The Ritz Hotel and Restaurant will keep in the remembrance of Londoners the name of the foremost hôtelier of our days, M. Ritz, a man whose genius is written across Europe and America, from Paris to Frankfort, from Biarritz to Salsomaggiore, from Lucerne to Madrid, from Budapest to New York. Too much quick brain work unfortunately has broken down M. Ritz's health, and he is never likely to take any share again in the control of the hotels which bear his name. He was the man who first taught the mass of the rich English how to dine in cultured comfort in their own capital; yet to the great majority of those who benefited by his perfect taste and his genius for giving unostentatious luxury to the gourmets of the world he was an unknown personality. Duchesses and actresses, legislators and actors, explorers and curates, all are known to the public by their photographs in shop windows and in the newspapers, but I never saw a photograph of Ritz in a Regent Street shop or in a journal.
It was by chance that he first came to England. When the Savoy Hotel was opened M. Ritz was manager of the Hotel National at Lucerne and of the Grand Hotel at Monte Carlo: Mr D'Oyly Carte found him at the Grand Hotel, and asked him if he would come to the Savoy for six months to put the restaurant in order. He came, bringing with him M. Escoffier, who had been chef at the Grand. Ritz at the Savoy made the supper after the theatre the popular meal it still continues to be, though it is, thanks to the Early Closing Act, a scramble to eat five-shillings' worth of food in half-an-hour, and he also discovered, while at the Savoy, that if a restaurant wishes a large number of its guests to be of the softer sex a band is a necessity. He saw that an Austrian band, engaged at the suggestion of Mr Hwfa Williams, kept the diners half-an-hour longer at their tables over their cigars and coffee, and that ladies soon came to consider a dinner unaccompanied by music a tame feast. For the music, often over-loud, to the accompaniment of which I eat my meals in most restaurants, I am not in the least thankful to M. Ritz; but the majority of diners, especially those in petticoats, if such things exist nowadays, think differently.
The fight to obtain music at restaurants on Sundays was one of M. Ritz's great battles. I remember the days, not so very long ago, when a band could not play on Sunday in a restaurant unless some individual dinner-giver engaged it to play for his guests, and had no objection to the other diners listening to it. Another advance made by Ritz was the obtaining of newly baked bread for those who lunched and dined at the Savoy restaurant on a Sunday. The baker who at first supplied this bread broke some law or some regulation in doing this, and was summoned; but M. Ritz, not to be beaten, established a bakery in the hotel to supply the bread. Other restaurants followed suit. He had an enormous facility for quick work, no detail was too small for him, and when he had made up his mind that a thing should be done he took unlimited trouble to have it carried out. At one time, when he managed the Carlton, he could not understand why the coffee made there should not be quite up to the level of the coffee at his hotels on the Continent. He tried every experiment possible, brought water from all parts of England, took every precaution against the dampness of our climate, and finally asked one of the Rümpelmayers, the great pastrycook family of the south of France, to come to London to advise him in this matter.
I used to see M. Ritz at this period of his life very often, and used to chat with him on matters of gourmandise. Very slim, very quiet, with nervous hands clasped tightly together, he would move through the big restaurant seeing everything, saying a word under his breath to a head waiter, bowing to some of the diners, staying by a table to speak to others, possessing a marvellous knowledge of faces and of what the interests were of all the important people of his clientele. There was a maxim, he said, which should be carved in golden letters above the door of every maître d'hôtel, and that maxim was, in English, "A customer is always right," and he always bore this in mind. Whenever at that period M. Escoffier invented a new dish a little jury of three, M. Escoffier, Madame Ritz and M. Ritz, used to sit in judgment on it in solemn conclave before it was allowed to appear on a menu in the restaurant. I once asked Madame Ritz, who has been M. Ritz's real helpmate and counsellor throughout his married life, to what quality she attributed her husband's success in life, and she answered, "sensibility," giving the word its French meaning.
M. Ritz had a talent for doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. I once saw him in the early morning on the platform of the station in Rome. He looked, as he always looked, as though he had come out of a band-box, well-shaved and well-brushed, the ends of his moustache pointed upwards, his whiskers brought down to the level of his mouth, wearing those dark garments of extreme neatness which one always associates with the manager of hotels. He was the one male person on the platform that morning who was not dishevelled, nor tired, nor unshaven; but he had raced across the Continent as fast as trains could carry him to be there to receive a duke and duchess who were going to stay at the hotel in which he had an interest.
A coup du maître d'hôtel, of which he told me afterwards with a smile, was the method by which he put a large luncheon-party of ladies on easy terms with each other. It was a luncheon given at the Carlton and attended by the ladies who were sending the hospital-ship out to South Africa during the Boer War. Many of the ladies did not know each other well, and M. Ritz, exceedingly anxious that the luncheon should be a success, feared that they might not be easily conversational, so at the commencement of the feast he took round a bottle of Château Yquem and suggested to each lady that a little glass of white wine made a good beginning to lunch. In two minutes every lady was chatting most pleasantly to her neighbours whether she had ever seen them before or not. Of the determination of M. Ritz in his early days to learn everything that was to be learned in the restaurant world, I remember one instance, told me by his wife. He held a well-paid post in one of the smart Parisian restaurants, but left it to go to Voisin's at a smaller salary, because he thought there was more to be learned in the good old restaurant in the Rue St Honoré than in the other place of good cheer.
M. RITZ
But it is of the Ritz Restaurant, not of Ritz himself, that I am writing in this chapter. I have read that the Ritz has swallowed up the site of the old "White Horse" cellars, from which so many of the coaches used to start, but the White Horse cellars had crossed the road a century and a half before I began to know my London. The Isthmian Club-house at one time occupied the portion of the site overlooking the Green Park, and when the Club moved on to other quarters it became the Walsingham, part chambers, part restaurant, one of the group of houses and hotels which stretched from the Green Park to Arlington Street. When M. Gehlardi managed the Walsingham, and M. Dutru was its chef, there was no better dining place in London.