[LVI]
THE MONICO
The Monico, in Piccadilly Circus, which is both café and restaurant, is an establishment which has been brought to its present prosperity by Swiss industry and Swiss thrift. The original M. Monico, the father of the present proprietors of the restaurant, came from the same village in the Val Blegno, in the Italian provinces of Switzerland, as did the Gattis. M. Monico was with that Gatti, the great-uncle of the present Messrs Gatti, who sold gaufres and penny ices in Villiers Street, and who when Hungerford Market was swept away and Charing Cross Station built established the Gatti's restaurant under the arches.
About fifty years ago, just at the time that MM. A. and S. Gatti were establishing themselves in the Adelaide Gallery, young M. Monico, who died only three years ago, was also making an independent start on the road to fortune. Looking about for a site on which to build a café he had found, off Tichborne Street, a large yard where coaches and waggons stood, and round which was stabling for horses. This yard he leased, and built on its site the Grand Café with the present International Hall above it. M. Monico had intended to put up a tall building, but the neighbours objected to this; he was obliged to alter his plans, and in consequence, whereas the café is a very high room, the International Hall above it is rather squat in its proportions. Those were the days in which billiards was a game much in favour, and in the International Hall above the café M. Monico established a number of billiard-tables. When the craze for billiards died away the long upper room, with its arched ceiling, became a banqueting hall. Fifty years ago the licensing magistrates looked with just as much suspicion on any new enterprises in restaurants as they do at the present day, and the Monico could not at first obtain a licence to sell wines and spirits. This, however, was later on granted to M. Monico.
I fancy that there must have been a good deal of the Italian combative spirit in old M. Monico, for he seems to have been at loggerheads with more than one of his neighbours. To-day, when you have gone in under the glass canopy with two gables which protects the Piccadilly Circus entrance, when you have passed the little stall for the sale of foreign newspapers and have come into the café which acts as an ante-room to the great gilded saloon, you will notice that part of this café has a solid ceiling and that the other half is glazed over. The glazed-over portion was, in old M. Monico's time, an open space, and into this open space a neighbour, a perfumer, had the right to bring carts and horses in the course of his business. This right the perfumer exercised on occasion, to the great annoyance of M. Monico, and the present Messrs Monico recall with a smile how the perfumer would often bring in a great van with two horses to deliver a couple of small packages that any messenger boy could have carried.
The clearing away of a block of houses when Piccadilly Circus was given its present proportions gave the Monico its entrance on to that centre, and when Shaftesbury Avenue was driven through the network of small streets in Soho, M. Monico and his sons obtained a second frontage for their restaurant and built the block which contains the grill-room, the buffet and banqueting-rooms, now topped by the new masonic temple, the latest addition to the Monico.
The Monico of to-day is one of those great bee-hives of dining-rooms that cater for every class of diner. It has its little café and its big à la carte dining-saloon, its grill-room, its banqueting-rooms and its German beer cellar down in the basement. It has two marble staircases, one leading down to Piccadilly Circus and one to Shaftesbury Avenue, and its big saloon, the original café, is as gorgeous a hall as gilding can make it. Its walls are of gold and mirrors and raised ornamentation, with the windows high up, and with a golden balcony for the musicians. It has a gilded ceiling and its pilasters are also golden. An orchestra plays in this room, whereas in the grill-room those who like their meals without orchestral accompaniment can eat them in peace. Up and down the great gilded room walk four maîtres d'hôtel in frock-coats and black ties, and a battalion of waiters are busy running from tables to kitchen. The bill of fare in the gilded chamber is a most comprehensive one, and any man of any nationality can find some of the dishes of his country on it. It is a beer restaurant as well as a wine restaurant, and the simplest possible meal, very well cooked, can be eaten there as well as elaborate feasts.
The grill-room is less gorgeous in its decorations, though its buff marble pillars and walls are handsome enough. It is in this room that the table d'hôte dinners at half-a-crown and three-and-six are served, and it is here that many men of business feed, and feed excellently well. Not many days ago I lunched in the grill-room, my host being a gourmet who knew all the resources of the establishment, and I enjoyed the sole Monico, a sole with an excellent white sauce; a woodcock flambé and a salad of tender lettuce which, like the beautiful peaches with which we finished our repast, must have been grown in some Southern, sunshiny clime. I also enjoyed the cheese fondue, made, I think, from the recette that Brillat Savarin set down in his "Physiologie du Goût."
The Monico has gained special celebrity for its banquets, and the requests for dates for such feasts made to the Messrs Monico have been so overwhelming that they have turned the Renaissance Saloon, which used to be devoted to a table d'hôte dinner, into a banqueting-room, and have redecorated it for its new uses.
It remains in my memory that men who were present at the banquet given to Lord Milner in the International Hall of the Monico before he left England to take up his duties as Pro-Consul in South Africa, and who talked to me afterwards of the feast, told me that it was the best public dinner, best served and best cooked, that they had ever eaten, and last year, when I dined at the Poincaré dinner of the Ligue des Gourmands, which was held in the Renaissance Room (the occasion on which M. Escoffier's "creation" of the poulet Poincaré was first disclosed to a discriminating gathering), I thought then that M. Sieffert's (the chef) handiwork was worthy of all the praise lavished on it, and that M. G. Ramoni, the manager, had arranged most admirably all the details of the banquet. The Renaissance Room now quite justifies its title, for its decoration of peacock blue panels and frames of gilded briar, with strange birds perched on the sprays, somewhat suggests Burne-Jones and the colouring of his school.