M. Escoffier is a little below the middle height, grey haired, and grey of moustache. His face is the face of an artist, or a statesman, and the quick eyes tell of his capacity for command. The quiet little man who, amidst all the clangour of the great white-tiled kitchen below the restaurant of the Carlton, seems to have nothing to do except to occasionally glance at the dishes before they leave his realm or to give a word of counsel when some very delicate entremet is in the making, to taste a sauce or give a final touch to the arrangement of some elaborate cold entrée, has organised his brigade of vociferous cooks of all nations as thoroughly as Crawford organised the Light Division of Peninsular fame. There is never any difficulty, for every difficulty has been foreseen. Only a man who has climbed the ladder from its lowest rung possesses such knowledge and such authority. M. Escoffier began his career as a boy in the kitchen of his uncle's restaurant in Nice. He went to Russia to the kitchen of one of the Grand Dukes, he served in the Franco-Prussian War as the Chef de Cuisine to the General Staff of the Army of the Rhine, and he knows the bitterness of captivity in the hands of an enemy. He was with Maréchal MacMahon at the Elysée and left the Grand Hotel at Rome when Ritz and he and Echenard came to London to make history at the Savoy. He writes with a very pretty wit on subjects connected with his profession, and he is married to a lady who, under her maiden name of Delphine Daffis, is well known in France as a poetess, and who has recently been decorated with the violet ribbon as Officier d'Académie.
If I have given so much space to a sketch of the great Maître-Chef, it is not that he is the only man of talent amongst the personnel of the Carlton. M. Kreamer, the manager, is eminent amongst his fellows. In the restaurant M. Besserer, light of hair, and with a light curling moustache, is an admirable Maître d'Hôtel, and the Carlton grill-room (to which I shall give attention when I write of the grill-rooms of London) owes much of its popularity to its manager, Signor Ventura.
And now for a little ancient history. Her Majesty's Opera House, with a colonnade surrounding it in which were shops and a little restaurant, Epitaux's, where the Iron Duke and other famous men gave dinner-parties in the early Victorian days, stood at the corner of the Haymarket and Pall Mall. If I wrote of the glories and the disasters of the big house of song I should have to write a book. When a company bought the site, and the Carlton and His Majesty's Theatre rose on it, the colonnade disappeared from three sides, and all the shops on those sides also vanished except the offices of Justerini and Brooks. These wine merchants held to their old position, and their window front was encased in the building of the new hotel without the business of the firm suffering a day's interruption. A cigar store has since then found an abiding place on the Pall Mall frontage. The name of Epitaux's was taken by the restaurant next door to the Haymarket Theatre, but was eventually dropped in favour of a more attractive title, the Pall Mall.
The tall porter outside the entrance of the Carlton in Pall Mall sets the swing door in motion to let us through; coats and hats, cloaks and furs are garnered from us as we pass through the ante-room, and then we are in the palm lounge, that happy inspiration of the architect which has been copied in other hotels through the length and breadth of the habitable world. The double glass roof, letting in light but keeping out draughts, was a novelty when the hotel was built. But, though this palm court has been copied far and wide, it has never been bettered. The terrace breaks up pleasantly the great width of floor space. The tall palms, and the flowers and smaller palms before the terrace, and the green cane easy-chairs give a sylvan touch to this great hall in the heart of London; and, as an instance of perfect taste, notice the little medallions of Wedgwood ware dependent from the capitals of the creamy marble pilasters.
Up the broad flight of steps we go into the restaurant, a restaurant the colouring in which is such that it never clashes with the hues of any lady's dress. The garlands of golden leaves on the ceiling, the artful use of mirrors and evergreens to give the illusion that outside the windows north and west there are gardens, the cut-glass chandeliers converted into electroliers, and giving a soft rosy light, the brown and deep rose of the carpet, the lighter rose of the chairs, the gilt cornice, the œil de bœuf windows towards the palm lounge, all form a perfect setting for charming people eating delicate foods. The keynote of the restaurant in decoration, as in the dinners which come from Escoffier's kitchen, is refinement. It is a pity, perhaps, that there is not daylight to brighten the restaurant from end to end, and that the electric lamps are always alight; but at dinner-time this is no drawback. An excellent string band plays on the terrace, but it is as well at dinner-time to choose a table far enough away from the musicians to ensure comfortable converse.
And now to describe to you a typical Carlton dinner. It is not easy, for I have so many memories of so many typical dinners there. Once the annual banquet of my old regiment was held at the Carlton in a great space of the restaurant screened off from the other diners. That was a noble feast! Again a memory comes to me of a silver wedding dinner, for which the table was decorated with creamy white and light pink roses, with silvered leaves. Escoffier composed for the occasion a dinner all white and pink, in which the Bortch was the deepest note of colour, the filets de poulets à la Paprika halved the two hues, and the flesh of an agneau de lait formed the highest light in the picture. That was the second occasion on which M. Escoffier sent to a dining-table the pêches Aiglon, the first occasion being a supper which Madame Sarah Bernhardt gave to Sir Henry Irving and other stars of our stage.
But most distinctive of all the dinners of ceremony at which I have been a guest at the Carlton was the dinner which Mr William Heinemann, the well-known publisher, gave to celebrate the publication by his firm of Escoffier's great work, "A Guide to Modern Cookery." The dinner was the idea of the Maître-Chef, who suggested that the best way to criticise the book would be to invite some of the men in whose judgment the publisher had faith to eat a dinner cooked by the man who had written the book. We were fourteen in all, mostly "ink-stained wretches," and amongst the signatures on the menu, which I religiously pasted opposite the title-page of my autographed copy of the work, are those of Sir Douglas Straight and of T. P. O'Connor, of a member of the great house of Harmsworth, and of other men whose palates are as keen as their pens.
This was the menu of the dinner and the list of the wines we drank that 30th May 1907:
Melon Cantaloup.
Caviar de Sterlet.
Tortue Claire.
Velouté Froid de Volaille.
Mousseline d'Ecrevisses Orientale.
Jeune Agneau Piqué de Sauge.
Morilles à la Crème.
Petits Pois à l'Anglaise.
Poularde Ena.
Trou Normand.
Cailles aux Raisins.
Asperges d'Argenteuil.
Pêches Sainte Alliance.
Mignardises.
Vins.
Vodka.
Amontillado, Dry.
Berncastler Doctor, 1893.
Heidsieck and Co., Dry, 1892.
Pommery and Greno, Nature, 1900.
Château Lafitte, 1878.
Dow's Port, 1887.
Café Double—Grandes Liqueurs.