CHAPTER XI—CAFÉS AND RESTAURANTS
THE most interesting thing, to the complete stranger, in a large foreign city that does not live on its own past is not the museums, but the restaurants and cafés, even in the dead season. We were told that August was the dead season in Copenhagen, and that all the world was at the seaside resorts. We had, however, visited a number of Danish seaside resorts, and they were without exception far more dead than Copenhagen. In particular Marienlyst, reputed to be the haunt of fashion and elegance, proved to be a very sad, deserted strand. Copenhagen was not dead.
We went for our first dinner to Wivels Restaurant, signalized to us by authority as the finest in Denmark, a large, rambling, crimson-and-gold place, full of waiters who had learned English in America, of hors-d’ouvre, and of music. The hand was much better than the food, but it has to be said that we arrived at half-past seven, when Danish dinner is over and Danish supper not begun. Still, many middle-class people were unceremoniously and expensively eating—in the main hors-d’ouvre. The metropolitanism of Copenhagen was at once apparent in this great restaurant. The people had little style, but they had the assurance and the incuriousness of metropolitans, and they were accustomed to throwing money about, and to glare, and to stridency, and to the idiosyncrasies of waiters, and to being in the swim. Wivels might show itself on Fifth Avenue or in the Strand without blushing. And its food had the wholesale, crude quality of the food offered in these renowned streets to persons in the swim.
Next we went to the Hôtel d’Angleterre, which was just the restaurant of the standardized international hotel. Once within its walls, and you might as well be at Paris, Aix-les-Bains, Harrogate, Rome, Algiers, Brussels, as at Copenhagen. The same menu, the same cooking, the same waiters, the same furniture, the same toothpicks, and the same detestable, self-restrained English travelers, with their excruciating Englishness. The café on the ground floor of this hotel, overlooking a large and busy circular place, with the opera and other necessaries of metropolitan life close by, was more amusing than the restaurant. It was a genuine resort in the afternoon. The existence of Copenhagen rolled to and fro in front of its canopied terrace, and one might sit next to an English yachting party of astounding correctness and complacency (from one of those conceited three-hundred-ton boats, enameled white, and jeweled in many holes, like a watch), or to a couple of Danish commercials, or to a dandy and his love. Here we one night singled out for observation a very characteristic Danish young man and young woman with the complexions, the quiet, persuasive voices, and the soothing gestures of the North. It was an agreeable sight; but when we had carried our observation somewhat further, we discovered that they were an English pair on their honeymoon.
In a day or two, feeling more expert in things Danish, we wanted a truly Danish restaurant, unspoiled by cosmopolitanism. We hit on it in the Wiener Café, appanage of the Hotel King of Denmark. A long, narrow room, anciently and curiously furnished, with mid-Victorian engravings on the somber walls. The waiters had the austerity of priests presiding at a rite. Their silent countenances said impassively: “This is the most select resort in our great and historic country. It has been frequented by the flower of Danish aristocracy, art, and letters for a thousand years. It has not changed. It never will. No upstart cosmopolitanism can enter here. Submit yourselves. Speak in hushed tones. Conform to all the niceties of our ceremonial, for we have consented to receive you.”