In brief, it was rather like an English bank, or a historic hotel in an English cathedral town, though its food was better, I admit. The menu was in strict Danish. We understood naught of it, but it had the air of a saga. At the close of the repast, the waiter told us that, for the prix fixe, we had the choice between cake and cheese. I said, “Will you let me have a look at the cake, and then I ‘ll decide.” He replied that he could not; that the cake could not be produced unless it was definitively ordered. The strange thing was that he persisted in this attitude. Cake never had been shown on approval at the Wiener Café of the Hotel King of Denmark, and it never would he. I bowed the head before an august tradition, and ordered cheese. The Wiener Café ought to open a branch in London; it was the most English affair I have ever encountered out of England.
Indeed, Copenhagen is often exquisitely English. That very night we chose the restaurant of the Hotel————for dinner. The room was darkly gorgeous, silent, and nearly full. We were curtly shown to an empty table, and a menu was dung at us. The head waiter and three inefficient under waiters then totally ignored us and our signals for fifteen minutes; they had their habitués to serve. At the end of fifteen minutes we softly and apologetically rose and departed, without causing any apparent regret save perhaps to the hat-and-coat boy, whom we basely omitted to tip.
We roved in the wet, busy Sunday streets, searching hungrily for a restaurant that seemed receptive, that seemed assimilative, and luck guided us into the Café de l’Industrie, near the Tivoli. The managers of this industrious café had that peculiar air, both independent and amicable, which sits so well on the directors of an organism that is firmly established in the good-will of the flourishing mass. No selectness, no tradition, no formality, no fashion, no preposterous manners about the Café de l’Industrie, but an aspect of solid, rather vulgar, all-embracing, all-forgiving prosperity. It was not cheap, neither was it dear. It was gaudy, but not too gaudy. The waiters were men of the world, experienced in human nature, occupied, hasty, both curt and expansive, not servile, not autocratic. Their faces said: “Look here, I know the difficulties of running a popular restaurant, and you know them, too. This is not heaven, especially on a Sunday night; but we do our best, and you get value for your money.”
The customers were samples of all Copenhagen. They had money to spend, but not too much. There were limits to their recklessness in the pursuit of joy. They were fairly noisy, quite without affectation, fundamentally decent, the average Danish. Elegance was rarer than beauty, and spirituality than common sense, in that restaurant. We ate moderately in the din and clash of hors d’ouvre, mural decorations, mirrors, and music, and thanked our destiny that we had had the superlative courage to leave the Hotel ————, with its extreme correctitude.
Finally, among our excursions ‘n restaurants, must be mentioned a crazy hour in the restaurant of the Hotel ————, supreme example of what the enterprising spirit of modern Denmark can accomplish when it sets about to imitate the German art nouveau. The ———— is a grand hotel in which everything, with the most marvelous and terrifying ingenuity, has been designed in defiance of artistic tradition. A fork at the ———— resembles no other fork on earth, and obviously the designer’s first and last thought was to be unique. It did not matter to him what kind of fork he produced so long as it was different from any previous fork in human history. The same with the table-cloth, the flower-vase, the mustard-pot, the chair, the carpet, the dado, the frieze, the tessellated pavement, the stair-rail, the wash-basin, the bedstead, the quilt, the very door-knobs. The proprietors of the place had ordered a new hotel in the extreme sense, and their order had been fulfilled. It was a prodigious undertaking, and must certainly have been costly. It was impressive proof of real initiative. It intimidated the beholder, who had the illusion of being on another planet. Its ultimate effect was to outrival all other collections of ugliness. I doubt whether in Berlin itself such ingenious and complete ugliness could be equaled in the same cubic space. My idea is that the creators of the Hotel ———— may lawfully boast of standing alone on a pinnacle.
It was an inspiration on the part of the creators, when the hotel was finished to the last salt-spoon, to order a number of large and particularly bad copies of old masters, in inexpensive gilt frames, and to hang them higgledy-piggledy on the walls. The resulting effect of grotesquery is overwhelming. Nevertheless, the ———— justly ranks as one of the leading European hotels. It is a mercy that the architect and the other designers were forbidden to meddle with the cooking, which sins not by any originality.
The summary and summit of the restaurants and cafes of Copenhagen is the Tivoli. New York has nothing like the Tivoli, and the Londoner can only say with regret that the Tivoli is what Earl’s Court ought to be, and is not. The Tivoli comprises, within the compass of a garden in the midst of the city, restaurants, cafés, theater, concert-hall, outdoor theater, bands, pantomime, vaudeville, dancing-halls, and very numerous side-shows on both land and water. The strangest combinations of pleasure are possible at the Tivoli. You can, for instance, as we did, eat a French dinner while watching a performance of monkeys on a tightrope. The opportunities for weirdness in felicity are endless. We happened to arrive at Copenhagen just in time for the fêtes celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the Tivoli, which is as ancient as it is modern. On the great night the Tivoli reveled until morning. It must be the pride of the populace of Copenhagen, and one of the city’s dominating institutions. It cannot be ignored. It probably uses more electric light than any other ten institutions put together. And however keenly you may resent its commonplace attraction, that attraction will one day magnetize you to enter its gates—at the usual fee.