There were some Londoners lunching in the restaurant. A party of ladies in furs were enjoying the novelty of the Chinese dishes; two youngsters, whom I took to be medical students, were ordering various dishes from the carte du jour, and were cross-examining the waiter keenly as to the cooking arrangements and how the delicacies were imported from China; and two schoolgirls, one of the flapper age and one younger, came into the restaurant giggling and looking round as though they expected a pantomime Chinaman to spring up before them or to jump round a corner.
The menu of the day at the Cathay is on a large folding mauve card, and the dishes are both in Chinese characters and in English letters with an explanation in English below each name. The first division is for chop sueys and noodles. A chop suey is to the Chinese what Irish stew is to the English and a ragoût is to the French. Pork is its foundation, and chicken livers and chicken gizzards, celery, mushrooms, peas, onion, garlic, peppers, oil and salt all go into it. Noodle is any paste dish, and macaroni or vermicelli would be described on a Chinese menu as a noodle.
Of the dishes on the card, Loo min is noodle in Pekinese style. Lat chew chop suey is chop suey with green chutney. Chop suey min is chop suey with noodle, and so on. There is a little list of dishes which are ready, and a longer list of dishes which will take some minutes to prepare, such as fried crab and Chinese omelet; fried rice, with meat, mushroom, egg and vegetables; sliced jelly-fish with pickle; and soyed pork. Some especial dishes are on the menu for which a day's notice must be given, one of these being birds'-nests with minced chicken and another shark's fin with sliced chicken, ham, bamboo shoots, etc. At the end of the list comes the catalogue of teas, pastries and sweets, pickled onions being included in this category.
After looking down the carte du jour, I turned my attention to the set luncheon, and first of all took up the card on which it was written in Chinese. In case you may be able to read Chinese fluently I reproduce this card on the next page.
The first word on this only means menu. The first dish is a soup of chicken, ham, bamboo shoots and mushrooms. The second dish is fried chicken liver and vegetables, and the last dish is simply roast pork.
I opted for this half-crown meal, and as a preliminary, the waiter put a tiny cup of soy and a Chinese porcelain spoon by the side of the European knives and forks and spoons which were already on the table. A wine list was offered me, but I preferred, as I was going to eat Chinese meats, to drink Chinese tea with them, and ordered a cup of Loong Cheng. The plates used at the Chinese restaurant are, like the cutlery, of European pattern, but the dishes in which the soups and the meats are brought to table are Chinese ones of all kinds of shapes and ornamented with Chinese paintings. My soup, with tiny strips of bamboo in it and morsels of chicken flesh, tasted very much like the chicken broth that one is given when one is ill and on a low diet. The fried chicken and vegetables were quite good eating, and the taste of the bamboo shoots in it was particularly pleasant to the palate. The roast pork I shied at, and asked instead to be given a plate of chow chow, an admirable sweet which I have known ever since boyhood, for one of my uncles, who was Consul at Foo Chow, used to send home to all his small nephews presents of this delicacy. The tea was excellent, and doing as the Chinese do, I did not spoil its taste by adding either sugar or milk to it.
Altogether my luncheon at the Chinese Restaurant was quite a pleasant experiment, and I can advise any gourmets who would like to test the cookery of the Far East in comfortable surroundings to follow my lead.