Many men distinguished in art and music and literature have felt, and still feel, the fascination of The Sceptre Chop-house. You may, very likely, amongst the company at the old mahogany tables, see one of the brightest writers on Punch, or our greatest living painter of battle pictures, or the man who composed "In the Shadows."
Upstairs are two delightful old rooms, browned by time and the London climate, with old wooden shelves, old clocks, old brass candlesticks, old chairs and tables. In one corner of the front room, by a window, stands Dickens' chair, for it is here, so the tradition of the house has it, that Dickens used to come in his early days to write, and it was in this corner that many of his "Sketches by Boz" were jotted down on paper. The Sceptre was a spruce, new little house at this period of Dickens' life, and probability as well as tradition is on the side of its having been one of his early haunts.
[XVI]
SOME GRILL-ROOMS
The modern grill-room we owe, I think, to the Americans, for the travelling American, who has his own very sensible ideas as to what comfort is, does not wish every night of his life to attire himself in a "claw-hammer" evening coat, but he feels that without that garment he would be out of place in the restaurant of any of the fashionable hotels. The grill-room gives him an excellent dinner, just as long or just as short as he likes, served quickly, in luxurious surroundings, and he can dress as he likes, to eat it. An American always knows what he wants, asks for it, and keeps on asking until he gets it. Quite a number of Britons of both sexes wanted all the conveniences of the grill-rooms long before the modern grill-room came into existence. (Hard-working men of business who had not time to go home to the suburbs to change their clothes, men of the theatre, authors and managers who work late in the evening, actors and actresses who like a very light meal before going to the theatre, and to sup after their work without wearing gorgeous raiment, and a host of other people who get their living by their brains.) But they had not the pertinacity of the American in demanding what they wanted.
Quite the beginning of the modern grill-room was that silver grill which Messrs Spiers and Pond established some time in the sixties under the arch at Ludgate Hill; but I look to the little grill-room in the old Savoy Hotel in the days before the new building had pushed through to the Strand as being the ideal of a modern grill-room, and I always measure any grill-room of to-day by the standard of that little place of good eating. It was small, and its windows looked up an unlovely cul-de-sac of which it formed the end. The people who controlled the Savoy Hotel and the Savoy Theatre all used it as their own dining-room; the general public scarcely knew of its existence; the food there was excellent. Besides the chops and steaks and other real grill-room fare, there were always one or two savoury entrées kept hot in metal pots and pans on a miniature hot plate in the middle of the room, and when the maître d'hôtel brought over one of these and took off the cover under one's nose, the savour of its contents alone gave one an appetite.
The present Café Parisien at the Savoy, which the russet-bearded Gustave steered to a great success, is the legitimate successor to that other grill-room which was hidden away in the midst of the building, but it has not the charm of discovery felt by those who used the old grill-room. The Café Parisien, which has its entrance in the Savoy forecourt, where gorgeous servitors in French-grey uniforms of State take one's coat and hat just as they do if one is going to spend one's money in the restaurant, is a great Adams room painted a very light grey, with portières of light pink, and with chairs and carpets of a deeper rose. It has a little space outside, a terrasse, as the French would call it, which is railed off from the courtyard by a white trellis, over which roses are trained. This is a very pleasant spot in hot weather, if so be that no motor sighing out deep breaths of petrol is standing in the vicinity. This Café Parisien is a place of pleasant, clean-shirted Bohemianism, much patronised by the aristocracy of the theatre. There is an elaborate à la carte menu with stars against those dishes which are ready. A man in a hurry can eat a four-course dinner here in half-an-hour without risking indigestion, but a couple who wish to talk over their meal can make a cutlet and an ice an excuse for sitting out an hour.