The Holborn shows originality in devoting a grill-room to ladies, and in the old Freemasons' Tavern in Great Queen Street, which now calls itself the Connaught Rooms, there is in the basement a large grill-room, with a choice of three joints at luncheon time as well as an extensive carte du jour, a grill which is much patronised by the lawyers from Lincoln's Inn Fields. In the evening a dinner is served in a smaller room, and I have dined there before going across the way to the Kingsway Theatre. Those who dine are, I think, mostly connected in some way or another with Freemasonry, and the talk that goes on at the tables has reference to high offices in the Craft and Mark, to "raising" and "passing," and to that ancient and sacred ritual which ladies still believe to be in some way connected with a red-hot poker.
[XVII]
ROMANO'S
Alfonso Nicolino Romano, a head waiter at the Café Royal, in 1874 bought with his savings a small fried fish shop in the Strand, converted it into a bar and restaurant, and in addition to his own name on its front added Café Vaudeville, for it was, and is, almost next door to the Vaudeville Theatre. Romano's in those days possessed a central window flanked by two doors, one leading into the bar and the other to the rooms above. In the window as an ornament was a small aquarium which contained goldfish, and those fish must have lived exciting, if short, lives, for the patrons of the bar tried to feed them with cigar ash, lemon rind, burnt almonds, and torn-up notepaper, and it is even said that "Hughie" Drummond, one of the most amusing and most reckless of the clean-shirted Bohemians who made "the Roman's" known all the world over, tried to take a swim with them.
Romano was a curly-haired, humorous, quick-witted little Italian who talked a strange Anglo-Italian jargon—"Pore ole Romano e got badda addick this morning" his usual morning greeting, was an example of it—and who was on the easiest terms of familiarity with most of his clients without ever overstepping the line. He had not very many rules as to the conduct of his business, but one from which he never departed was that he would under no circumstances make a reduction in the total of a bill. He would give an aggrieved customer some of the very best "cognac" of the house or split a bottle of the most expensive champagne with him or ask him to dinner next day, but what he would not do was to reduce any item in the account. One of the most frequent forms of verbal invitation given by "The Roman" was to a Sunday midday inspection of his cellars in the Adelphi arches. "You coma see my cellars, Mister So-and-So Eskwire, best in London" was the actual wording. Romano had come from a good school, and he laid down an excellent cellar. The food in the restaurant was also beyond reproach.
Behind the bar, a bar which was always full of racing men, journalists, coaching men, men from the Stock Exchange, men about town—for those were the days when no man in the movement thought it undignified to be seen standing up in a place of refreshment—was the restaurant. It was little more than a corridor, a long, narrow room with space for one line of tables only; but at those tables used habitually to sit the merriest gathering of good fellows, and I include the ladies in that term, that ever came together in a London restaurant. There were witty journalists such as Shirley Brooks, "Pot" Stephens, "Jimmy" Davis, and "Shifter," and there were men of the theatre—Cecil Raleigh, for instance, and "Charlie" Harris, who when the waiter called the order for his dinner down the speaking-tube always added himself "pour le patron," for Romano, who lunched and dined at the table nearest the bar door, was not likely to get a tough steak or a thin quail. There were Guardsmen, such at "The Windsor Warrior," "Billie FitzDitto," "Haddocks," and "The Bonetwister," and men about town, of whom Hughie Drummond and Fred Russell were perhaps the best known, and coaching men, "Dickie the Driver" and "Swish" and "Partner," who used to delight in bringing jolly old Jim Selby to dine; and Arthur Roberts, then at the very top of his form, and "Mons" Marius, as representatives of the actor fraternity. And around this kernel of good-fellowship formed a fringe of other good fellows who came and went, men from the country, men from the far parts of the world, soldiers, sailors, planters, explorers, country squires. It was rather a clannish gathering, for everybody seemed to know everybody else at the line of tables, and people who were not taken into companionship, no difficult matter if they were kindred souls, felt "out of it," and went elsewhere.
Between the Gaiety Theatre and Romano's there grew up an indefinite alliance, and golden-hearted Nellie Farren would lunch there when a new burlesque was in rehearsal, and "the Child" and dear "Jack" St John and others of the principals looked with favour on the restaurant, and on Lord Mayors' days made a brave show of beauty at the windows of the first floor. The Gaiety Girls of those days, splendid women and jolly good fellows, who enjoyed life, and by their beauty and sociability helped other people to enjoy life, lunched and supped at the Roman's. I have a dozen names at the tip of my pen, but if I wrote them down I should stray into a gossip over the ladies of the burlesque and light opera stages in the seventies and eighties, and should require columns and columns of space to deal adequately with such a subject. Most of them married, and, as the fairy tales have it, "lived happy ever after." And the "halls," we didn't call them variety theatres then, were also represented at the Roman's. Jolly, humorous Bessie Bellwood lunched there five days out of six, though she kept the Roman humble by asserting that she preferred the tripe and onions at Chick's to anything his kitchen could produce, and when she was in good anecdotal form kept everybody near her tremulous with laughter. And the sisters Leamar, who used to sing a duet as to Romano's being "a paradise, sure, in the Strand" and added the information that "the wines and the women are grand," naturally paid frequent visits to the restaurant to assure themselves that the description was a correct one.
The Roman gathered about him a staff which exactly suited the tone of the restaurant, proof thereof being that so many of them remain in its service to this day. M. Luigi Naintre, the manager of Romano's, has climbed the ladder of promotion steadily through all the grades at the restaurant, and though for a while after Romano's death he wandered into other folds, one of the first acts of the company which now controls the restaurant was to ask him to come back to it. Long experience has taught him the art of making each frequenter of the restaurant believe that the establishment is maintained entirely to meet his or her taste and whims, and he is essentially the right man in the right place. M. Minola, his second in command, also graduated in the "Roman" school. The cellarman, L. Bendi, and the wine-butler, L. Villa, have been in the restaurant as far back as I can remember.