The life of the place, which chiefly is bound up in the consideration of where to eat the three simple meals allowed, is curious. In the morning, after the disagreeable necessity of drinking three or more glassfuls of the hot water, every man and every lady spends a half hour deciding where to breakfast and what kind of roll and what kind of ham they shall eat. The bakers' shops are crowded by people picking out the special rusk or special roll they prefer, and these are carried off in little pink bags. Two slices of ham are next bought from one of the shops where men in white clothes slice all day long at the lean Prague ham or the fatter Westphalian. No man is really a judge of ham until he has argued for a quarter of an hour every morning outside the shop in the Carlsbad High Street as to what breed of pig gives the most appetising slice. Bag in hand, ham in pocket, the man undergoing a cure walks to the Elephant in the Alte Wiese, or to one of the little restaurants which stud the valley and the hillsides, delightful little buildings with great glass shelters for rainy days and lawns and flower-beds and creepers, where neat waitresses in black, with their Christian names in white metal worn as a brooch, or great numbers pinned to their shoulders, receive you with laughing welcome, set a red-clothed table for you, and bring you the hot milk and boiled eggs which complete your repast. Be careful of which waitress you smile at on your first day, for she claims you as her especial property for the rest of your stay, and to ask another waitress to bring your eggs would be the deepest treason.
Dinner is a mid-day meal, and as you are not tied down to any particular hotel for your meals because you happen to be staying in it, the custom is to dine where your fancy pleases you. There is Pupp's with its verandah and its little grove of Noah's ark trees, patronised by all nations, and the Golden Shield and Anger's, and Wirchaupt's in the Alte Wiese, which since I have known Carlsbad has grown from a ham shop into a very smart little restaurant handsomely decorated. Wirchaupt's is small enough still for its patrons to have individual attention paid them, and if you are an habitué you will be told as you go in if anything especially good has been bought at market that morning, and little hints are given you as to the composition of your meal. Bohemian partridges and the trout and Zander from the Tepl and other mountain streams are the two great "stand-bys" of the man at Carlsbad who likes good food; but the big fowls which come, I fancy, from Styria, are excellent birds; the venison, the hares, the mutton, and the ever-present ham are all capital. The wines of the country are excellent. The cheapest form of the local wine is served in little caraffes, but here, as in most other places, it is wise to pay the extra shilling and drink the bottled wine. Besides the wine of the province there are obtainable the usual Austrian wines, and the Hungarian Erlauer and Offner and Carlowitz.
I have halted in the Alte Wiese to descant on the usual dinner of Carlsbad, which, ordered à la carte, never costs more than a few shillings. Up on the hill at the Bristol, from the terrace of which there is a fine view over the valley to the Keilberg, and at the Savoy Westend, where some Egyptian servants imported by Nuncovitch from the land of the Pharoahs wait upon you, and which has a great pavilion as its open-air dining-hall, you are likely to find most of the people, English and American, whose movements are recorded in the society papers, taking their mid-day meal. The American millionaire at Carlsbad, however, fares just as simply and just as cheaply as does any half-pay captain, for Dr. Krauss and Dr. London are no considerers of persons in their dieting.
In the afternoon, about five o'clock, all the world goes to one of the cafés in the valley to listen to a concert and to drink hot milk; and in the evening a meal, as simple as dinner has been, is eaten. This is the hour to see Pupp's at its best. In the little grove of trees before the house, where the big band-stand is, there is an array of tables, each with its lamp upon it. In the outside verandah of the great restaurant there are more tables, and inside the glazed verandah and in two long rooms, each rising a step above the other, are a host of people supping. The scene is like some great effect at a theatre, and I know nowhere where one can find any restaurant shining with light as Pupp's does on a summer night. The restaurant in the Stadtpark is always crowded when the band plays there, but the attendance is very hurried and casual, and contrasts badly with Pupp's and the other first-class restaurants. At the two Variety Theatres in the lower town one can, by booking a table in advance, sup fairly comfortably, and listen while one sups to a very good variety entertainment.
At Gieshübl, where Herr Mattoni makes a fortune by bottling the spring water, and which is little more than an hour's drive from Carlsbad, there is an excellent restaurant where the fare is the same as that found in Carlsbad.
Marienbad
All that I have written of Carlsbad, concerning its food and drink, applies to Marienbad. There is the same freedom as to dining-places, and on a sunny day a man will take his meal in one of the creeper-grown bowers which are erected on the edge of the park by the hotels which face it, or at the Kursaal garden. On a dull day he will dine at Klinger's, the house which has a special celebrity, but which, with its rather stuffy rooms and its much ornamented plate-glass windows, which never seem to open quite wide enough, is pleasanter on a cool day than a hot one; or at the New York, which has its rooms ornamented after the style the Parisians call "the New Art."
There are several good restaurants in the environs of Marienbad, at the Waldmühle and elsewhere, and the Egerländer Café is well worth a visit. It is a large café, with the usual grove before it, built on a commanding hill. The special characteristics of the place are that the rooms and the great hall are built and furnished after the fashion of Egerland, the most picturesque style that Austria boasts of. The girls who wait are all in the handsome Egerland costume, and the effect is very pretty. There is a restaurant at Egerland, and the proprietor, when I was at Marienbad in 1901, talked of adding sleeping apartments to the establishment and of making it a hotel as well as a restaurant and café.
Prague
The expedition to Prague generally forms part of a stay at Carlsbad or Marienbad. My personal experience, gained from two visits, is that if one stays either at the Saxe or the Blauer Stern, it is wiser to take one's meals in the restaurants of the hotels than to go further afield and fare worse. One traverses the hop-fields of Pilsen during the journey from Carlsbad, and an amateur of beer should find Prague a paradise second only to Munich.