What would such a one have said to our modern dinners, at home, or at a restaurant; a place which he probably would not comprehend at all, for, at any rate with us, the fashion of dining in public, especially with our women-folk, is a very recent innovation. The hearty individual of Mr. Holbrook’s time and type would have more sympathy with the frugalities of the La Manchan gentleman Cervantes drew, with his lean horse and running greyhound, courageous ferret, and meals of “duelos y quebrantes,” that strange dish, which Mr. Cunninghame Graham tells us “perplexed every translator of the immortal work.”
The modern restaurant is, I suppose, part and parcel of the evolutionary trend of the times. It has its advantages and its drawbacks. Its influence on public manners or manners in public (which are not altogether the same thing), are not entirely salutary. He was a wise person who once said, “Vulgarity, after all, is only the behaviour of others.” Go into any frequented restaurant at dinner-time, watch the men and women (especially the latter), how they eat, talk, and observe their neighbours—et vous m’en direz des nouvelles! Our forbears, although, or perhaps because, they dined out less, or not at all, had a certain reticence of table manner which has been lost in succeeding generations. Be good enough to note the reception of a party of guests entering a full restaurant and making their way to their reserved table. Notice how every feminine eye criticizes the new-comers. Not a bow, nor a frill, nor a sleeve, nor a jewel, nor a twist of chiffon is unobserved. Talk almost ceases whilst the progress through the already filled tables takes place. The men of the party ask polite questions, and endeavour to continue the even tenor of the conversation, but the feminine replies are vague and malapropos. No woman seems able to concentrate her attention on talk whilst other women are passing. She must act the critic; note, observe, copy, or deride. These are our table manners of to-day. Not entirely pretty, perhaps; but typical and noteworthy.
LES ALIMENTS: par Bertall
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The multiplication of restaurants continues, and yet, come to think of it, the actual places where one lunches, dines, or sups, the “legitimate” houses, so to say, can be numbered on the fingers of both hands—including the thumbs. All the others are more or less esoteric. One can, possibly, dine as well in Soho as in the Strand, but there is no cachet about the dinner, and one never meets any one one knows, or if one does, one wishes one hadn’t.
Still, compared with our grandfathers’ times, things have vastly altered. In the “Epicure’s Almanack or Calendar of Good Living for 1815,” there is a list of over one hundred eating-houses of sorts, but the only ones that survive to this day are Birch’s of Cornhill; the “Blue Posts” in Cork Street; the “Cheshire Cheese,” Fleet Street; the “Golden Cross,” Charing Cross; Gunter’s of Berkeley Square; Hatchett’s in Piccadilly; the “Hummums” in Covent Garden; Long’s in Bond Street (better known as “Jubber’s”); the “Ship,” Charing Cross; the London Tavern; and “Sweeting’s Rents.”
Speaking of the music at a very well-known restaurant in town, a morning paper said recently: “It is noticeable that many of the visitors occasionally stop talking and listen to the music.” This set me thinking. It is worth while listening to good music. Bad music we are better without. Good cooking and good conversation are natural concomitants, and mutually assist one another. Ergo, it seems obvious that good music and a good dinner are incompatible. It is rude to talk whilst musical artists are giving of their best for your delectation, and, at the same time, a dinner partaking of Wordsworth’s Peter Bell’s party in a parlour “all silent and all damned” is contrary to the best gastronomic traditions. Thus I think I have the musical diner in an impasse.
Speaking from memory, among the best dozen restaurants in London there is music in every one save three; I am therefore bound to conclude that it is merely a question of supply and demand, and that I am in a minority. I overheard a quaint protest the other night at a restaurant where the music is particularly loud, blatant, and objectionable. A man and, presumably, his wife were dining together, and were evidently anxious to keep up their conversation on some mutually interesting topic. During a lull in the clatter and noise I heard the woman’s voice say, “I do wish they would play more quietly, one really cannot hear what one is eating.”