He was born in Berlin in 1867, and, having been a clerk in a Hamburg shipping agency, came to this country when he was nineteen years old to learn the English language. He soon found a billet in a City office, as correspondence clerk at a pound a week, and he determined to stay in England, though his father, who was a spirit distiller, wished him to return to Germany and the distillery.
When he was twenty years old he thought he knew London well enough to engage in business on his own account. His father would not help him, but he had £2000 left him by his mother, and with this he engaged in various speculations, the thought of which now moves him to hearty laughter. He wanted to induce the English to smoke the German students' long pipes and to use washable india-rubber playing cards.
These and other such brilliant ideas made a very serious inroad on his capital. He held, amongst other agencies, one for a manufacturer of preserves, and this brought him into touch with German provision shops. These shops were all tucked away in little side streets in the Soho district, and Mr Appenrodt thought that there would be a good opening for German delicatessen if it was possible to show them in better premises and with more appetising surroundings. He opened in a basement at the corner of Lombard Street and Gracechurch Street a shop, in a room about twenty feet square. At that time there were no light refreshment places in the City except the A.B.C. shops, and Mr Appenrodt soon had a large clientele for his little shop. He saw that there was a fortune to be made in catering for the wants of the middle classes, but before he experimented on a larger scale he went back to Germany to serve his one year of military service, having sold his little business to a man who transferred it to some licensed premises and made a fortune by it.
When Mr Appenrodt came back, having completed his term of military service, he found that his luck in the City had petered out, for not one of the shops he opened in succession proved to be a success. The last straw was a shop in the Commercial Road, which seemed likely to eat up all the funds he had left. But it was during this last attempt that his luck turned. He engaged a young lady as shop assistant, and she brought him good luck and success; and his love story, for it was a love story, led up to the right ending of all love stories, a happy marriage. And he backed his luck, for he and his wife made a last bold bid for fortune by taking a shop in the West End, at the corner of Coventry Street and Whitcomb Street. This venture proved an instantaneous success. Mr Appenrodt and his wife at first did all the work themselves, and their business hours were from nine a.m. until one the next morning. They had no afternoons or evenings off, and worked all and every Sunday.
Easier times came, assistant after assistant was engaged, and one branch after another was opened. Not all of these proved successes, but in spite of minor set-backs, the firm of two continued to flourish more and more, and has now the big shop and restaurant at Coventry Street, eight branches in various parts of London and a big depot in Paris. Mr Appenrodt has refused many offers to turn his undertaking into a company. He looks on his five hundred employees as his family, and is not willing to put them at the mercy of strangers.
That was Mr Appenrodt's story to me across the table, and when I asked him questions he amplified his personal history in various ways. He told me how the Parisian depot came to be established: that one day he met a former employee, one of his own countrymen, who talked French like a native of France. He knew his man, and he told him that he was just going over to Paris, and that if he could find a suitable shop to let there, he would take it and put his old friend in as his partner and as the manager. He found the shop, put his friend into it, and it has proved a most successful speculation. He told me of the various obstacles he had to overcome in building his premises in Coventry Street; of the large sums he expended to buy out the owners of the three houses he required and of the difficulties he experienced in obtaining a licence to sell beer and other liquors; how at last he bought two public-houses and surrendered their licences, and how the Licensing Magistrates then gave him permission to serve alcoholic drinks, but only with food. His prices, Mr Appenrodt told me, are fixed as being the lowest prices at which he can sell first-class food and make a reasonable profit on it without looking to any profit from the drinks that are sold, for no pressure whatever is put on the patrons of his restaurant to drink anything stronger than water.
I asked Mr Appenrodt what his special hobby was, and he told me that it was to buy public-houses and to turn them into Appenrodt establishments, which, if you come to think of it, is as true a work of reform as any that is being carried out in London.
He and his wife, he went on to say, love the work they do. They go together frequently to the firm's factory in the country, where workmen, many of them imported from Germany, make the sausages, the glassed delicacies and other specialities of the house, and on fine days to the farm they own at Hendon, a picturesque tract of country through which the River Brent flows, where they breed pigs for the pork sausages—though English pork is so firm that Dutch pork or other foreign porks must be mixed with it to make it bind—and fowls and other farm produce.
Before I said good-bye to Mr Appenrodt he asked me if I would like to see the kitchen and other parts of the house, and I said "With pleasure," for I never think that the final word can be said regarding a restaurant until one has seen the kitchen that supplies it. We went upstairs to the top of the house, passing on the way a room in which half-a-dozen women were peeling potatoes for the potato salads, potatoes specially imported from Germany, for English potatoes crumble too easily to be satisfactory material. And eventually we came to a big kitchen at the top of the house, very airy and very clean, where a French chef de cuisine rules over cooks of all nationalities. Descending again, we went into the basement to look at Appenrodt's Keller, decorated after the German style with landscapes and figures, where two bands play alternately all the afternoon and evening, and where good Germans, and Englishmen who like good German beer, congregate to eat simple food and drink the produce of Austrian and German hop-fields.
And finally I walked round the big shop on the ground floor, where at the marble counter the men in white were busy cutting sandwiches, and Mr Appenrodt explained to me the beauties of the glassed delicacies and the great variety of sausages of all countries, and as he took up one after another, sausages of majestic size, products of Germany or Italy, cut so as to show a section, and smaller sausages in glass jars, and bunches and packages of sausages, and Swiss sausages in a shape to take up very little room in a knapsack, I felt coming over me exactly the same feeling that I experience when a collector of beautiful china, or priceless lacquer or wonderful metal-work explains to me the beauties of his collection, a feeling that I too want to collect that particular kind of curio. If I were much in Mr Appenrodt's company I feel quite sure that I should become an enthusiastic amateur in the matter of sausages.