A London Mosaic

by Walter Lionel George

CHAPTER V
SOUPS AND STEWS

In another chapter of this book the change that has come over London feeding has already been indicated. The times when respectability edicted that one should eat only within the family circle, when all that could be obtained abroad was a stodgy meal of bread and cheese at a coffee-house, or the lightest refreshment at Vauxhall or Cremorne, are long gone by; to-day, almost as many meals are consumed at restaurants as under homely roofs. It was a long battle the restaurants waged under the early banners of Hatchett’s or the Café Royal and, strange to say, the Grand Hotel. Yes, once upon a time the Grand Hotel, that ancestor, was the latest thing; in the eighties it was ‘the thing’ to lunch or stay at the Grand Hotel. But, in those days, ‘the thing’ was rather a scandalous thing, and if one lunched or dined away from home one felt dissipated; one had to choose one’s company when taking a meal thus, for the worst was easily thought of one in 1880, while to-day, the best is hoped for. (There is, perhaps, no great difference between the two attitudes.)

In those days the home was a British institution; it figured in the solemn list which numbered suet pudding, the royal family, bustles, Tennyson, the evangelical attitude, and chenille decoration of mantelpieces. The home had its rights; indeed, it had all rights; it was the place where you ought to want to be, and far from which you would naturally feel remorse; it was the thing you had to ‘keep together,’ the thing you had to ‘make,’ to ‘save’; your self-abnegation should have told you that you had no rights except to add the pillar of your person to those of the porch. It has gone, this Victorian rectitude; it has gone the way of Dundreary whiskers and of weepers round the hat; I suspect that the restaurant habit, as it is called, has turned some of the sods for its grave. There is something relaxing in a restaurant, at least to a people such as ours, afflicted with a considerable sense of private licence and of public dignity. Restaurant dining outrages in us a sort of modesty, and, like most Puritans, we rather enjoy having our modesty outraged; it is the revenge of the flesh, and it pleases us godly men to discover in ourselves a streak of the devil. We feel this rather more in the foreign restaurants than in the British; in the British eating-houses, where there is no menu, but only a bill of fare, where understandable things, such as mock-turtle soup, boiled mutton with caper sauce, and roly-poly are offered us, we know too well where we are; we eat, instead of giving way to greediness; by avoiding that temptation we avoid one of the cardinal sins, and more’s the pity. In foreign restaurants, however, where neither the name of the dish nor the form it assumes is understandable, we can develop a sense of sin; we can do this because our feet are set on foreign ways, all of which lead to Babylon. Foreign waiters address us, and there is no virtue in their eyes; they look like assassins, and it is thrilling to think that they may be assassins, or nihilists, or grand-dukes. Foreigners dine at the tables; their women are too smart to be good; the yellow-backed novels they bring in must surely be undesirable; they are poorly clad, which proves that they lead sinful lives; they are richly dressed, which points to evil courses. They are foreign. Is not the Drury Lane villain foreign?

SOHO MARKET

From this sense of sin arose in the beginning the popularity of the Soho restaurants. I do not know when they began to be popular. Some, such as the Restaurant d’Italie, the Monico, the Villa Villa, are old stagers, but when I first came to town their customers were mostly men; if couples came they generally included a man who did not care to take his womenkind to such places, but did not mind taking other people’s womenkind. (Thus it worked out just the same in the end.) The growth of London, which compelled men to live farther and farther out, favoured the restaurants, for distant dormitories drive men to proximate refectories. The Soho restaurant grew in numbers, together with the Cabins, the Lyons’s, the J.P.’s, and others, but at the same time, because they provided pleasant fare at low prices, they gained advertisement from the men who first frequented them. Thus the women heard of them, and they liked them immensely, for the Soho restaurant provides exactly the sort of meal that many women want: next to nothing, pleasantly served. So, in the last dozen years, they have prospered enormously; the early ones, such as Brice’s, Le Diner Français, Au Petit Riche, found many rivals such as the Moulin d’Or, the Mont Blanc, Chantecler, Maxim’s, the Rendezvous, etc. Their career has been curiously uniform. Nearly all have been started by a chef, a waiter who had saved up a small working capital or married well. Being foreigners, the proprietors liked good cooking, and in the beginning every Soho restaurant offered a good meal. To-day there are still a few where the proprietor circulates among the tables, asking you whether you are satisfied, and naïvely begs congratulation, but that state of mind is rare. So long as the customers were mainly foreign, the standard was kept up: small, important, subtle things were done, such as steaming vegetables instead of boiling them, such as putting in salt while the meat cooked. But the Englishmen who came to lunch, having advertised their wonderful find, grew very proud of it, began to bring their friends, their sisters, and, nowadays, even their aunts. They came in increasing numbers, and the proprietors discovered three things: that there were in London more Londoners than foreigners; that the Londoners were willing to pay more than the foreigners; that they either didn’t know what they ate, or that they didn’t care. As very few of the proprietors were in business as artists; as, moreover, they grew discouraged when they went round the tables and asked people whether they had enjoyed the stuffed mushrooms and were asked: ‘Were they stuffed?’ they ceased to take pains. They found out what the English customer wanted: paper flowers on the tables, Japanese fans, and dishes with incomprehensible names. So, one after the other, they began to cater for a purely English clientèle; a good many have discovered that the English customers expect made-up meats instead of, say, roast beef, and are willing to take those meats on trust; so the wise proprietor, in many cases, makes up his menu from the dishes left over from the night before at the Carlton or the Ritz. After all, he gives them what they want: a dissipated atmosphere. Not long ago, I watched four school mistresses in a state of considerable dissipation. They sat in the little restaurant, laughing rather more shrilly than they would have at Simpson’s, as if excited by the rather excessive effect of prettiness, the mauve walls, the blue and yellow curtains, the pretty fringed shades. Oh, how one understood Sally Bishop! How the mellow spirit of Mr Temple Thurston brooded with folded wings over the little place! The school mistresses listened hungrily for French, which was being spoken by the attendants, and they kept a wary eye upon their fellow lunchers: sober couples drinking claret; young men and women, the latter unpowdered, the former oppressed by sartorial self-righteousness. There was nothing against the lunch; it was a nice, ordinary little lunch; the sort of well-cooked little lunch that could be turned out by the gross, out of a machine, all the year round, every little lunch alike, for ever and ever. But my school mistresses were tasting dissipation while avoiding vice.

In true cooking one does not avoid vice. One courts vice. One says: ‘Eating is a sensuality, and we shall satisfy our senses as much as we can. We shall sing hymns to it; people have sung hymns to drinking, why not to eating? We are not ashamed of “feasting” our eyes and our ears; why not our palates?’ Some people understand this. Mr Anatole France sums it up well when analysing a Castelnaudary stew:—

‘The Castelnaudary stew contains the preserved thighs of geese, whitened beans, bacon, and a little sausage. To be good it must have been cooked lengthily upon a gentle fire. Clemence’s stew has been cooking for twenty years. She puts into the stew sometimes goose or bacon, sometimes sausage or beans, but it is always the same stew. The foundation endures; this ancient and precious foundation gives the stew the quality that in the picture of old Venetian masters you find in the women’s amber flesh.’

If you are a proper person you will call this disgusting; you will feel that this is an indecent subject, and that an author who dares to head his chapter ‘Soups and Stews’ ought in another world to be chained for a thousand years to the ghost of Colonel Newnham Davis. That is a legacy of the past; not more than twenty years ago it was indeed indecent to discuss food, and if a vulgarian did so, the only thing the lady of the house could reply was: ‘Oh, really!’ The war has altered that, and I am inclined to hope that people who endlessly discussed the difference between butter and margarine, the advantages to be found in neck of mutton, will maintain these not ignoble preoccupations. I believe they will, for they were moving that way; they had already left far behind the Victorian lady with a wasp waist who ‘daintily pecked at her dinner like a little bird.’ They may one day adopt Brillat-Savarin’s dictum: ‘Let me cook your ministers’ dishes, and they will give you good laws.’

But, leaving aside Soho, which is, after all, only the culinary frontier, we find that the restaurant has spread over the whole of London, carrying everywhere its gospel of satisfaction. This gospel takes various forms, for restaurants fall into different classes according to their locality and their prices. There are the pompous, like the Carlton, the Savoy, the Popular Café; there are the distinguished, such as Claridge’s, Jules’s, Dieudonné’s; there are the fanciful, such as Pagani, Verrey’s, old Gambrinus, Bellomo’s, Gustave, the Savoyard, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Greek; there is the slab-of-meat class, such as Gatti’s, Simpson’s, to say nothing of the Shepherd’s Bush Restaurant, and the Tulse Hill Hotel; above all there is the restaurant of the Joseph Lyons civilisation, the Strand Palace Hotel, the Regent Palace, the Strand Corner House.