The Queen's Restaurant, No. 4 Sloane Square, is one to which I often go when there is a first night at the Court Theatre, for it is only just across the road from that house. Its proprietor, M. Coppo, who learned his business at the Café Royal, bustles about his restaurant with a napkin under his arm doing the work of maître d'hôtel. The restaurant, with cream-coloured walls and mirrors in white frames, consists of several rooms thrown into one, the part by the entrance door being narrow and just holding two rows of tables, while at the back there is plenty of space. The clientele, on the occasions that I have been there, has been a mixture of all the comfortable classes—Guards' officers from the neighbouring barracks, fashionable people of both sexes from Sloane Street and its neighbourhood, dramatic critics making a hurried meal before going to the theatre, business men, and an artist or two from the Chelsea studios. M. Coppo gives his patrons a set dinner, the price of which, I fancy, is 3s. 6d.; but I have always ordered my dinner from the carte du jour, and I have found the food to be quite reasonably cheap and good.
I wonder how many people of the tens of hundreds who take their books to Mudie's to be exchanged know that the Vienna Café just across the road is an excellent place at which to lunch. In the upstairs rooms I have eaten, in the middle of the day, Austrian and German dishes excellently cooked, and there is a Viennese cheese cake which is a speciality of the house for which I have a liking, and with a slice of which I have always ended my meal. The coffee of the house is the excellent coffee made in the Austrian manner, and at tea-time the Café down below is always crowded with people, especially ladies, who like the Viennese cakes and pastries that they obtain there.
[XXX]
THE KING'S GUARD
ST JAMES'S PALACE
"The best dinner in London, sir!" was what our fathers always added when, with a touch of gratification, they used to tell of having been asked to dine on the Guard at St James's; and nowadays, when the art of dinner-giving has come to be very generally understood, the man who likes good cooking and good company still feels very pleased to be asked to dinner by one of the officers of the guard, for the old renown is still justified, and there is a fascination in the surroundings that is not to be obtained by unlimited money spent in any restaurant.