with an inky stick on torn bits of brown paper, and each pirate's place was marked for him by a card with blood spots on it. Every table had a big card in a split cane set up to mark a pirate locality. There were Skeleton Cove and Murder Gulch, Coffin Marsh, Gallows' Hill, Cannibal's Creek, Dead Man's Rock and others, and the ship's officers, the roll of which included the Stale Mate, the Hangman, the Powder Monkey and the Ship's Parrot, presided each at a table. The first mate sat next to the Captain, and it was his business to wave a black flag over his great commander's head at intervals, and to beat constantly a big drum which was concealed under the table.
The waiters at the feast looked even greater ruffians than the feasters, which is saying a great deal. They were the most shocking set of criminals and marine cut-throats that ever carried a dish of salt junk. Most of them had black eyes; their bare arms were wondrously tattooed, and they all smoked short clay pipes as they went about their work. The pirates, because of their superior station, smoked long churchwardens, of which, and playing-cards, there was a plentiful supply scattered about the tables. One waiter entered so thoroughly into his part that he danced a little hornpipe as he took round the dishes.
When the feast had commenced with oysters, the pirate waiters suddenly produced a supply of knives and forks, and menus of what the real dinner was. Below is the menu of the real dinner, and an excellent dinner it was. Pirates who had known better days nodded to each other approvingly across the table when they had eaten the fish dish, which was exceptionally good. Mr George Harvey most certainly has succeeded in regilding the faded glories of the Freemasons' Tavern and in putting the Connaught Rooms, which is the title of the rebuilt house, very firmly on the dining map of London.
Huîtres Royales.
Consommé Excelsior.
Timbale de Sole Archiduc.
Poularde Hongroise.
Nouilles au Parmesan.
Noisette de Pré-Salé Montmorency.
Pommes Anna.
Faisan en Cocotte à la Truffe.
Salade Jolly Roger.
Jambon d'York au Champagne.
Poires St George.
Friandises.
Barquettes de Laitances.
Dessert.
Café Double.
The band, a real string orchestra, in white jackets, on the deck of the dhow, played rag-time melodies and other inspiriting airs, and occasionally made itself heard above the noise with which the pirates settled down to their feast. The big drum was always in action, and somewhere outside the hall a waiter shook a sheet of theatre-thunder in a vain attempt to equal the noise of the drum within; pistols were discharged in all parts of the lair, and the pirate with an emerald-green complexion, whenever he thought the Captain looked dull, walked over to his table and fired a pistol into his ear to cheer him up. When this failed to attract the Captain's attention, a large cracker was set fire to under his chair.
One of the groups of pirates, thinking that the band were having far too peaceable a time, suddenly drew pistols and cutlasses, boarded the dhow, and put the musicians to the sword, which delighted the fiddlers very much. There was also dancing during the dinner, for two of the pirates, wishing to give a real society touch to the function, rose and performed a wild Tango in and out of the tables. That was not the only dance, for a fat carver, who wore a conical white cap and white garments plentifully besprinkled with gore, had stood during the early stages of dinner and had looked on at the pirates' antics, being much amused thereat. One of the pirates, thinking that a spectator ought to have some share in the active work of the fun, seized him and forced him to dance, and dance the carver did, with such good will that he finally tired the pirate out, and remained, perspiring and smiling, the victor in the dance.
When dinner was over the guest of the evening was tried by court-martial. He was accommodated with a chair in the centre of the room and given a cigar and a drink; a wide circle of candles in bottles was put about him to give light to the proceedings, and all the pirates sat in groups in the sawdust, the master-at-arms, with drawn cutlass, behind the prisoner, the accuser, a picturesque ruffian, and the prisoner's friend, an equally forbidding scoundrel, and the pirate Captain being the only individuals standing up. This grouping formed a really striking picture, and I have no doubt that many artistic eyes took in its possibilities. The accusation brought against the prisoner was that he had paid income tax (groans from the pirates), that he was even suspected of paying super-tax (yells of fury from the pirates), that he kept tame animals, notably Welsh rarebits, and that he fed them. The pirate Captain had already warned the prisoner that his sentence had been determined upon, and therefore that it was no use for him, or anybody else on his behalf, to plead his cause; but the prisoner's friend had a speech ready, and loosed it off, making the case very much blacker against his client than it had been before. Sentence was then duly pronounced, but as the pirate Captain had mislaid the plank on which the victim was to walk, and as the goldfish which were to represent sharks had been left downstairs, the doom of the victim resolved itself into the presentation to him of a pair of silver hand-cuffs with a tiny watch at the end of one of them.
After the court-martial, the pirates gave themselves and their guest an entertainment. One pirate sang admirably; another pirate, whose name, I think, before he went to sea, was Walter Churcher, told excellent stories, and a third pirate went through the whole performance that the flashlight photographer inflicts on good-natured diners, his apparatus being a whisky bottle and a tin mug, and then handed round photographs he pretended to have taken of our guest.
There was more fun to come, but as midnight was drawing near, and as I belong now to the early-to-bed sect of sea-wolves, I departed quietly. The lift boy at my flat, when he saw the brick-dust of my marine complexion, said to me, as he took me up: "Good gracious, sir, whatever has happened to your face?"
It was a great night altogether!
[XXVI]
APPENRODT'S
I had been, like every other Londoner, aware of the coming of Appenrodt's shops into the panorama of the London streets; but I had never gone into one of the Appenrodt establishments until a year ago, and it was the dread of the armour-plate sandwich of the buffets that sent me there.
I often, when I am going to an early first night at the theatre, cut matters so fine as to dinner that I have only time to eat a couple of sandwiches at a buffet, and as often as not the barmaid, knowing that I am not a regular customer, does a feat of sleight of hand and gives me the roof, the two top sandwiches of the pile. If I protest I am assured that they were fresh-cut not a quarter of an hour ago, and being a moral coward in such matters, I eat them. If I postpone my sandwich meal until after the theatre a second thickness of armour-plate has been added to the bread.
One evening, walking home after the theatre to my flat in the wild north-west, I became aware when I reached Oxford Circus that I was very hungry. Through the windows of Appenrodt's shop at Oxford Circus I could see men in white jackets very busily slicing bread and making sandwiches for the people who sat at the little tables. I went in, ate a couple of ham sandwiches which had been made for me before my eyes, and blessed the name of Appenrodt, for they were all that a ham sandwich should be.
When Appenrodt's headquarters at No. 1 Coventry Street were a-building I watched with interest the putting in of the big plate-glass windows, and after its completion I looked whenever I passed at the big cartes du jour which are put up outside wherever there is space for them. One evening, on my way to a club in the Leicester Square district to dine, I found, just as I arrived at the Coventry Street corner, that I had cut my time very close, and that if I dined at the club I should not be in my place at the rising of the curtain. I looked at the big bills of fare outside Appenrodt's, and went up into the restaurant on the first floor to see whether I could get there a quickly served meal. I had an excellent plate of chicken consommé, a cut from one of the joints of the day—roast veal and bacon—and a rice pudding. I found this simple food quite excellent, and I got to my theatre in plenty of time.
My first experience led me on to other dinners in Appenrodt's restaurant on the first floor, and I found that the dishes, without exception, were admirably cooked, and that the soup and the soufflé omelette with which I now always begin and end a repast at Appenrodt's are noticeably excellent. There is plenty of choice, for the menu of the day comprises four soups, ten fish dishes, at least the same number of entrées, some of these being those that Germans love, vegetables and sweets in due proportion, four joints at lunch-time and the same number at dinner.
This is a typical dinner that I ate one night at Appenrodt's, and these are the prices I paid for the dishes:—crème conti, an excellent white soup, 6d.; suprême de brill Dugleré, 1s. 6d.; pilaff de foie de volaille à la Grecque, 1s. 3d.; and omelette Mylord, which is a form of omelette surprise, 1s. 6d.; and I drank therewith a pint of Rhenish sparkling muscatel with all the taste and bouquet of the grape in it.
The restaurant is all white and gold, and has a low ceiling, but as it has a row of windows on two sides I have no doubt it will be quite cool in summer. The curtains to the windows are of some pleasant straw-coloured material, with pink spots on it; the carpet is dark. A glass screen is in front of the lifts which bring the dishes down from the kitchen at the top of the house. There are two staircases, one, the main one, from Coventry Street, and another one from Wardour Street, leading up to the restaurant. The waiters are mostly Germans, who speak good English, and who have the bearing of drilled men. I have no doubt that Mr Appenrodt, who at one time sacrificed a growing business to go back to Germany to do his military training, does not engage any of his countrymen who have shirked their years of service. The only drawback to the restaurant that I have noticed is an unavoidable one owing to the construction of the house, that the personnel of the coffee kitchen have to pass through the restaurant coming and going about their work.
The people who dine in the restaurant at Appenrodt's seem to belong to all classes. When I have dined there early I have seen amongst the customers men and ladies whom I recognised as belonging to the Variety profession, and who eat an early meal before going to the theatres where they perform. Many of Appenrodt's countrymen and countrywomen dine in the restaurant, and the black-coated classes of respectable Londoners and their womenfolk have already found out how good the food is there.
Having seen all these things, and feeling sure that Appenrodt, with his many shops and his restaurants, meant a new power come into the centre of London, I became curious as to the owner, or owners, of the name and asked whether it was just a nom de fantasie or whether there really is such a person in the flesh as a Mr Appenrodt. I was assured that there was a Mr Appenrodt and that if it would gratify my curiosity to talk to him he would be very pleased to meet me.
And so it came that I met Mr Appenrodt in his own restaurant, and found him to be a very quiet, patently sincere German gentleman, with a round face, pleasant, steady eyes, hair a little thin on the top and a large dark moustache. He told me across a luncheon-table the story of his life, and I was able to assure him that other people besides myself would find the history of his early struggles in England an interesting one.
He was born in Berlin in 1867, and, having been a clerk in a Hamburg shipping agency, came to this country when he was nineteen years old to learn the English language. He soon found a billet in a City office, as correspondence clerk at a pound a week, and he determined to stay in England, though his father, who was a spirit distiller, wished him to return to Germany and the distillery.
When he was twenty years old he thought he knew London well enough to engage in business on his own account. His father would not help him, but he had £2000 left him by his mother, and with this he engaged in various speculations, the thought of which now moves him to hearty laughter. He wanted to induce the English to smoke the German students' long pipes and to use washable india-rubber playing cards.
These and other such brilliant ideas made a very serious inroad on his capital. He held, amongst other agencies, one for a manufacturer of preserves, and this brought him into touch with German provision shops. These shops were all tucked away in little side streets in the Soho district, and Mr Appenrodt thought that there would be a good opening for German delicatessen if it was possible to show them in better premises and with more appetising surroundings. He opened in a basement at the corner of Lombard Street and Gracechurch Street a shop, in a room about twenty feet square. At that time there were no light refreshment places in the City except the A.B.C. shops, and Mr Appenrodt soon had a large clientele for his little shop. He saw that there was a fortune to be made in catering for the wants of the middle classes, but before he experimented on a larger scale he went back to Germany to serve his one year of military service, having sold his little business to a man who transferred it to some licensed premises and made a fortune by it.
When Mr Appenrodt came back, having completed his term of military service, he found that his luck in the City had petered out, for not one of the shops he opened in succession proved to be a success. The last straw was a shop in the Commercial Road, which seemed likely to eat up all the funds he had left. But it was during this last attempt that his luck turned. He engaged a young lady as shop assistant, and she brought him good luck and success; and his love story, for it was a love story, led up to the right ending of all love stories, a happy marriage. And he backed his luck, for he and his wife made a last bold bid for fortune by taking a shop in the West End, at the corner of Coventry Street and Whitcomb Street. This venture proved an instantaneous success. Mr Appenrodt and his wife at first did all the work themselves, and their business hours were from nine a.m. until one the next morning. They had no afternoons or evenings off, and worked all and every Sunday.
Easier times came, assistant after assistant was engaged, and one branch after another was opened. Not all of these proved successes, but in spite of minor set-backs, the firm of two continued to flourish more and more, and has now the big shop and restaurant at Coventry Street, eight branches in various parts of London and a big depot in Paris. Mr Appenrodt has refused many offers to turn his undertaking into a company. He looks on his five hundred employees as his family, and is not willing to put them at the mercy of strangers.
That was Mr Appenrodt's story to me across the table, and when I asked him questions he amplified his personal history in various ways. He told me how the Parisian depot came to be established: that one day he met a former employee, one of his own countrymen, who talked French like a native of France. He knew his man, and he told him that he was just going over to Paris, and that if he could find a suitable shop to let there, he would take it and put his old friend in as his partner and as the manager. He found the shop, put his friend into it, and it has proved a most successful speculation. He told me of the various obstacles he had to overcome in building his premises in Coventry Street; of the large sums he expended to buy out the owners of the three houses he required and of the difficulties he experienced in obtaining a licence to sell beer and other liquors; how at last he bought two public-houses and surrendered their licences, and how the Licensing Magistrates then gave him permission to serve alcoholic drinks, but only with food. His prices, Mr Appenrodt told me, are fixed as being the lowest prices at which he can sell first-class food and make a reasonable profit on it without looking to any profit from the drinks that are sold, for no pressure whatever is put on the patrons of his restaurant to drink anything stronger than water.
I asked Mr Appenrodt what his special hobby was, and he told me that it was to buy public-houses and to turn them into Appenrodt establishments, which, if you come to think of it, is as true a work of reform as any that is being carried out in London.
He and his wife, he went on to say, love the work they do. They go together frequently to the firm's factory in the country, where workmen, many of them imported from Germany, make the sausages, the glassed delicacies and other specialities of the house, and on fine days to the farm they own at Hendon, a picturesque tract of country through which the River Brent flows, where they breed pigs for the pork sausages—though English pork is so firm that Dutch pork or other foreign porks must be mixed with it to make it bind—and fowls and other farm produce.
Before I said good-bye to Mr Appenrodt he asked me if I would like to see the kitchen and other parts of the house, and I said "With pleasure," for I never think that the final word can be said regarding a restaurant until one has seen the kitchen that supplies it. We went upstairs to the top of the house, passing on the way a room in which half-a-dozen women were peeling potatoes for the potato salads, potatoes specially imported from Germany, for English potatoes crumble too easily to be satisfactory material. And eventually we came to a big kitchen at the top of the house, very airy and very clean, where a French chef de cuisine rules over cooks of all nationalities. Descending again, we went into the basement to look at Appenrodt's Keller, decorated after the German style with landscapes and figures, where two bands play alternately all the afternoon and evening, and where good Germans, and Englishmen who like good German beer, congregate to eat simple food and drink the produce of Austrian and German hop-fields.
And finally I walked round the big shop on the ground floor, where at the marble counter the men in white were busy cutting sandwiches, and Mr Appenrodt explained to me the beauties of the glassed delicacies and the great variety of sausages of all countries, and as he took up one after another, sausages of majestic size, products of Germany or Italy, cut so as to show a section, and smaller sausages in glass jars, and bunches and packages of sausages, and Swiss sausages in a shape to take up very little room in a knapsack, I felt coming over me exactly the same feeling that I experience when a collector of beautiful china, or priceless lacquer or wonderful metal-work explains to me the beauties of his collection, a feeling that I too want to collect that particular kind of curio. If I were much in Mr Appenrodt's company I feel quite sure that I should become an enthusiastic amateur in the matter of sausages.
[XXVII]
THE BURFORD BRIDGE HOTEL
One of the pleasantest short runs out of London by motor car is to Box Hill and the little hotel which lies just below it. In summer the most picturesque way of getting to the hotel is either by one of the Brighton coaches, which make it their lunching place, or by the coach which goes to Box Hill and back in a day. And by no means an uncomfortable, and certainly the cheapest, way of going down to the hotel is to do as I did one Sunday—journey by the L.B. & S.C. Railway, getting glimpses of Epsom and the great rolling common land of Ashtead, of little rivers, and old mills, and wooded downs, on the way.
The Burford Bridge Hotel, which takes its name from the wide brick bridge near by, over the River Mole, stands alongside the high road where it curves from the hill-side down to the level. It is a picturesque building, for when the Surrey Trust, of which more anon, took the house, it was a mere wayside inn. It has been gradually built on to, and is now more a group of houses of white rough-cast and slate roofs than one house. It has rambling tiled-roofed stables and a garage alongside it, and is surrounded by tall trees. Behind it, just where the hill begins to rise, are its gardens, with turf terraces and geraniums in terra-cotta pots on white pedestals. A great cedar stands in the midst of one of the lawns and another lawn is a bowling-green. Some of the trees on the hill-side stretch out great branches which give shadow to the garden-seats.
Creepers climb over the house, there are rose-bushes by the paths, and out beyond the bowling-green an orchard of old fruit-trees is on the banks of the Mole, a brown stream in which the weeds wave gently as it moves with a pleasant rustle through the down country on its way to join the Thames. There are two dovecotes in the garden of the hotel, and the flutter of white wings in the sunlight is pretty to see. Behind the gardens is Box Hill, one part of which is steep, grassy down scored with white footpaths, the other half stony slopes so steep as to be almost cliffs, up which the woods and undergrowth climb. On the Sunday of my visit the dark green of these woods was scarcely touched by the russet and orange of the autumn tints.
In the old portion of the house there are small rooms on the ground floor, and above, a dozen little bedrooms with flower-boxes in their windows and bell-pulls hanging by the fireplaces; for though there is electric light all over the house, the old-fashioned bell-pulls and the long line of bells in the corridor have been left as an old-world touch. Out into the garden there juts a newly built part of the house, with a large dining-room on the ground floor and bedrooms above. The dining-room is panelled with chestnut wood to within a couple of feet from the ceiling. It has on one side recesses, one of which forms an ingle-nook for the fireplace, and opposite to them, in the wall facing the garden, are many French windows which give on to the lawns. At one end of this pleasant room is a great bow-window looking down the length of the lawns and orchard, and the tables in this bow are the ones most sought after. The strips of red carpet on the polished wooden floor deaden the sound of the feet of the waiters as they go to and fro, the chairs are handsome ones of red leather, and as they bear on their backs a scroll with "The Gaiety" on it, I presume they were bought when the Gaiety Restaurant breathed its last.
All the classes for which the old inn, turned hotel, caters are provided for. There is a refreshment-room for the chauffeurs, a bar for the rustics. There is also a very pleasant sanctum, which I should have called the bar parlour, but which is dubbed the lounge, in which are the heads of some of the foxes killed by the local pack of hounds, and a photograph of a meet at the hotel, some coaching prints, a picture of a racehorse and its jockey, some little stags' heads which were in the house when it was bought by the Trust, a grandfather clock, some Japanese bronzes and Wedgwood vases, some old-fashioned wooden arm-chairs and some big leather ones. It is in this comfortable room, with a long stretch of window looking on to the road, that the worthies of the neighbourhood assemble to talk over local politics and other important matters. There is a little ante-chamber to the dining-room with comfortable seats in it, a coffee-room and a drawing-room which runs the full width of the old house and is the room in which the ladies staying in the house sit after dinner.
The Surrey Public House Trust, which bought the Burford Bridge Inn, and in whose hands it has become one of the most flourishing small country hotels in England, is an association of noblemen and gentlemen of Surrey who have bought a dozen inns and hotels in the county, and who run them on the sanest and soundest possible lines. The sale of alcoholic drinks is not looked to as the principal source of profit, and as none of the houses owned by the Trust are tied houses, the goods, eatable and drinkable, are purchased in the best and cheapest markets. The company has as its manager at Burford Bridge Mr "Mike" Hunt, who comes of the family who were the lessees of the Star and Garter at Richmond in its palmy days. Mr Hunt, plump, light-haired, with a moustache somewhat resembling that of the German Emperor, knows all there is to know of hotel management, and the eight and a half years he has been at Burford Bridge are the years in which the hotel has risen to its present fame. He knows pretty nearly every motorist who uses the Brighton road, and is a keen supporter of local sport.
The road to Dorking at certain times of the day, especially on Sundays, is alive with motor cars and motor cycles, and the cars at lunch-time and at tea-time cluster in front of the hotel like swarming bees. In the big dining-room the lunch that is served is an excellent one. There is a choice of two soups, one thick, one clear; fish—on this particular Sunday there were some excellent lobsters—a great choice of cold meats and one hot meat dish, and a choice of puddings. A cut from the cheese is the ending of lunch, and then a cup of coffee served under one of the trees on the lawn. Half-a-crown is the charge made for this very ample meal.
If you are making a day of it, as I did on this Sunday, it is pleasant in the afternoon to stroll past the station, near which a little wooden chapel stands thatched with reeds, and on through country roads where the little roses of the brambles were turning to blackberries, and past garden hedges where the box and holly mingle, out towards Updown Woods. Once away from the clatter and roar of the main road one is soon in the heart of the most beautiful country in Surrey, and one comes back to the hotel, when the rush of the motors returning to town is lulling, to find a little blue mist coming up from the valley before the distant wooded hills, and all the rooks winging their way homeward to their rookery in the great trees, and in the broad meadow by the Mole across the road, scores and scores of rabbits out for a frolic.
This is the dinner that I ate on that Sunday evening at Burford Bridge:
Consommé à la Reine.
Thick Giblet Soup.
Boiled Turbot, Sauce Hollandaise.
Roast Leg of Mutton.
French Beans. Potatoes.
Roast Duckling or Roast Partridge.
Salad.
Beignets Soufflés.
Tartlets Confiture.
Cheese, etc.
The giblet soup was excellent, the turbot fresh, and, though the mutton might have been the more tender for another day of hanging, the partridge and the salad were capital and the beignet made with a very light hand. The price of the dinner was 4s. 6d., and I drank with it a pint of Rüdesheimer, which cost me 2s. 9d.
A large party of ladies and men who were staying in the hotel had a table in the centre of the big room and were very merry over their meal. Two pretty girls and a young man, motoring up to London, who stopped at the hotel to eat a dinner on their way, two pleasant-faced ladies staying at the hotel, and various couples of men, were some of the diners that night. After dinner I watched the departure of the motorists, who were completing their journey up to London, sat for a while by the fire in the drawing-room, for there was sharpness in the September night air, and at ten o'clock, gently tired by my afternoon's walk on the hills, went up to bed in a clean little bedroom with some good old prints on its walls. Next morning the sound that woke me was the cawing of the rooks on their way to the fields.
[XXVIII]
THE RITZ
The Ritz Hotel and Restaurant will keep in the remembrance of Londoners the name of the foremost hôtelier of our days, M. Ritz, a man whose genius is written across Europe and America, from Paris to Frankfort, from Biarritz to Salsomaggiore, from Lucerne to Madrid, from Budapest to New York. Too much quick brain work unfortunately has broken down M. Ritz's health, and he is never likely to take any share again in the control of the hotels which bear his name. He was the man who first taught the mass of the rich English how to dine in cultured comfort in their own capital; yet to the great majority of those who benefited by his perfect taste and his genius for giving unostentatious luxury to the gourmets of the world he was an unknown personality. Duchesses and actresses, legislators and actors, explorers and curates, all are known to the public by their photographs in shop windows and in the newspapers, but I never saw a photograph of Ritz in a Regent Street shop or in a journal.
It was by chance that he first came to England. When the Savoy Hotel was opened M. Ritz was manager of the Hotel National at Lucerne and of the Grand Hotel at Monte Carlo: Mr D'Oyly Carte found him at the Grand Hotel, and asked him if he would come to the Savoy for six months to put the restaurant in order. He came, bringing with him M. Escoffier, who had been chef at the Grand. Ritz at the Savoy made the supper after the theatre the popular meal it still continues to be, though it is, thanks to the Early Closing Act, a scramble to eat five-shillings' worth of food in half-an-hour, and he also discovered, while at the Savoy, that if a restaurant wishes a large number of its guests to be of the softer sex a band is a necessity. He saw that an Austrian band, engaged at the suggestion of Mr Hwfa Williams, kept the diners half-an-hour longer at their tables over their cigars and coffee, and that ladies soon came to consider a dinner unaccompanied by music a tame feast. For the music, often over-loud, to the accompaniment of which I eat my meals in most restaurants, I am not in the least thankful to M. Ritz; but the majority of diners, especially those in petticoats, if such things exist nowadays, think differently.
The fight to obtain music at restaurants on Sundays was one of M. Ritz's great battles. I remember the days, not so very long ago, when a band could not play on Sunday in a restaurant unless some individual dinner-giver engaged it to play for his guests, and had no objection to the other diners listening to it. Another advance made by Ritz was the obtaining of newly baked bread for those who lunched and dined at the Savoy restaurant on a Sunday. The baker who at first supplied this bread broke some law or some regulation in doing this, and was summoned; but M. Ritz, not to be beaten, established a bakery in the hotel to supply the bread. Other restaurants followed suit. He had an enormous facility for quick work, no detail was too small for him, and when he had made up his mind that a thing should be done he took unlimited trouble to have it carried out. At one time, when he managed the Carlton, he could not understand why the coffee made there should not be quite up to the level of the coffee at his hotels on the Continent. He tried every experiment possible, brought water from all parts of England, took every precaution against the dampness of our climate, and finally asked one of the Rümpelmayers, the great pastrycook family of the south of France, to come to London to advise him in this matter.
I used to see M. Ritz at this period of his life very often, and used to chat with him on matters of gourmandise. Very slim, very quiet, with nervous hands clasped tightly together, he would move through the big restaurant seeing everything, saying a word under his breath to a head waiter, bowing to some of the diners, staying by a table to speak to others, possessing a marvellous knowledge of faces and of what the interests were of all the important people of his clientele. There was a maxim, he said, which should be carved in golden letters above the door of every maître d'hôtel, and that maxim was, in English, "A customer is always right," and he always bore this in mind. Whenever at that period M. Escoffier invented a new dish a little jury of three, M. Escoffier, Madame Ritz and M. Ritz, used to sit in judgment on it in solemn conclave before it was allowed to appear on a menu in the restaurant. I once asked Madame Ritz, who has been M. Ritz's real helpmate and counsellor throughout his married life, to what quality she attributed her husband's success in life, and she answered, "sensibility," giving the word its French meaning.
M. Ritz had a talent for doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. I once saw him in the early morning on the platform of the station in Rome. He looked, as he always looked, as though he had come out of a band-box, well-shaved and well-brushed, the ends of his moustache pointed upwards, his whiskers brought down to the level of his mouth, wearing those dark garments of extreme neatness which one always associates with the manager of hotels. He was the one male person on the platform that morning who was not dishevelled, nor tired, nor unshaven; but he had raced across the Continent as fast as trains could carry him to be there to receive a duke and duchess who were going to stay at the hotel in which he had an interest.
A coup du maître d'hôtel, of which he told me afterwards with a smile, was the method by which he put a large luncheon-party of ladies on easy terms with each other. It was a luncheon given at the Carlton and attended by the ladies who were sending the hospital-ship out to South Africa during the Boer War. Many of the ladies did not know each other well, and M. Ritz, exceedingly anxious that the luncheon should be a success, feared that they might not be easily conversational, so at the commencement of the feast he took round a bottle of Château Yquem and suggested to each lady that a little glass of white wine made a good beginning to lunch. In two minutes every lady was chatting most pleasantly to her neighbours whether she had ever seen them before or not. Of the determination of M. Ritz in his early days to learn everything that was to be learned in the restaurant world, I remember one instance, told me by his wife. He held a well-paid post in one of the smart Parisian restaurants, but left it to go to Voisin's at a smaller salary, because he thought there was more to be learned in the good old restaurant in the Rue St Honoré than in the other place of good cheer.
M. RITZ
But it is of the Ritz Restaurant, not of Ritz himself, that I am writing in this chapter. I have read that the Ritz has swallowed up the site of the old "White Horse" cellars, from which so many of the coaches used to start, but the White Horse cellars had crossed the road a century and a half before I began to know my London. The Isthmian Club-house at one time occupied the portion of the site overlooking the Green Park, and when the Club moved on to other quarters it became the Walsingham, part chambers, part restaurant, one of the group of houses and hotels which stretched from the Green Park to Arlington Street. When M. Gehlardi managed the Walsingham, and M. Dutru was its chef, there was no better dining place in London.
The great white stone building of the Ritz, with its arcaded front and its entrance to the restaurant and ballrooms right in the middle of the arcade, is a comparative new-comer to London, in that it was opened in 1906. It is a building, inside and out, of the Louis XVI. period, with every modern luxury added. The Winter Garden, where one awaits one's guests, is a delightful place of creamy marble pillars and gilt trellis-work, casemented mirrors, carved amorini and a fountain with a gilt lead figure of "La Source" looking up at the golden cupids poised above her. The little orchestra of the hotel plays in this Winter Garden, and its music in no way interferes with the conversation in the restaurant.
The restaurant itself may be said to be dedicated to Marie Antoinette, for the gilt bronze garlands which hang from electrolier to electrolier, forming an oval below the painted sky, were designed to represent the flower decorations at one of Marie Antoinette's feasts, and though the garlands have been much lightened, for at first they were too heavy in design, they are still reminiscent of the poor little queen who lived such a merry life and met so sad an end. It is a restaurant of soft colours, of marbles, cream and rose and soft green, of tapestried recesses and of handsome consoles in the niches. Towards the Green Park long arched windows look on to one of the pleasantest prospects in London, and below these windows and between them and the Park is a little forecourt, in which a green tent is pitched when a great ball is to be held in the suite of rooms below the restaurant, and where on hot summer evenings dinner is served in the open air. At one end of the restaurant is a gilt group of Father Thames contemplating an exceedingly attractive lady who represents the Ocean. Everything in the restaurant is of the Louis XVI. period, and the Aubusson carpets and the chairs and all the silver and the china and the glass used in the restaurant and the banqueting rooms harmonise with that period.
The restaurant is not a very large one, and sometimes tables for its guests are set in the Marie Antoinette room with which it connects, and in that portion of the corridor which forms an ante-room. But though it is not of a very great size, the Ritz has a most aristocratic clientele. Royal personages often lunch and dine there, and diplomacy regards it as its own particular dining place, for tables are retained by the secretaries and attachés of two of the Embassies, the German and the Austrian, and, I fancy, by a third one also.
Lady Amalthea had very graciously said she would dine with me at the Ritz, so I went in the afternoon of a hot day to interview M. Kroell, the manager, who stepped across Piccadilly from the Berkeley to succeed M. Elles, who, for a time, managed both the Ritz in Paris and the Ritz in London. With M. Kroell was M. Charles, the manager in charge of the restaurant, and I asked that I might be given that evening a little dinner for two, not of necessity an expensive dinner, but one suitable for a warm evening, and I sent my compliments to M. Malley, the chef de cuisine, and said that I hoped that I should find some of the specialities of his kitchen amongst the dishes.
M. Malley came from the Ritz at Paris when the London Ritz was first opened, having acquired his art at the Grand Véfour and the Café Anglais. He presides over a very spacious range of white-tiled kitchens, in which all the rooms which should be hot are divided by a wide corridor from the rooms which should be cold, and he has a talent for the invention of new dishes, amongst these being a very splendid dish of salmon with a mousse of crayfish, which he has named after the Marquise de Sévigné, a reminiscence of his days at Vichy, and his pêches Belle Dijonnaise, of which more anon. Russian soups are one of the specialities of the Ritz kitchen, and there is a Viennese pastrycook amongst the members of M. Malley's brigade, who makes exquisite pastry. The late King Edward had a special fancy for the cakes made at the Ritz, and a supply used to be sent to Buckingham Palace, but M. Elles told me that this was a State secret, for M. Ménager, the King's chef, might not have liked it to be known that anything from another kitchen entered Buckingham Palace.
As I had left my dinner in the safe hands of the experts, so I also left the question of the champagne we should drink, only asking that it should be one recommended by the house.
Before going on my way I reminded M. Kroell that on the last occasion that I had word with him he was presented with a miniature in brilliants of the order bestowed on him by the King of Spain, and I asked him if he had been awarded any other decorations. M. Kroell laughed, and then modestly owned to the German military medal, and as he told me this he involuntarily squared his shoulders as an old soldier.
Lady Amalthea arrived with military punctuality (she is a soldier's wife) in the best of spirits, wearing a dream of a dress, and her diamonds and turquoises. A table had been kept for us at the upper end of the room, where Lady Amalthea could both see all the guests and be seen by them. She ran through a little selection from Debrett as she took her seat, having scanned most of the diners as she came in, and I was enabled to add to this by identifying a group at one of the tables as some of the Peace Delegates from the Balkans.
Then we settled down to the infinitely important matter of seeing what the dinner was that M. Malley and M. Charles in counsel had arranged for us.
This is the menu, and though at first sight it seems a long one for two people it is an exceedingly light dinner, and we neither of us ate the tiny cutlets which were the gros pièce of the feast. The wine to go with it was a bottle of Roederer 1906:
Melon.
Consommé Glacé Madrilène.
Filet de Sole Romanoff.
Cailles des Gourmets.
Côtes de Pauillac Montpensir.
Petits Pois.
Velouté Palestine.
Poulet en Chaudfroid.
Salade à la Ritz.
Pêche Belle Dijonnaise.
The melon, delightfully cold, struck the right note in a dinner for a hot evening; the Madrilène soup, beautiful in colour and flavoured with tomato and capsicum, carried on the summer symphony; the Romanoff sole was quite admirable, served with small slices of apple and artichokes and with mussels, the apple giving a suspicion of bitter sweetness as a contrast to the flesh of the fish. M. Charles happened to be near our table at this period, not, I think, quite by chance. I assured him that if there was such a thing as a gastronomic nerve M. Malley's creation had found it. The quails formed part of a little pie brought to table in a pie-dish of old blue willow pattern, and with them were coxcombs and truffles and other good things. The poulet en chaudfroid was a noble bird, all white, and in it and with it was a pink mousse delicately perfumed with curry powder, a quite admirable combination. The Ritz salad is of cœurs de romaine, with almonds and portions of tiny oranges with it. Last of the dishes in the dinner came the pêche Belle Dijonnaise, which is one of the creations which have made the fame of M. Malley, and which will become historical. It is a delightful combination of peaches and black currant ice with some cassis, a liqueur of black currants, added to it, and it is called Belle Dijonnaise because of the old Burgundian proverb: A Dijon, il y a du bon vin et des jolies filles.
I do not doubt that many people dined well in London on that hot June evening, but this I will warrant, that no two people, however important they might be, or whatever they paid for their dinner (my bill came to £2, 10s.), dined better than did Lady Amalthea and I at the Ritz, and I make all my compliments to M. Malley.
I should not do the Ritz full justice if I did not refer to the banquets which are served in the Marie Antoinette room and in the great white suite below the restaurant. As typical of the Ritz banquets I give you the menu of one that Lord Haldane gave to the foreign officers visiting London in June 1912, and I also give the accompanying wines:
Caviar d'Esturgeon.
Kroupnick Polonaise.
Consommé Viveur Glacé en Tasse.
Timbale de Homards à l'Américaine.
Suprême de Truite Saumonée à la Gelée de Chambertin.
Aiguillette de Jeune Caneton à l'Ambassade.
Courgettes à la Serbe.
Selle de Veau Braisée à l'Orloff.
Petits Pois. Carottes à la Crème.
Pommes Mignonette Persillées.
Soufflé de Jambon Norvégienne.
Ortolans Doubles au Bacon.
Cœurs de Laitues.
Asperges Géantes de Paris, Sauce Hollandaise.
Pêches des Gourmets.
Friandises.
Mousse Romaine.
Tartelettes Florentine.
Corbeille de Fruits.
Vins.
Gonzalez Coronation Sherry.
Berncastler Doctor, 1893.
Château Duhart Milon, 1875.
Heidsieck Dry Monopole, 1898.
G. H. Mumm, 1899.
Croft's Port, 1890.
La Grande Marque Fine, 1848.
The dinner looks at first glance to be an exceedingly long one, but it is also an exceedingly light one, the saddle of veal being the only substantial dish of the feast. The aiguillettes of duckling from one of the special dishes at the Ritz, and the soufflés and the mousses that come from the Ritz kitchens are always ethereal. This banquet is an excellent example of a feast which is important without being heavy.
[XXIX]
SOME OUTLYING RESTAURANTS
In calling the restaurants about which I write in this chapter "outlying" ones, I do not mean that they are in the far suburbs, but only that they are some little distance from Nelson's Column, which I take to be the centre of restaurant land, and that each of them is in a part of London having its own entity—Knightsbridge, Belgravia, Sloane Square and Bloomsbury.
Rinaldo, in the days when he was at the Savoy, used to stand at the desk by the door and tell us all as we came in what tables had been reserved for us. Of course, as maître d'hôtel, he had other duties, but as he knew my whims concerning the position of my table, and as he always sent me just where I wanted to be, I have him in grateful remembrance for doing this. When he left the Savoy he set up on his own account at No. 15 Wilton Road, which is just opposite Victoria Station, and there, I am glad to say, he still flourishes. He is no longer quite the slim Spanish don with a peaked black beard that he used to be, but proprietorship has a waistcoat-filling effect on restaurateurs, and time softens black hair with streaks of grey.
Rinaldo's restaurant is quite spacious, a high and airy room with plenty of light. Its walls are of pleasant grey with decorations in high relief in the upper part, and on the stained glass of the sky-light are paintings of game and fruit. Baskets of ferns in the shape of boats hang from the roof, and there are always bunches of roses on the tables. Behind a screen at the far end is the service bar where the wines are served out, and in the centre of the room is a very appetising table of cold meats and fruit; the melons and other things that should be kept cold being on a long box of broken ice; the mushrooms reposing in big wooden baskets; the crayfish and the egg-fruit and the other delicacies, according to seasons, all being set out with exceptional taste and looking very tempting.
Quite an aristocratic clientele lunches and dines at Rinaldo's restaurant. Many of the great people of Belgravia like to lunch in a restaurant which is no great distance from their homes; the Monsignori from the neighbouring Roman Catholic Cathedral often go there, and quite a number of gourmets who like the Italian dishes—for Rinaldo, though he looks like a Spaniard, is an Italian—of which there are always some on the bill of fare, are very constant patrons.
The restaurant has an extensive carte du jour, and most people who lunch there prefer to order that meal from the card, though there is a two-shilling lunch for those who are in a hurry. On the carte du jour which I took away with me on the last occasion I lunched in Wilton Road I found amongst the entrées ris de veau financière, Vienna schnitzel, côte de veau Napolitaine, bitock à la Russe, entrecôte Tyrolienne and fritto misto à la Romaine, which shows that the restaurant caters for many nationalities and many tastes. My lunch on this occasion—it was a warm summer day—consisted of a slice of cantaloup melon, 9d.; fritto misto, 1s. 6d.; a cut of cheese; an iced zabajone Milanaise, 1s., and a cup of coffee, which is always excellent at Rinaldo's, and which, disregarding his early bringing-up—for Italians never allow metals to touch coffee—Rinaldo pours out of a fascinating little metal pot. A three-and-six dinner is the dinner of the house, and Rinaldo explained to me that this rarely contains Italian dishes; for Englishmen in the evening find them rather difficult to digest. This is a menu, taken by chance in the autumn, of the dinner of the restaurant:
Hors d'œuvre.
Consommé Tosca.
Crème Portugaise.
Turbot Bouilli. Sce. Homard.
Filet d'Hareng Meunière.
Mignonette d'Agneau Marigny.
Grenadine de Veau Clamart.
Grouse rôti.
Salade.
Choufleur au Gratin.
Glacé Napolitaine.
Mignardises.
Gretener, who is the proprietor of the New Albert Restaurant, 77 Knightsbridge, also, in the past, scored good marks in my memory, for he was manager of that very difficult proposition, the restaurant of the Gare Maritime at Boulogne, and during his reign there it was always possible, by giving him warning beforehand, to get an excellent luncheon excellently served. As most of the business of that restaurant is to put the greatest amount of food in the shortest possible time into travellers who keep one anxious eye on the train outside, or to cater for big parties of excursionists at the cheapest possible rate, a manager must have a soul for the gastronomic art to keep his restaurant under these conditions a place of delicate cookery. When M. Gretener and his pretty wife came to England they established themselves at a restaurant in Knightsbridge, which has a tessellated pavement and walls of ornamented glazed tiles with mirrors at intervals, and a ceiling on which cupids in high relief gambol on medallions with a blue ground. A stained glass window is at the far end of the restaurant, a wide staircase leads to the first floor, and under the staircase is a little glassed-in serving-room. M. Gretener has collected a very faithful clientele, and he also sends out meals to the dwellers in the houses of flats which abound in Knightsbridge. In the summer-time many people who go out of a morning to Hyde Park, strangers in the land, French, Germans, and Italians amongst them, see Gretener's as they go through the Albert Gate and make it their lunching place. A three-shilling dinner is the dinner of the house, but whenever I have been there I have ordered my meal à la carte from the very moderately priced card of the day, and this is a typical bill. Crème Lentils, 8d. Mayonnaise of Salmon, 2s. Noisette d'agneau Doria, 1s. 6d. Haricots verts sautés, 6d., and Bavarois chocolat, 4d.
The Queen's Restaurant, No. 4 Sloane Square, is one to which I often go when there is a first night at the Court Theatre, for it is only just across the road from that house. Its proprietor, M. Coppo, who learned his business at the Café Royal, bustles about his restaurant with a napkin under his arm doing the work of maître d'hôtel. The restaurant, with cream-coloured walls and mirrors in white frames, consists of several rooms thrown into one, the part by the entrance door being narrow and just holding two rows of tables, while at the back there is plenty of space. The clientele, on the occasions that I have been there, has been a mixture of all the comfortable classes—Guards' officers from the neighbouring barracks, fashionable people of both sexes from Sloane Street and its neighbourhood, dramatic critics making a hurried meal before going to the theatre, business men, and an artist or two from the Chelsea studios. M. Coppo gives his patrons a set dinner, the price of which, I fancy, is 3s. 6d.; but I have always ordered my dinner from the carte du jour, and I have found the food to be quite reasonably cheap and good.
I wonder how many people of the tens of hundreds who take their books to Mudie's to be exchanged know that the Vienna Café just across the road is an excellent place at which to lunch. In the upstairs rooms I have eaten, in the middle of the day, Austrian and German dishes excellently cooked, and there is a Viennese cheese cake which is a speciality of the house for which I have a liking, and with a slice of which I have always ended my meal. The coffee of the house is the excellent coffee made in the Austrian manner, and at tea-time the Café down below is always crowded with people, especially ladies, who like the Viennese cakes and pastries that they obtain there.