From Hampstead to Surbiton, from Richmond to Epping, the little Italian restaurants flourish. One gourmet whom I know, with a delicate taste in Italian wines, makes pilgrimages regularly to Reggiori's, opposite King's Cross Station, because he gets there a particular wine which this restaurateur imports; while I take an almost paternal interest in Canuto's Restaurant in Baker Street. The rise of that restaurant from a very humble place, that put out two boards with great sheets of paper on them, giving the dishes ready and the dinner of the day, to a rather haughty little restaurant with a very beautiful window and the carte du jour and the menus of table d'hôte dinners behind the glass in frames of restrained gorgeousness, typifies the gradual advance in social splendour of the long street that leads to Regent's Park.
[LVIII]
THE HYDE PARK HOTEL
Newly engaged couples are rather kittle cattle to entertain at any meal. There was once a pretty young widow who was about to marry a charming young man, and I asked the pair to lunch with me one day at the Savoy and was very particular to secure a table in the balcony, for I thought that the view over the Gardens and up the Thames to the House of Lords and Westminster Abbey would harmonise very well with love's young dream. And it did harmonise only too well with it, for the pretty widow sat with her face in her two hands gazing up the river with far-away eyes while the grilled lamb cutlets grew cold and the bomb praliné grew warm, and the charming young man, sat opposite to her with hands tightly clasped, gazing into her face and thinking poetry hard the while. Conversation there was none on that occasion. I do not believe that the couple knew in the least whether they were eating sole or cream cheese, and I still have such remnants of good manners that were instilled into me in the days of the nursery that I felt that I was doing an impolite thing to eat heartily while my guests were neglecting their food. I often subsequently wondered whether in the days when I fell desperately in love at least once in every six months, I behaved in public as much like a patient suffering from softening of the brain as did that nice young man on the day he lunched with me at the Savoy.
One of my nephews, a young soldier doctor, is going to do a very sensible thing in marrying an exceedingly nice girl early in his career, and as he is on leave in London it seemed to me that it would be a pleasant thing to ask him and the young lady to lunch or dine with me. Though I did not for a moment believe that the presence of his intended would cause him to neglect his food, I was not prepared, after my previous experience, to put the young lady to the tremendous trial of the view of the Thames from the Savoy balcony, and I decided that dinner, not lunch, should be the meal.
As I was curious to see whether a little dinner at the Hyde Park Hotel was as well cooked as the great banquets are in that flourishing establishment, I asked them to dine there with me one Sunday evening, and gave Mr Kerpen, the manager of the hotel, warning of our coming, asking him to suggest to M. Müller, the chef de cuisine, that I should like one or two specialities of his kitchen included in a very short menu.
If lunch had been the meal to which I invited the young couple the Hyde Park Hotel dining-room would have been a spot as inducive to day dreams as are the balconies at the Savoy and the Cecil, for the view the Hyde Park Hotel commands over the Park is one of the most beautiful and most varied in London. A strip of garden lies between the Hotel and the Ladies' Mile, and beyond that is the branch of Rotten Row that runs up past the Knightsbridge Barracks. Beyond that again are green lawns and clumps of rhododendrons and other flowering shrubs, and the grassy rise up to the banks of the Serpentine, the glitter of the water of which and the big trees about it closing in the landscape. The carriages go rumbling past; there are generally some riders in the Row and there is always movement on the footpath, and it seems to be one of the duties of the regiment of Household Cavalry at Knightsbridge to supply as a figure in the immediate foreground either a young orderly officer in his blue frock-coat setting out or returning from his rounds on a big black charger, or a rough-riding corporal in scarlet jacket teaching a young horse manners. The view up the river to Westminster may have a dreamy beauty on a sunshiny day, the vista of the long walk in the Green Park, down which the windows of the Ritz dining-room look, may have more sylvan beauty, but the outlook of the Hyde Park Hotel has more colour and more variety than those of the other big hotels I have mentioned.