A London Mosaic

by Walter Lionel George

They all deserve their little word, and it is difficult to say of each of them just what should be said, because they have so much in common, yet are so far apart, like brothers and sisters. There is a flavour of Joseph Lyons at the Savoy, while Gatti has Reggiori for a little relative. Yet, when one comes to know them well, they are all so different. No one, for instance, could mistake the Carlton for the Savoy; both have a broad spaciousness born of their size, of the comparative expensiveness of their meats; both are lofty and white and clean; their glass is pretty good, and their plate so-so. But while the Carlton maintains a certain air of having selected from among the not very select, the Savoy shows little sign of having tried that much. To lunch at the Savoy makes one feel not so much that one is among the rich as among the well-to-do on short leave. The Savoy is sober; its luxury is quieter than that of the Joseph Lyons restaurant; in a way, with its top lights, its flowers, it recalls the Joseph Lyons civilisation; the flowers are real, but not much more so; the band is more discreet, but it plays the same tunes. Its population, too, is different; at the Savoy, you do not see the young clerk, but you do see what some of the young clerks will become if they are lucky; many foreigners in a state of gormandise and bejewelment; rather dowdy people, too, the well-off dowdy, whose sideboards must be taken to pieces before they can be got into country cottages. The business element is strong. Somehow, one tells a business man fairly easily; he wears good clothes that nearly fit him; his hair is well cut, his cheek is well shaved, but a consciousness of the barber’s art hangs about his head; his elegance is not a natural product, it is one of the goods which he produces; he misses ‘the line’ which some sediment of aristocracy or musical-comedy upstart achieves better than will ever the business man’s solidities. There is too much meat upon his cheeks; you feel that he is a little too rich, just as his eyes are a little too bright; he is like a very new knife that has not yet learned to cut.

THE SAVOY

Others, too, Americans, who are happier in those big hotels than any of the English, because hotel-life is, in many of them, an acquired characteristic. They are interesting, those Savoy Americans, abundant women, exquisite girls made of beautifully tinted steel-plate, those men with the square shoulders, square chins, square heads, cubic cheeks; you know, without being told, that they are connected with the cinema trade, or that they are producing a play by Mr Montague Glass or Mr Bayard Veiller, or that they are selling many motor-cars, or something like that. (The American who comes to Europe for the purpose of exporting art to Pittsburg is not found at the Savoy; he goes to Chelsea and Fitzroy Square.) And yet it is not a disagreeable place; its breadth, the airy width of plate-glass that looks out upon the Thames, the cheapness and the adequacy of its food, all these are part of the new restaurant of the new civilisation, which has replaced the little taverns in the little corners of the town. It is no use being sentimental over the little restaurant, or, indeed, over anything little: there are too many of us for anything little to be much more than a survival. If restaurants did not feed us a thousand at a time, they would never manage to feed us all.

One thinks of that in the small restaurants that have survived, such as Verrey’s. To many people it seems a queer thing to lunch at Verrey’s; it seems rather out of date, and, indeed, when one approaches that frontage, painted a sort of faded 1850 blue and provided with coloured glass, one has a sense of antiquity. Inside antiquity is still more striking, for the big, square room under the skylight manages at the same time to be drab in colour and Moorish Gothic in architecture. It still has the many mirrors of the ’fifties, an air of being comfortably off enough to afford to be dowdy. Rakish and dowdy! Can anything better translate the amusements of two generations ago? To-day, Verrey’s gives you a fair lunch, and at its café tables, which are somehow more substantial than the café tables of Paris, you understand what England thought the Continent must be like in the days of the Grand Tour.

There are other places, fanciful as Verrey’s. There is Bellomo’s, in Jermyn Street, a modest, pleasant little place, a long, narrow back room filled with agreeable young couples. Bellomo’s is rather like a young-old man, with its panelled wainscoting, its wallpaper of faded gold, and its moulded, early Victorian frieze. There is something solid about its dumb waiters; Bellomo’s is somehow benevolent.

But then Verrey’s and Bellomo’s are within limited flights of fancy. The curious gastronome will, in London, easily find queerer places and foods. At Pagani’s he can come to understand that risotto may well be eaten in Valhalla; at Gambrinus’s, the Regent Street one, of course, he could, before the war, when it was German, find unexpected delight in liver-sausage sandwiches, with perfectly sour gherkins, and, heaven of heavens, really cold beer. In those days it was decorated with antlers, enormous fanciful jugs, out of which you enormously drank the frozen gold of that beer. I think it has become Belgian since the war; I am not quite sure, for I went there only once after the transfer.

But the truly curious go not to foreigners like Pagani or Gambrinus, or even to Gustave, where the foods are truly French, or to the Savoyard, where they are French and eatable under the eye of strange pictures; the truly curious go not to the foreigner, but to the professional foreigner, to restaurants such as the Greek, the Chinese, or the Japanese. Of these the Chinese is the most attractive. I mean the Cathay, next door to the Monico, not the Chinese restaurants in Limehouse, where nothing is eatable, and nothing is tragic, and nothing is coloured, let Mr Thomas Burke say what he likes. A lunch at the Chinese restaurant is really an adventure, for nearly all the dishes are made of the same things, and yet they all taste different. There is an admirable dish, hang-yang-kai-ting, made of fried chicken with almonds and bamboo shoots. That is a simple one, and the curious will find more profit in a dish the name of which I have forgotten, which contains fried sliced pork, celery, beans, sprouts, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and green chutney. Eat that, and it is a very large, overflowing, savoury portion; flavour it well with chop-suey (which you can call liquid salt if you are a foreign devil). Eat it immediately after chicken liver soup, and if you do not forget before swallowing the bamboo shoots to chew, and chew, and chew, then a true mellowness will be known to you. Also, do not forget the great bowl of boiled rice, pure, white rice, perfectly dried, not sticky rice à la A.B.C., but rice where every grain remembers that it has a personality. Don’t ask for chopsticks: the best people in China do not use chopsticks; they use forks. (There used to be a Chinese restaurant where they provided chopsticks for the English; it was great fun watching them pour their food down their sleeves with that conscious air of duty that seems to overwhelm the Englishman experiencing pleasure.) And don’t forget dessert, ginger in syrup, fire in the midst of sweetness, like a red-haired girl; and ly-chee, large, sweet, white nuts in an opalescent syrup, extraordinarily good.

But, in a way, all those places, the very rich and the very odd, are running on their own ticket, and do not express the times in which we live. Our modern times are the Strand Corner House. I should not wonder if many of my readers had never been into the Strand Corner House; that is, if they are incurious of life. If they repent their acceptance of things as they are, they will find an unexpectedly large building decorated with heavily flowered stucco mouldings, with plate-glass, with stained glass, with panels of crimson satin. They will find light, co-operative luxury; superposed tiers, bearing crowds of people lunching on the top of one another’s heads, and at the bottom of a deep well, a band that can be heard above the clatter of twelve hundred pairs of jaws. A thousand people at a time really eat all together at the Strand Corner House, and, in a way, no wonder. The place is quite clean, not offensive in its appurtenances, and can supply three courses for less than two shillings; the music is the ordinary dance or sentimental music, the sort that makes you feel friendly or affectionate as required. The public of the Strand Corner House is, therefore, the world. Its variety is much greater than that of any other place. One might think that this public would consist exclusively of flappers and their escorts, and, indeed, the flapper is prevalent, though she comes in threes and fours quite as much as more ostentatiously with a ‘boy.’ Also the suburbs, middle-aged couples, when the wife has been shopping in St Paul’s Churchyard and has strayed down the Strand; unexpectedly you see people with an air of modish vanity, dashing people who smoke cigarettes and drink claret, damning both the expense and the consequences. Though very few of the frequenters could be mistaken for members of the classes, none are members of the masses; they seem to be in a state of social suspension; they are, especially the girls, of a rather crystalline type. I mean that you realise their good looks at once instead of by degrees. If you look about you, you will not fail to find half a dozen faces that can give you the knock ... only, if you look round the other way, you will probably see another half a dozen faces that can give you exactly the same knock, and when one is an old Londoner and has been getting the knock all one’s life, well, one unfortunately comes to stand it rather well.

These great crowds of young people with a little money in their pocket and much zest in their hearts tend to fall into uniform types. The men nearly all buy their collars at the Regent Street branches of city hosiers; the girls seem to skim the lighter froth of the big West End stores, except that Marshall’s knows them not. This produces a uniform quality: they have to overtake the fashions, and so become a little outrées.