MM. Degiuli and Boriani have chosen as the motto of their restaurant, "Venez et vous reviendrez," and this confident prediction has been justified.
There is much history concerning the site on which the Pall Mall now stands. In the latter years of the Stuart dynasty, when the lane which led from Piccadilly down to the Mall gradually became a street of houses, Charles II. gave permission to John Harvey and his partner to sell cattle as well as fodder in the Haymarket. All along this market, on both sides, inns sprang up, and one of them occupied the site where the Pall Mall Restaurant now stands. The inn was pulled down early in the eighteenth century, and on its site Mr Potter, a carpenter, built a "summer" theatre; this theatre was converted by Samuel Foote somewhere about 1760 into a winter theatre. Mr A. M. Broadley has written for the proprietors of the Pall Mall an interesting booklet which deals at length with this theatre and its managers, Foote and the Colmans, and with the great actresses and actors and musicians who appeared on its stage. Mozart played on the spinet there as an infant prodigy; Margaret Woffington made her first bow to an English audience in the part of Macheath in The Beggars' Opera, "after the Irish manner"; and two actresses who married into the peerage—Lavinia Fenton, who died Duchess of Bolton, and Elizabeth Farren, afterwards Countess of Derby—played on its stage. But on 14th October 1820, the Little Theatre, as it was called, closed its doors with the tragedy of King Lear and a farce. It was not at once pulled down, and was still standing in a battered state when the present Haymarket Theatre, built by John Nash, was opened in 1821, just a fortnight before the coronation of George IV. When the Little Theatre was eventually pulled down shops were erected on its site. Two of these were in the year of the first Great Exhibition converted into the Café de l'Europe, the great hall of which, somewhat altered, is the large room of the present restaurant. Mr William John Wilde, who was Buckstone's treasurer at the Haymarket Theatre, became the proprietor of the Café de l'Europe in the late fifties, and as there was no early-closing law in those days the café naturally enough became the favourite supping place for those who had sat through a long evening at the theatre almost next door, and the sturdy critics who congregated in the first row of the pit ate their devilled bones and tripe and onions, Welsh rarebits, chops and potatoes in their jackets, at the café after midnight and passed judgment on the performances of Buckstone and Liston, Sothern and the other famous comedians of the theatre as they supped. Mr D. Pentecost was the last proprietor of the old café. He was, as "Dagonet" in The Referee has lately reminded us, a nephew of Pierce Egan, the author of "Tom and Jerry," and he was, amongst other things, the refreshment contractor to the Alhambra. He was also the proprietor of the Epitaux Restaurant in the colonnade of the opera house in the Haymarket. When that building was pulled down, in order that the Carlton and His Majesty's Theatre should be built on its site, Mr Pentecost transferred the name of Epitaux to the Café de l'Europe. The building was redecorated and MM. Costa and Rizzi became the lessees. Ten years ago, as I have previously written, MM. Degiuli and Boriani became the proprietors and gave the restaurant its present name and its present appearance.
[XLI]
IN JERMYN STREET
MAISON JULES. BELLOMO'S. LES LAURIERS
Jermyn Street used to be sacred to small private hotels, shops and bachelors' chambers, but the restaurants have now invaded it and there are half-a-dozen places of good cheer which have their front doors in the street, while some of the Piccadilly restaurants have a back entrance there.
M. Jules had the happy idea of taking two houses, one of them at one time the home of Mrs Fitzherbert, as a medallion of the head of King George IV., found under the drawing-room floor proves, and converting them into a hotel and restaurant. It has proved so successful in Jules' case that he is now adding on to his hotel and restaurant, building at the same time a nice little suite of rooms with bow-windows for himself and his wife. As you walk down Jermyn Street from St James's Street towards Lower Regent Street, the Maison Jules is on the right-hand side. You cannot miss it, for an illuminated terrestrial globe and the name above the doorway catch your eye. A little ante-room is separated from the restaurant by a glazed screen to keep off draughts. The restaurant itself, a long room running the whole width of the house, is all white, with a little raised ornamentation on its walls, with gilt capitals to the white pillars, and on the marble mantelpiece a clock and candelabra of deep blue china and ormolu. At the end of the room a big window, which is almost a wall of glass, is cloaked by lace curtains. There is a second room running at right angles at the back, which either can be used as part of the restaurant or can be partitioned off.
Jules himself will welcome you as you come into the restaurant. I have known him for many years, having first made his acquaintance when he was manager at the Berkeley, when his hair was of lustrous brown, and I have always been one of his supporters at the hotel in Piccadilly and at the Savoy—when he became manager there, and now in Jermyn Street, where, with his wife and his daughter, who has married the chef de cuisine, and his son, who is following in his father's footsteps, he controls the restaurant and the hotel. The girth of his waist may have increased a little, possibly to match the bow-windows of those new rooms, since I have known him, and his hair is now powdered with grey, but his good-natured, round, rosy face, and his eyes, which almost close when he smiles, remain the same. He is always so pleased to see me that I find that a dinner at the Maison Jules does me more good than most tonics do.