Chapter M: Ritz 184 (3)

At last the board took its courage in both hands and redecorated the restaurant from floor to ceiling. It is now a hall of white and gold and pink. The panels are of Rose du Barri silk, the pillars are gleaming white, while the frieze is of the lightest blue. A dark rose carpet gives relief to this shimmering, shining restaurant, and in its centre is a handsome table of many tiers for fruit and sweet things, a table of gilt sphinx heads and many electric lamps. The waiters wear knee-breeches; the band plays in an ante-room. The redecorated restaurant at once jumped into the affections of the world that dines, and further to add to the good temper of this place of butterfly colouring, the directors engaged as the _maître d'hôtel_ in charge of the restaurant, M. Califano, who is known to the patrons of the Cecil as "Sunny Jim." One of the advantages with which M. Califano has been endowed by Nature is a smiling face, and some wit at the time that "Sunny Jim" was a favourite figure on all the hoardings, gave M. Califano his nickname.

To complete their work of betterment, the board added to the restaurant and hotel the new palm court, a sumptuous lounge, upholstered in powdered blue and gold, which has eaten up more than a half of the great forecourt of the Cecil. This forecourt, which was almost of the size and shape of a Roman hippodrome, was a great comfort in past days to the cabdrivers of London, for there was unlimited room in it for them to wait to take up guests at the hotel; but it was a great waste of space. The new palm court is a very splendid place, and besides giving the restaurant a noble reception-room, it has shut away from the hotel all the noise of the street and all the bustle of the reception hall. It has, however, done away with the most American spot in London, the space of paving outside the front entrance of the Cecil which used to be known as "The Beach." Here used to be cane chairs and rocking-chairs and piles of luggage, and a newspaper stall, and in the summer-time pretty girls sunning themselves, and waiters hurrying to and fro with cold drinks and long straws in them; and the American guests of the hotel who loved the brightness and the bustle of the spot christened it "The Beach," and preferred it to any of the gilded parlours inside the hotel. The new palm court, however, in a stately manner, has taken the place of "The Beach" as a meeting-ground for the hotel guests. Mr Kaiser, the general manager of the Hotel Cecil, tells me that the building of this fine lounge has been of benefit to the restaurant as giving a finishing touch to its comforts, and I have no doubt that this is so, for dining in the restaurant, I found it comfortably filled by people staying in the hotel, and guests from outside, and "Sunny Jim" told me of the vast numbers whom on such special occasions as Christmas and New Year's Eve he manages to accommodate in the restaurant and balcony.

I ate the Cecilian dinner, a seven-and-sixpenny _table d'hôte_ meal, which I found quite excellent. This is the menu:

Huîtres Natives on Hors d'Œuvre.
Consommé Princesse.
Crème Parisienne.
Filets de Sole Carême.
Quartier d'Agneau Arléquine.
Pommes Macaire.
Caille en Cocotte au Jus d'Ananas.
Salade.
Asperges, Sauce Hollandaise.
Glacé à l'Andalouse.
Friandises.

The delicate sauce with the sole, the neatness of the garnish of the vegetables with the quarter of lamb, the plumpness of the quail and their contrast of taste with the pine-apple, would have assured me that the kitchen is in first-class hands, even had I not known that M. Jean Alletru, a chef who stands very high in the estimation of his brother chefs, had succeeded M. Coste, when that great man retired.

I might have spent a shilling less and have eaten an alternative dinner without the oysters in it, or I might have taken advantage of an arrangement by which anyone dining at the Cecil can pay a fixed price for his or her dinner, and choose practically anything they like from the _carte du jour_, which is a very ample one, and which generally contains some of the _spécialités_ created by M. Alletru. This is the list of these _spécialités_ and a couple of very pretty little dinners can be arranged from amongst them, the only thing needed in addition being a soup. _Tomate en surprise au caviar, turbotin Prince de Galles, filet de sole Clarence, timbale de truite froide Norvégienne, ris de veau St Cloud, caille à la Salvini, poitrine de volaille Providence, selle d'agneau Cecil, poularde à la Jacques, fraises Tetrazzini, bouteille de champagne en surprise._

I have given high praise to M. Alletru, but the highest praise that a _maître-chef_ can receive is that which comes from his brothers in art, and no higher compliment could be paid to the management of the Hotel Cecil and their _chef de cuisine_ than that the Ligue des Gourmands, the association of all the principal French chefs in England, when they held their first Dîner d'Epicure under the presidency of M. Escoffier, placed themselves in the hands of the Cecil and of M. Alletru, who, with his brigade of cooks, sent to table the dinner that M. Escoffier had designed. If I print the menu of this banquet, a banquet at which there were three hundred guests present, in preference to that of any of the many banquets at which I have been a guest in the great banqueting halls of the Cecil, it is because in my opinion it is the perfection of a dinner of ceremony. The _Dodine_ and the _Fraises Sarah-Bernhardt_ were the two sensational dishes of the feast, but it is not a dinner of many courses of rich food, and is interesting without being heavy:

Hors d'œuvre.
Petite Marmite Béarnaise.
Truite Saumonée aux Crevettes Roses.
Dodine de Canard au Chambertin.
Nouilles au Beurre Noisette.
Agneau de Pauillac à la Bordelaise.
Petits pois frais de Clamart.
Poularde de France.
Cœur de Romaine aux Pommes d'Amour.
Asperges d'Argenteuil Crème Mousseline.
Fraises Sarah-Bernhardt.
Dessert.
Café--Liqueurs.
Bénédictine.

Whether the Cecil was the first of the great banqueting houses to effect a reform in the service of public banquets I am not sure, but it was at the Cecil that I first found that such a reform had taken place. In old days it was the custom for the waiters to trail a dish along the whole length of a banqueting-table, and the salmon, which went up the room a noble-looking fish, came down five minutes later to starvation corner, a head, a tail and a skeleton. It was at the Cecil that I first noticed the breaking up of the tables into manageable sections of guests, with a waiter and his aids to each section, and the dinner served straight from the kitchen to that section. The restaurant and the banqueting halls and the private dining-rooms by no means exhaust the list of the accommodations of those who dine that the Cecil affords. There is below the Rose du Barri room another one, the Indian room, decorated in Oriental fashion with blue and yellow tiles, and in this a grill dinner and a _table d'hôte_ dinner are both served, and when this room overflows another equally spacious room is opened and becomes the grill-room.

(As I correct the proofs of this chapter news comes to me that "Sunny Jim" will in 1914 become a joint partner in the management of the St James's Palace Hotel in Bury Street and will give special attention to its restaurant.)

XI

CLARIDGE'S

I reach back in memory farther in touch with Claridge's than with any other hostelry in London, One of the stories of her early life that my mother often told me when I was a small boy was how my grandfather, as crotchety an elderly widower as ever ruled an Indian district, when he finally retired from the service of John Company, arrived in London with his bullock trunks and sandalwood boxes lined with tin, his bedding rolled up in bundles, his guns, his fly-whisks, and palm-fans, and all the strange paraphernalia that an Anglo-Indian official gathered about him in those days. With him came his faithful bearer, and an ayah, and his little pale daughter, and they all descended at Claridge's Hotel--though perhaps in those days it might have been Mivart's. The first great grief of the little girl's life was that the "Nabob," as my grandfather was called in the family, delivered a "hookum" to the manager of the hotel that an English nurse must be provided directly for his small daughter, as the ayah ought to return at once to her own country, and my mother was obliged to say good-bye to her devoted Indian attendant. My first personal introduction to Claridge's was when, as a schoolboy, I was invited by another schoolboy, who wished to show off, to go with him to visit a German _Graf_, a nobleman with a very long string of minor titles, whose greatest glory was that he owned a castle on the Rhine. The _Graf_ was very polite to the two little English boys, and talked to us in very bad English; and when we took our departure he saw us to the door as though we had been persons of the greatest importance. Mr Claridge, wearing a skull-cap of velvet, happened to be in the hall as we passed through, and I remember well the beautiful bow that he gave to the Count. Mr Claridge's bows were celebrated; they were of a different depth, according to the rank of the person to whom he bowed, and there was even a delicate difference in the salute that he gave to a Serene Highness to that with which he welcomed a Royal Highness. Claridge's in those days consisted of half-a-dozen houses connected with each other, and the best rooms in these houses formed the suites where the various royalties who patronised the hotel lodged, Mr Claridge and his staff of servants being always on the watch that the privacy of his guests should not be invaded. On one occasion, when a famous caricaturist took a room at the hotel, Mr Claridge waited on him and informed him that he must transfer his custom elsewhere, for, though he, Mr Claridge, was a great admirer of the artist's talent, and decorated the walls of some of the rooms with his work, he could never allow a royal personage to be caricatured within the walls of his hotel. Not that Mr Claridge himself always spoke too respectfully of the great ones of the earth. Archbishop Temple used to tell a story that when in 1846 the Pope seriously thought of taking refuge in England, Mr Claridge remarked that he was so full up with kings and royal dukes that he could only offer his Holiness a small back room, but that, being a bachelor, he, the Pope, would probably not mind.

The old Claridge's was pulled down and the new Claridge's built in the nineties, and I remember the opening day, when a great crowd of fashionable people came to look at its _salons_ and ballroom and restaurant, and the royal suite. The india-rubber roadway in the entrance, then a novelty, was much admired, and the six footmen in the hall, in their state livery, looked mighty splendid. Mr D'Oyly Carte, who more than anyone else had been the moving spirit in the creation of the new hotel, was wheeled about in a chair through the crush of pretty ladies and distinguished gentlemen, for he was then very ill.

The new Claridge's soon found its own particular atmosphere, an atmosphere of perfect serenity. The little army of footmen, who were too gorgeous for ordinary occasions, were reduced in numbers, and now only one superb being in plush and silken calves moves about the hall and arranges the papers in the reading-room. The inner hall, with its pillars and walls of white, and its reflected light, is a most comfortable lounge in which to sit after dinner and listen to the orchestra, and out of this open two rooms, one of Wedgwood blue with Wedgwood designs on it, and the other of old gold. The restaurant has been considerably altered since its first opening, for it has been divided into two rooms, the colouring of it has been brightened, and at night an abundance of light is now thrown on to the painted ceilings from cunningly concealed lamps. The bases of the great arches which support the roof are cased in dark oak, with an inset of olive wood; the carpet is of rose and grey and the chairs are of green leather with the arms of the hotel stamped upon it.

It is a restaurant in which dinner takes its right place as one of the tranquil pleasures of life. The music of the band is never too loud, the fine napery and the admirable glass are pleasant to the touch, the flowers in the silvered stands of the table lamps give an agreeable touch of colour, the cut glass of the pendent electroliers sparkles, and the first and the second _maîtres d'hôtel_, M. Invernizzi, who comes from the Palace Hotel, at St Moritz, to London for the season, and M. Castelani, who is a permanency at Claridge's, are tactfully attentive, while M. Gehlardi, the manager of the hotel, walks through the rooms during the course of dinner to bow here and there at a table, and to assure himself that all is well. It is the clientele of Claridge's that has made its atmosphere, for the well-dressed, good-looking, quiet people who dine at the tables, put a comfortable distance apart, are folk whose names bulk largely in the Society columns of the newspapers, and the list of the diners on any given night in Claridge's Restaurant would be for the most part a string of titles. Good manners are in the air, and I do not think that even the rawest plutocrat could be unmannerly amidst such surroundings.

On the night that I last dined at Claridge's, I had written beforehand asking that a table for three should be reserved for me, and I had intended to give my guests the larger of the two dinners of the restaurant, the twelve-and-six one, which runs through the usual courses, and which is by no means a set dinner, for any dish which does not exactly match the fancy of a dinner-giver is changed for another to suit his whim or his palate. But I found that a special little feast had been ordered for me by M. Gehlardi, and the menu of it was as follows:--

Melon Cantaloup.
Bortch à la Russe.
Filets de Sole Newnham-Davis.
Noisette d'Agneau aux Fines Herbes.
Petits pois frais. Pommes Noisettes.
Coq en Pâte.
Salade de Romaine à l'Estragon.
Fraises Parisienne.
Friandises.

The _chef de cuisine_ at Claridge's is M. Maurice Bonhomme, who had passed through the kitchens of two great Parisian restaurants, the Café de Paris, and Ledoyen's, in the Champs Elysées, before he came to London. He is a chef of high repute, and these are the specialities of his kitchen:--_filet de sole Tosca, suprême de sole Pré Catalan, Coulibiac de saumon, suprême de volaille d'Orléans, cailles Hacchi Pacha, Coq en Pâte Claridge's, pêches Caprice, fraises Delphine_.

Of the dishes of my dinner, the excellent _Bortch à la Russe_ was served as it is in Russia, with little _pâtés_ to break into it. The list of these _pâtés_ in the menu of a Russian dinner is often a long one. The _filet de sole_, which M. Bonhomme paid me the compliment of christening to my name, is a quite admirable _sole poché au Madère_, with all the fumet of the fish retained and served with sliced _champignons_ and _pointes d'asperges_. I sent my very best compliments to M. Bonhomme on his masterpiece. The _coq en pâte_ is an ornamental dish, for the fowl stuffed with all manner of rich things is encased in a paste shaped like a cock, crest and all. The outer covering is broken before the bird is carved. It is a dish of almost terrifying richness.

Quite a number of the great people of the land give their banquets at Claridge's, and out of the sheaf of the menus of these feasts I select one of the Surrey Magistrates' Club Dinner, which shows that our Solons across the Thames dine and wine with much discretion and taste:

Royal Natives.
Hors d'œuvre.
Consommé Monte-Carlo.
Bisque de Crabes.
Turbotin braisé au Champagne.
Whitebait diable noir.
Selle de Béhague à l'Estragon.
Haricots verts de Nice.
Pommes nouvelles au Beurre.
Timbale à la Galoise.
Caneton d'Aylesbury à l'Anglaise.
Salades d'Oranges.
Asperges vertes Sauce Hollandaise.
Pêches Melba.
Friandises.
Bonne Bouche.

VINS.
Oloroso Fine Old.
Piesporter, 1904.
George Goulet (mag.), 1900.
Moët et Chandon.
Dry Imper., 1904.
Dow's 1896.
Courvoisier Brandy.
Fine Champagne, 1865.

I wonder how a club dinner of magistrates of fifty years ago would contrast with such a dinner as the above.

XII

THE EUSTACE MILES RESTAURANT

Old "Rats," which is the disrespectful title by which most of his friends call Major-General Sir Ulysses Ratbourne, late of the Bundlekund Fusiliers, was holding forth to his crony, Colonel Bunthunder, late of the same distinguished regiment, in the hall of the Cutlass and Cross-bow Club as I passed through it, and the General paused for a second in his denunciation of Radicals and Socialists to say that he wanted to have a word with me, and then finished his peroration. Colonel Bunthunder muttered: "Very true, very true," and went on into the smoking-room shaking his head sorrowfully, and the General turned to me.

"Look here, my lad"--anyone under seventy is "my lad" to the General--said he, "I want you to give me a bit of advice."

I said the correct platitude, and awaited developments.

"My nephew Bill, the one in the Hussars, has just married, and he and his wife are coming up to town, and I want to know where to take 'em to dine."

I reeled off the list of the half-dozen most fashionable restaurants; but the General cut me short. "Ay, my lad, that's all very well; but the girl that poor old Bill's been and married is a vegetarian. What d'ye say to that, now?"

The General had put into the word "vegetarian" just the tone of astonished disgust he would have employed had he told me that the young lady was a militant suffragette; but I did not echo that at all. "Take them to the Eustace Miles Restaurant in Chandos Street," I advised; "and whatever your niece's fads may be, you can give her what she wants there."

Old "Rats" thanked me with the chastened thankfulness that men show when given the address of a specialist for some obscure disease of which they think they are a victim, wrote the address down on a card, and went after Colonel Bunthunder into the smoking-room to tell him all about it.

It occurred to me, however, directly the old General had left me, that I was sending him to a restaurant into which I had never myself been, and concerning which I knew nothing, except that I always look into its windows and at its bill of fare whenever I pass down Chandos Street; and, therefore, in order that I might be able to give the old man some detailed information from my own experience, I went next day to Chandos Street to lunch.

Before I set down what my experiences were, I wish to express my personal admiration for the single-mindedness of Mr Miles and his wife in doing the work they have set themselves to do. That Eustace Miles, half trained, went into a tennis court to defend his title of amateur world champion against a young American gentleman trained to the second, and that he made a fine fight for the championship with the odds desperately against him, shows that a diet of non-flesh food doesn't kill pluck or stamina. And before the authorities asked Mrs Miles not to send the E.M. soup barrow down to the Embankment on winter nights, as they wished to clear that thoroughfare of derelicts, she and her helpers had done much to feed the hungry and to reclaim some of those who were not irreclaimable, which shows that a kind heart thrives on Emprote and Protonnic and Compacto, and the other meatless foods with strange names. Lastly, that the Eustace Miles Restaurant celebrated last year the seventh anniversary of its opening, shows that London wanted such a restaurant, and that it has kept its clientele.

The big windows of the Eustace Miles Restaurant are "dressed" as if they were shop-windows. Sometimes they are full of tins and packets of the non-flesh foods arranged in piles and pyramids; sometimes they look like the windows of a book shop, piles of literature and charts of the human frame being in evidence; and sometimes boxing-gloves and foils and pictures of young men holding themselves upright and sticking out chests as full as those of pouter-pigeons draw attention to the fact that a physical school high up in the building is one of the Eustace Miles activities. Sometimes the windows look like those of a pastry-cook's shop, and sometimes they bristle with copies of _Healthward Ho!_ the monthly magazine which Mr Miles edits. Always outside the door in a glazed case is the bill of fare for the day printed in red and green type, and I have often wondered what "Egg and Mushroom Fillets and Duxelles Sauce with Asparagus and New Potatoes (N.)," or "Pinekernel Quenelles and Onion Sauce with Spring Cabbage and Potatoes (N., F.U.)," or "Hazel-nut Sausages and Gravy with Cauliflower and Roast Potatoes (N., F.U.)," taste like, and what the capital letters after each dish mean. Now, however, there was no reason to linger and look at the card. I was about to plunge into the great unknown, to sample the dishes with strange names, and to learn the secret of N.N. and F.U.

A commissionaire, looking just like other commissionaires, though he, like all the other employees of the restaurant, eats the food of the restaurant, opened the door to me and gave me a card for my bill, and my first impression was that I was in a Food and Cookery Exhibition, for in front of me was a stall piled high with tins of Emprote and a cash desk with a little model of the E.M. barrow by it, a stall for pastry and biscuits, and a book-stall; but beyond this first line of defence I saw little tables with white cloths on them, and many people sitting at them, and I walked on looking for a vacant seat. I came to a table with only one occupant, and sat down; a little waitress in a neat brown dress put the red and green printed bill of fare into my hand, and I found myself suddenly faced by a puzzle to which the purple ink _carte du jour_ of a small provincial French restaurant is as ABC is to a jig-saw puzzle. However, in larger print than anything else on the card was the announcement that a half-crown _table d'hôte_ luncheon and dinner was served, so I said to the waitress in an offhand manner, as though I were an habitué: "I'll take the half-crown lunch, please." She never budged. "Compacta _croûtes_ or roasted cashews?" she asked me, and I gasped out, "Compacta," and wondered what on earth I was going to eat.

Then, while the little waitress had gone to get me the first instalment of the unknown, I looked down the menu and made up my mind which of the two soups, the two entrées, the two sweets and two savouries I would order when the waitress came back again, and then turned my attention to the room and the people at the tables. There is a suggestion of a gymnasium about the restaurant, for it is a high room with a broad gallery running round it about half-way up its height, and it is lighted by a great space of skylight. All the boarding, and there is a good deal of it, is painted dark green, and on the walls is a dark green and white paper. A tea-stall, green and white, and a long buffet of green wood, with pots of flowers on it, are at one end of the restaurant; the floor is covered with oilcloth, with strips of crimson cocoa-nut matting laid over it, and there are flowers in vases on the little white-clothed tables which occupy all the floor space below and in the gallery. There is a sense of airiness and spotless cleanliness about the place. Big notices draw attention to the Normal Physical School and other of the Eustace Miles activities, and a request to gentlemen not to smoke till after six P.M. was just above my head.

The people at the tables were just like the people one sees at any other restaurant where the prices are not high--ladies who might be stenographers, or country cousins up for a day's shopping, young men who, I daresay, are bank clerks--a good, level, healthy-looking gathering. A man with clear blue eyes and a close-clipped white beard sat down in the seat opposite to mine, and ordered something without looking at the menu; a youngster in golfing kit took the other unoccupied place at the table, and a wrinkle came across his forehead as he plunged mentally into the intricacies of the _à la carte_ sheet, until the waitress helped him by pointing with her pencil to some dish printed in red ink, and he joyfully assented to her suggestion. A young man brought in a bull-dog on a leash, and the dog was petted on his progress up the floor by all the little waitresses.

The waitress who had me in her charge returned with the Compacto _croûtes_, two little angles of hot toast with something spread on them, and she took my order for the next course, of lettuce and sorrel _potage_, and for some ginger ale, which I ordered as having a vague feeling that it would be in keeping with the meal. The Compacto had a far-off taste of potted meat, and I had noticed that it was labelled N., F.U., which a note at the top of the menu told me meant nourishing and free from uric acid. The dishes marked N.N. are "Very Nourishing." The lettuce and sorrel soup, when it came, was distinctly to be commended, a trifle thin, perhaps, but having the taste of the vegetables in it, and being excellently hot. This also, I was pleased to see, was noted as N. and F.U.; and had I been subject to gout, which--"touch wood," I am not, I should have been eating an admirable non-gouty meal. Then came what on the menu was described as a main dish. It was asparagus and lentil timbale, cucumber sauce, stuffed vegetable marrow and new potatoes _sautés_. I rather hope that this will not be the main dish that old "Rats" will stumble up against when he takes his niece to dine at the Eustace Miles Restaurant, for the timbale did not seem to me to have any strong taste of asparagus in it--perhaps the lentils had killed it. The stuffed vegetable marrow was rather a watery delicacy, but I ate up the _sautés_ potatoes, feeling quite glad that I knew what their taste was going to be. The next dish, however--honey shortbread and stewed apricots--I can unreservedly praise; the shortbread was excellently light and the stewed apricots were good things of their kind. I had told the waitress that as a savoury I would have _matelote_ eggs on toast, but I cancelled that order, for I look on savouries as superfluities, and ate some cheese as a finish to my repast.

The little waitress totalled up my bill on the card that the commissionaire at the door had given me, and I was making my way to the pay-desk when I saw in a corner by the book-stall a lady engaged in opening letters; and, thinking that this must be Mrs Eustace Miles, I asked her if such was the case, and when she said "Yes," introduced myself. She welcomed me to the restaurant, explained that her husband was away playing a championship game at tennis, and said how sorry she was that she had not met me before I lunched, as she would have liked to suggest to me the dishes that best suit anyone making their first essay on non-flesh foods. I told her, however, that I had wished to make my first attack just as any other meat-eating member of the public would do, and I was very glad to be able to compliment her on the cook's soup and the shortbread. I had bought at the book-stall the May number of _Healthward Ho!_ and had carried off from the dinner-table a sheaf of leaflets giving information concerning the restaurant and the _salons_, and in addition to these Mrs Miles gave me a leaflet describing the exhibit that the then chef of the restaurant, Mr Blatch, N.C.A., sent to the Food and Cookery Exhibition in 1910, and which won a gold medal there, and an account of the _déjeuner_ at which M. Escoffier and the editor of _Food and Cookery_ and _The Catering World_ were present, and which was described by the latter in glowing terms, "excellent," "delightful" and "delicious" being adjectives used for every course. This was the menu of the feast:

Milk Cheese and Celery Mayonnaise.
Salsify and Barley Cream Soup.
Cashew Nut Timbale and Cranberry Sauce.
Nut and Vegetable en Casserole.
Vegetables (Conservatively Cooked).
Jamaican Fruit Salad.
Devilled Compacto.

It was recorded that M. Escoffier very much enjoyed the devilled Compacto, and praised the work of the chef who had prepared the _hors d'œuvre_ and the entrées. As, however, since the date of this _déjeuner_, which was in March 1910, M. Escoffier has given the world his famous _Dodine_, and his not less famous _Poularde Poincaré_, he was evidently not weaned from the errors of flesh-eating by his visit to the Eustace Miles Restaurant, nor shall I be lured away by any stuffed vegetable marrow from creamy salmon and plump quails.

But I shall say no word to dissuade old "Rats" from going to dine at the Eustace Miles Restaurant, for I am quite sure that what he will eat there will certainly do him no harm, and if he chooses F.U. dishes may probably do him a lot of good, but I should like to be present when the old man first looks down the green and red bill of fare of the day and finds himself faced by all the strange new dishes, for his remarks will be worthy of the occasion.

XIII

THE PRINCES' RESTAURANT

When the house for the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours--that classic stone building with busts of great painters in the ovals that ornament its façade, busts on which the sparrows perch and watch the traffic in Piccadilly--was put up in the early eighties, there was space below the galleries for some shops and for a large hall. It occurred to somebody, probably M. Benoist, whose great charcutier's shop was just over the way, that Princes' Hall was eminently suitable to be a dining-room, and Princes' Restaurant came into existence, M. Benoist being the moving spirit, his brother-in-law, M. Fourault, being the manager, and M. Azema, a chef of much fame, being at the head of the kitchen.

Princes' Restaurant, as I first remember it, was not the beautiful room it is now. The painted ceiling with its concealed lights, as fine an example of this kind of art as we have in London, was a later addition; the garden outside the windows of the restaurant had still to be made, and I think that the windows which look towards St James's Church were not in the great room when it was first built. The hotel, which has an entrance in Jermyn Street, and in which there are some noble rooms for banquets and balls, was another afterthought. The lessees of some of the shops on the Piccadilly front were bought out before the palm garden, in which impatient gentlemen wait for ladies who are late, and where satisfied diners smoke their after-dinner cigars and drink their coffee, could be made, and comparatively lately communication has been established between the restaurant and the galleries above, in order that when there is a ball in the picture-hung halls the dancers can troop down to sup below.

If Princes' Restaurant and Princes' grill-room and Princes' Hotel are like Rome in that they were not built in a day, they are very good to look upon in their finished state. The restaurant has a great height, and the early diners can smoke there without the least taint of tobacco greeting the later comers. Its ceiling is, as I have already written, a beautiful example of decorative art, and a bill of exceeding length, the sum total of which astonished me when I was told how many figures it comprised, was paid for this embellishment. Its walls are creamy in colour, the curtains are of soft pink, and the tall windows south and east are reflected in mirrors, looking like other windows on the northern side, where the space is not occupied by the Palm Lounge. A musicians' gallery runs along the western side, and the doors into the kitchen are below this, but the red-coated musicians have forsaken their aerie, which now forms a way to ballrooms and galleries, and have found a snug corner on the floor of the restaurant. There are some fine marble statues of nymphs on pedestals and palms and banked-up plants and flowers in the restaurant, and the general effect suggests that one has stepped out of London greyness into some Southern clime where all is light and bright and spacious. At night the electroliers are shaded so as to give a mixed golden and pink light, which is most comfortable to the eyes, and is, I am sure, very becoming to the complexions of the ladies, and the carpets and the upholstering of the chairs carry on the harmony of deep rose and pink.

The history of the present success of the Princes' Restaurant is the story of the triumph of the short dinner over the long one. As a lunching place Princes' was a great success from the day its doors first opened. The ladies of Mayfair and Belgravia and Tyburnia found that it was comfortably near their shopping centres, and the little ladies of the stage also liked to lunch there. The musical comedy ladies monopolised the first half-dozen tables to the right as one entered, leaving the rest of the tables to the other ladies, and Stage looked at Society's hats, and Society looked at Stage's furs, and no doubt each envied what the other wore. But for quite a while--it seemed a long while to the shareholders--Princes' did not find its destiny as a dining place. M. Benoist wished it to be a great _à la carte_ restaurant such as he has made the restaurant of the Hermitage at Monte Carlo, but for some unexplainable reason diners did not flock to Princes' to eat expensive dinners, nor did a long _table d'hôte_ dinner tempt them. At last it was determined that new methods should be tried and new men came on to the Board of Directors to try them, that very energetic and very successful organiser, Mr Harry Preston, of Brighton, being one of them. A short theatre dinner became the trump card of the restaurant in the evening, the Princes' ballrooms became the scene of most of the dances organised in theatreland, and when the company began to earn an annual dividend for its shareholders the advantages of brief dinners became very apparent to them.

This was the dinner of the day that I took a lady to eat at seven o'clock on an evening on which Sir George Alexander produced a new play at the St James's:--

Hors d'œuvre à la Russe.
Petite Marmite Henri IV.
Crème Lamballe.
Suprême de Saumon Doria.
Agneau de Pauillac à la Grecque.
Boutons de Crucifères aux Fines Herbes.
Chapons à la Broche.
Salade.
Biscuit Glacé au Chocolat Praliné.
Friandises.

This was the six-and-six theatre dinner of the day, not too long to be eaten during the hour that theatre-goers allow themselves for a meal, and quite long enough for those for whom dinner is the one event of an evening. M. Roux, the _maître d'hôtel_, who has been at the Princes' for eighteen years, also showed me the menu of a half-guinea dinner which the Princes' holds in reserve should the little dinner not be impressive enough for some of its clients. The dinner was excellently cooked, and the tiny _pilau_ which came to the table with the lamb would have caught the appreciative attention of any gourmet, and assured me that M. Génie, the present head of the kitchen, who had previously won his spurs at the Carlton and the Brighton Metropole, and had at one period learned all there is to learn in Egypt, the land of _pilau_, is a worthy successor to M. Azema and M. Granvilliers. The lady who dined with me was much impressed by the two Pierrots sitting on the moon, a work of art which came to table with the _biscuit_, and was enthusiastic as to the playing of the orchestra. I thought myself that the musicians insisted a little too much that their music and not my conversation was what the pretty lady had come to Princes' to hear, but the question of music in a restaurant is a matter on which the gentler sex and the denser one are never in accord and the managers of most establishments find it a thorny question. If an orchestra of distinction is engaged nothing in the world will persuade its head that his music should be merely an accompaniment to conversation, and the opinion concerning music of a young man who has so much to say to a pretty girl that a dinner never lasts long enough to allow him to say it all, is very different to that of a bored husband, who has nothing in particular to remark to his wife after they have reached the soup course.

At seven, when we commenced our dinner, two other tables were already occupied. By half-past seven the room was comfortably full, and at a quarter to eight, when we left to go to the St James's, diners were still coming in to their tables. Most certainly what the dwellers in the leafy lanes of Mayfair and by the snipe-ground of Belgrave Square required was a restaurant in Piccadilly, where they can dine well and at not too great a length, nor at too great a price, on their way to the theatre, and Princes' has at last given them what they wanted.

XIV

THE CRITERION

The East Room at the Criterion is a trophy of one of woman's victories over man, for it was one of the first, if not the very first, restaurant-rooms designed and decorated to harmonise with feminine frocks and frills, and made beautiful that mankind should bring beautiful womankind there to eat things delicate. In the sixties, restaurants were few and far between, and were mostly places where men dined without their feminine belongings. But all this was changed in the seventies, and the East Room did its full share in persuading man that it added pleasure to a good dinner in a restaurant to be faced by a pretty woman. The East Room of to-day is twice the size of the one that Messrs Spiers and Pond first built, and its decoration of white and gold, and panels painted with Watteau subjects, its harmony of greys and pink in carpets and furniture and curtains, its ante-room with old French furniture, and the satisfactory arrangement by which the music of the orchestra, perched in a gilded cage above the big entrance hall, comes softened by distance to the diners in the East Room, are all happy second thoughts. But the East Room was, in 1873, when it was first opened, the dining place to which every lady asked her husband to take her, and it has held its own against ever-increasing competition through the years. Its windows look down on the rush and swirl of Piccadilly Circus, a wonderful scene either by day or night, and it adds to the pleasure of an unhurried meal to watch the hurry of thousands of one's fellow-creatures.

At one period, after the extension of the building, there were two East Rooms, a dividing wall being where the arches and curtains now are. The one of these nearest the grand staircase was a strictly _à la carte_ restaurant, while in the other, approached through a corridor, a _table d'hôte_ meal was served. The East Room of to-day smiles on both classes of diners. When a man sits down at his table there at dinner-time, M. Kugi, the _maître d'hôtel_, puts before him the _carte du jour_, an ample one, with any special delicacies in larger print than the others, and also lays on the table the menus of the half-sovereign and seven-and-six _table d'hôte_ dinners, and it is his experience that the greater number of diners look at the _carte du jour_ and then, mistrusting their own judgment, order one or the other of the _table d'hôte_ meals.

This was the menu of the seven-and-six dinner one night when I dined at the East Room at a tiny dinner-party, before going to the theatre down in the cellars of the big building to see the play running there:

Hors d'œuvre.
Consommé Rossolnick.
Crème aux huîtres.
Truite de rivière Dona Louise.
Selle d'Agneau Mascotte.
Pommes nouvelles.
Poularde du Surrey à la broche.
Salade.
Parfait au moka.
Friandises.
Dessert.

It was a very well-selected, well-served dinner. Had we chosen the half-guinea dinner we should have had an addition to this menu of _cailles à la Grecque_ and _chou de mer, sauce vierge_. The _Rossolnick_, with its flavour of cucumber, was excellent, the trout were fresh and firm, and the Surrey fowl as plump as any foreigner from Mans. M. Auguste Pannier, the chef of to-day, is worthy of the great men who have preceded him in the kitchen of the East Room. And not only have there been great cooks, but great managers as well at the Criterion, with the East Room as the particular object of their care. Oddenino, Mantell, Gerard, who all moved on to other posts, were predecessors of M. Emile Campenhaut, the manager of to-day, as was also M. Lefèvre, whose health broke down, but whom I remember as being an enthusiast on the subject of the art of cookery, a man who brought plenty of brain power to bear on the subject of delicate food. I think that the best of the many dinners I have eaten _à deux_ in the East Room was one ordered in consultation with him, and I subjoin it as a good specimen of an East Room _à la carte_ feast:

Caviar.
Consommé à la Diane.
Filets de sole aux délices.
Suprêmes de volaille grillés.
Carottes nouvelles à la crème.
Laitues braisées en cocotte.
Cailles à la Sainte-Alliance.
Salade de chicorée frisée.
Croûtes à la Caume.
Soufflé glacé à la mandarine.

The _caille à la Sainte-Alliance_, in imitation of Brillat Savarin's _faisan à la Sainte-Alliance_, consisted of a truffle in an ortolan, the ortolan being in the quail. The _Croûte Caume_ is an admirable banana dish in which the tastes of the banana and pine-apple and apricot and kirsch all mingle.

The East Room is, of course, only one of the many restaurant-rooms in the great stone building. Immediately under the East Room are the Marble Restaurant and the grill-room. The Marble Restaurant, in old days, when men of position did not think it undignified to stand at a bar and drink brandy and soda, was the Long Bar, and a wonderful sight this bar, running the whole length of the building, used to be at midnight, crowded with Londoners of all the leisured classes and with a score or more of good-looking barmaids in black behind the bar. When the habits of the men of London began to change, and the Long Bar did not draw so many devotees, the firm of Spiers and Pond was not quite convinced for some time that the "palmy" days of the bars were gone, and they made the Long Bar one of the most beautiful saloons in London, decorating it with marbles and inlay of Venetian glass. That beautiful saloon is now the Marble Restaurant, in which a five-shilling _table d'hôte_ meal is served, and where singers on Sundays discourse music to the diners.

The American Bar had its period of great success, and in the grill-room, which formed part of the bar's surroundings, chops and steaks, unsurpassed anywhere in London, used to be grilled. But the character of some of the habitués of the American Bar was too pronouncedly sporting to be altogether satisfactory, and the American Bar passed away from the front part of the building as the Long Bar did. There is a buffet now at the Jermyn Street side, but it is no longer the haunt of the gentlemen who were so overwhelmingly devoted to sport. The grill-room, without the American Bar, is a very flourishing section of the Criterion. It differs from most other grill-rooms in having plenty of sunlight and fresh air, and has this distinctive feature, that there is an American cook in its kitchen and that American dishes can always be obtained there even when they are not on the bill of fare. I have eaten clam broth, terrapin, dry hash, scalloped sweet potatoes, and Graham pudding, when dining there with Americans.

The Criterion contains a score of banqueting-rooms, including a huge one at the top of the house, where a statue of Shakespeare looks down upon the diners. The West Room, which is now one of the banqueting-rooms, has been used by the management for many experiments. For a long time a _Dîner Parisien_ was served there, and as its cost was only five shillings, and as one got a great deal of very good food to eat for that sum, I used to patronise it very regularly in my subaltern days, when a dinner in the East Room could not be budgeted for. At one time it was given over to the vegetarians, and good-looking damsels in art clothing brought the diners dishes of nut cutlets and vegetable steaks; but the nut-eaters did not hold possession of the room for long.

It is not easy to-day to associate the great stone building in Piccadilly Circus with the revels of miners in an Australian township. But it was in Melbourne, during the gold fever, that the seed was sown which blossomed into the big stone house in the centre of London. Felix Spiers and Christopher Pond were both young Englishmen. Felix was born in one of the old houses on Tower Hill, which was then the office of the General Steam Navigation Company, whose agent his father then was. The family of the Spiers moved to Paris, and young Felix was put into a banking house, where he remained until he was eighteen. Then he went to Melbourne, with the gold fever upon him, to make his fortune. In Melbourne, he met young Christopher Pond, also an Englishman, and also determined to make his pile. Spiers had become, for the time being, a wine merchant, an experience which later was to serve him to excellent purpose at the Criterion, for he laid down some admirable wine there, amongst it some hock which as long as it lasted I used to drink in preference to any other wine on the Criterion list. The miners were spending money in Melbourne as though it were water, and the Theatre Royal, Melbourne, received much of the golden shower. It occurred to young Spiers and young Pond that it would be a profitable undertaking to start a restaurant next door to a theatre, and they established, in Collins Street, the Café de Paris. Their next enterprise was to become caterers for the Melbourne and Ballarat Railway. They were full of ideas in those days, and one of these was to bring out to Australia a team of English cricketers and to tour them as a speculation. This was the thought of which the test matches were born. Spiers and Pond came to England intending to persuade Charles Dickens to make a great reading tour in Australia, and then it was that they espied the nakedness of the land in regard to railway catering. Dickens came to their aid with his attack on Mugby Junction, and he wrote an article in _All the World_ entitled "The Genii of the Cave," in which he described the then novelty of the "Silver Grill" under the arch at Ludgate Circus, which Spiers and Pond established. The Criterion was the pet child of the two great caterers. It rose on historic ground, for it occupied the site of the old "White Bear," which had been a celebrated coaching-house, one of those fine old inns of many galleries. The theatre was opened four months later than the restaurant; but it was not until 1879 that Sir Charles Wyndham, with whom so many of its successes are associated, took over sole management, though he had been a partner for the previous three years with Mr Alexander Henderson in its control.

XV

SOME CHOP-HOUSES

Many of the City chop-houses nestle together in the alleys and courts between Cornhill and Lombard Street. There, on either side of one of the narrow little passages, you will find Simpson's Chop-houses, with pleasant grey-green walls to their rooms and a window in which simple food, cooked and uncooked, is shown as bait to draw in the hungry passer-by; and there in Castle Court is the George and Vulture, which is also Thomas' Chop-rooms, which dates back to 1660, is proud of its Dickens' traditions, and is more ambitious in its bill of fare than most of the chop-houses.

There also, in Chance Alley, is Baker's Chop-house, which, that there may be no mistake as to its pretensions, describes itself on a board at the Lombard Street entrance to the alley as a tavern, and a chop-house, a coffee-house, and soup-rooms. It is a dignified little house, which bears its years well--it was founded in the seventeenth century--and which, with its two bow-windows with small panes of glass and its glass door in between, commands confidence even before one has crossed the threshold. Inside one of the windows are wire screens to give privacy to the company in the house, but the other window begs all men to look in and see the fish and the joints, the vegetables, the salad stuff, and, perhaps, a loin of cold beef, samples of what the larder contains. Beyond this rampart of good things edible you may see dames and damsels attired in black, busy in a glassed-in little room drawing beer, taking payment from satisfied customers for what they have eaten, and a grave gentleman, with white hair and beard, making entries in a large ledger; for the little portioned-off space you are looking into serves as bar and counting-house, some old punch-bowls on a shelf giving it its right old-world note.