As a specimen of a Monico banquet I cannot do better than give you one eaten by that famous Kentish cricketing club, the Band of Brothers, the menu of whose dinner bears their badge in dark and light blue, and has also a bow of their ribbon:
Huîtres de Whitstable
Fantaisie Epicurienne.
Tortue verte en Tasse.
Turbotin poché, Sauce Mousseline.
Julienne de Sole Parisienne.
Mousse de Volaille Régence.
Côtelettes d'Agneau Rothschild.
Pommes Anna.
Punch Romaine.
Bécassine sur Canapé.
Salade de Laitue.
Escalope de Homard Pompadour.
Pêche Flambé au Kirsch.
Paillettes au Parmesan.
Fruits.
Corbeille de Friandises
Café.
Vins.
Amontillado.
Marcobrunner, 1904.
Bollinger and Co., 1904.
Lanson, 1906.
Martinez Port, 1896.
Grand Fine Champagne, 1875.
Many of the banquets given at the Monico are masonic ones, and the new temple at the top of the house on the Shaftesbury Avenue side is a very splendid shrine, with walls of marble and a dome round which the signs of the zodiac circle, and with doors and furniture of great beauty.
[LVII]
THE ITALIAN INVASION
The plains of Lombardy, the pleasant mountain land of Emilia and the champaign that surrounds Turin, are studded with comfortable villas, the property of successful Italian restaurateurs who have made a comfortable little fortune in London and who go to their own much-loved country to spend the autumn of their days. Every young North Italian waiter who comes to England believes that in the folds of his napkin he holds one of these pleasant villas, just as every French conscript in Napoleonic days thought that he, amongst all his fellows, alone felt the extra weight of the field-marshal's baton in his knapsack. No race in the world is more thrifty and more industrious than are these North Italians, and they rival the Swiss in their aptitude for making considerable sums of money by charging very small prices.
Spain and Great Britain are usually classed together as the two countries in which the natives know least of economy in housekeeping and cookery, and the Italians, spying the wastefulness of the land, have descended on England as a friendly invading force, whereas the Swiss have taken Spain in hand. There is no Spanish town in which there is not a café Suizio, and there are very few English towns in which an Italian name is not found over a restaurant, which is often a pastry-cook's shop as well.
I have in preceding chapters written of some of the restaurants owned by Italians in London, but were I to deal at length with all the well-managed restaurants, large and small, controlled by Italians in London, I should have to extend the size of my book to very swollen proportions, so I propose to mention briefly those Italian restaurants at which at one time or another I have lunched or dined with satisfaction.