These several gentlemen, combined into one, would not be all too learned in the niceties of gastronomy to be able to put together a modern dinner menu. Nowadays we want something more than mere quantity. The Gargantuan repasts of our forefathers are not for us. In those days, maybe (or perhaps not), unlimited exercise, hunting, and the like made these gross meals comparatively digestible; but we live in more delicate times, and want our viands fewer in number and more carefully cooked, with less added flavour and more of their own natural juices.
It is very true that one-half of the world does not know how the other half dines. We follow one another in sheep-like fashion round the few better-known restaurants, eating the same dinners, drinking the same wines, and seeing the same people week after week, in a dull monotony of sameness.
And yet there are a few quite nice, respectable, meetable sort of folk, who, with the cosmopolitan habit strong upon them, know their London well enough to be able to dine every night in a different country, and remain all the time within a shilling cab-fare of Piccadilly.
How is it done, you will ask? It is really very simple.
Say you want a French dinner, light, delicate, and appetizing, go to Kettner, in Church Street, Soho, or to Dieudonné, in Ryder Street, and you will find un petit diner très-fin, as good as you will obtain anywhere in Paris. If you patronize the former very old and very quaint establishment, ask to look over the kitchens; they are as neat and clean as those in a painting by an old Dutch master. As to the menu, you cannot do better than leave yourself in the hands of the maître d’hôtel.
If you are inclined to dine à l’Italienne, go to Pagani’s, in Great Portland Street, and order Minestrone; Sôle à la Pagani; Pollio alla Contrabandista, and macaroni; take plenty of Parmesan cheese with everything, and imagine yourself in Florence. Do not forget to drink the special Lacrima Christi, and inspect the “autograph-room” on the second floor.
Again, suppose you desire to spend a Teutonic evening and regale yourself on German delicacies. Hie then to the old Gambrinus, in Regent Street, run by the excellent Oddenino of the Imperial. Call the Ober Kellner and bestell yourself Fleisch Brühe, Karpfe in Bier, Kalbskotlette mit Celeri salat, and Dampfnudeln. As the American critic remarked: “If you like that sort of thing that’s just the sort of thing you’ll like.”
I have lunched Turkishly in the City off Kabobs, kid stuffed with pistachio, and most excellent rice-milk and cinnamon. There used to be a Spanish restaurant in Soho, where they gave you Escudella, Estofado, and the world-renowned Gaspacho; but I rather think that this place came to an untimely end, owing to lack of patronage. Many Russian dishes, such as Bortsch, Blinis, Koulbiac, and Shtshi, are to be met with on the ordinary menus of the best restaurants; and the Swedish Smorgasbord, or exaggerated Zakouska of the Russians, is occasionally put before one as hors d’œuvre à la Suédoise, which is, of course, quite wrong, because the real thing ought to be eaten standing up at a side-table, and not sitting down at the dinner-table. However, these are the necessary tributes to convention.
“Œufs à la coque! Of course not! I want hens’ eggs, ordinary barn-door fowls’. What silly people these foreigners are!”
The average Englishman travelling abroad has really not got much beyond that stage of insular and ignorant prejudice. But why should he go abroad at all, when here in his native London he can, if he so desires, get a dinner cooked after (sometimes very much after) the fashion of almost any country in the world?