Chapter M: Ritz 184 (8)

There are unlimited variations on the above, and the tale can take from two minutes to three-quarters of an hour in the telling, according to the volume of guide-book gush and the amount of lip-smacking over the food that is introduced into it.

But why go to France, Italy or Spain to obtain these materials for a story? The circumstances can be exactly reproduced in London. The preliminaries are to eat nothing between breakfast and dinner-time and to tire yourself out with exercise. Then, if you wish to indulge in the motoring adventure, engage the most rickety taxi-cab to be found on any stand and drive round and round the inner circle of Regent's Park until the inevitable breakdown occurs. When, after a quarter of an hour's delay, the chauffeur says that he is ready to go on again, tell him to drive to Soho Square, then to go down Greek Street, and to stop when he comes to the Restaurant Gustave.

Or if it is the cathedral city incidents you would like to live through once more, start in a worn-out condition from Golden Square, and make your way in a zigzag through the narrowest streets and alleys you can find to St Anne's, Soho, which is big enough to be a second-class cathedral, and go on, still zigzagging, till you reach Greek Street and Gustave's.

And this is what you will find when you get there. A little restaurant with a chocolate face and with a plate-glass window, on which the fact is announced that it is an _à la carte_ establishment. Two little trees are in front of the window--little evergreen trees are fashionable just now in Soho--and the name "Gustave" is well in evidence above, with an electric lamp to throw light upon it. Inside the window a long lawn curtain gives privacy to the restaurant. The card of the day, with half-a-hundred names of dishes written in black ink, hangs in a brass frame by the door.

Go inside, and you find yourself in a little room--a French gentleman who went on my recommendation to Gustave's described it to me afterwards as a _boîte_--with cream-coloured walls and a chocolate skirting. A counter, to which the waiters go to fetch the dishes, with a girl behind it very busily engaged, is at one side of the room. Oilcloth is on the floor, and a little staircase leads to the first floor. Eleven tables are in this room, all of them generally occupied, mostly by French people; but there is a second smaller room on beyond, which holds four tables, and on the two occasions lately that I have dined at Gustave's I have found one of these tables vacant.

Everything is very clean at Gustave's, and if the napery is thin and the glass is thick, that is quite in keeping with the travel story. The people at the other tables are probably French. They belong to the respectable classes, and they behave just as well as though they carried innumerable quarterings on their escutcheons. A young waiter puts the _carte du jour_, with an ornamental blue border, on the table in front of you, and Monsieur Gustave, who, napkin on arm, bustles about his little restaurant, comes to give advice, if needed, as to a choice of dishes.

Gustave--who must not, of course, be confused with that other Gustave who was manager of the Savoy, and who is now at the Lotus Club--is a little Frenchman, with a moustache, who is very wide awake. He has a sense of humour, and he talks excellent English. He was for a time at an hotel in Hatton Garden, and at the Restaurant des Gourmets before he came to Greek Street.

The first item on a bill of fare that I took away, with me reads: "½ doz. Escargots, 8d.," but long ago, at Prunier's in Paris, I tried to attune my palate to snails, and failed, so on this particular night I did not even consider their inclusion in my dinner. Nor did I dally with _hors d'œuvre_, though I might have had sardines, or _filets de hareng_, or _anchois_, or _salmis_ for twopence. But I ordered soup, and I think I went up in Gustave's opinion when I preferred three-pennyworth of _soupe à l'oignon_ to _pot au feu_ at the same price. There were three fish dishes on the card, _moules Marinières_, 6d.; _merlan frit_, 6d.; _sole frit_, 10d.; and Gustave recommended the _moules_ as being a dish of the house, and having come in that morning.

Looking down the list of entrées to find something sufficiently bizarre in taste to match the commencement of my dinner, I hesitated over a _pilaff_, which would have cost me 8d., almost plumped for a _râble de lièvre_, which meant an outlay of 1s., and then, remembering that it was Christmas-time, as near as possible ordered a _boudin_, which is the sausage that all good Frenchmen eat once a year at the _réveillon_ suppers on Christmas Eve. But I remembered the nightmare that followed the last _réveillon_ supper to which I went in Paris, and, passing over all the entrées, ordered nothing more exciting than a wing of chicken, 1s., and a _salade chicorée_. A _crème chocolat_, 4d., was my _entremet_.

The onion soup proved to be excellent--quite strong and quite oniony, which, as I was not going into polite society that evening, could offend no one. The mussels quite justified M. Gustave's eulogium, but as I did not eat the whole bowlful, and left some of the savoury liquid, M. Gustave, with an expression of concern on his face, came to my table to ask whether I had found any fault with the dish. I assured him that my appetite, not the mussels or the cook, was alone to blame. The wing of the chicken was plump and tender, and had I paid half-a-crown it could not have been better. The _crème chocolat_ certainly tasted of chocolate, if the cream was not a very pronounced feature in it.

It was a very excellent meal--at the price--and had I carried out the starvation and strong exercise and vivid imagination preparation that I have so strongly recommended to you, instead of lounging out to tea in the afternoon with a pretty lady and eating tea cake and sugary things at five o'clock, I should have recorded all the beautiful things about the little restaurant that I hear in the travel stories.

XXXIV

A SUPPER TRAIN

One day last year I ate two meals under roofs owned by the Great Eastern Railway Company.

I lunched in the dining-room of the Great Eastern Hotel, Liverpool Street, a splendid, airy room, light grey and gold, with brown Scagliola marble columns. The tables in this dining-room are set a good distance apart, rather a rare luxury in the City, where space is very limited; one is not forced to overhear the conversation of the people dining at other tables, and waiters do not kick one's chair every time they pass. The people lunching seemed to be a happy blend of visitors staying in the hotel and City men who had come in from their offices, but there was none of that breathless hurry-scurry that I always associate with a lunch in the City.

A curious piece of furniture, glass above, wood below, caught my eye as we went into the room. It looked at a distance like a jeweller's showcase, and I asked my host if it was that. He laughed and told me to inspect the jewels that it contained. It was a sideboard for the cold meats, showing them, but at the same time keeping the dust from them. It is cooled by ice. It is such a happy idea that the Carlton Club has copied it.

This is the menu of the lunch that I might have eaten in its entirety had I chosen:

Consommé Pluche.
Potage Solferino.
Boiled Salmon, Caper Sauce.
Fried Fresh Haddock.
Omelette Alsacienne.
Grilled Kidney, Vert Pré.
Roast Haunch of Mutton, Red Currant Jelly.
Roast Veal à l'Anglaise
(Or choice of cold meats).
Cabbage. Tomatoes.
Boiled and Lyonnaise Potatoes.
Roast Partridge and Chips.
Damson Pudding. Baked Custard.
Stewed Apricots.
Cheese. Radishes. Watercress.

I know of old that the cookery at the hotel is excellent, for I have often lunched both there and at the Abercorn Rooms, next door, so I did not feel in honour bound to form myself into a tasting committee of one, and to go through the menu. I ate salmon and partridge and damson pudding, and found them excellent. On the menu I saw that the price of the lunch was 3s. 6d.

My host, being a Freemason of high degree, asked me if I had ever seen the Masonic temple in the Abercorn Rooms, and as I said that I had not we crossed on the first floor from the hotel to the rooms, and, meeting Mr Amendt, the manager of all the Great Eastern catering enterprises, on the way, he showed us the temple, splendid with panels of onyx and columns of delicately tinted marble, the lamps of onyx, dish-shaped and throwing their light up to the ceiling, seeming to me to be the most beautiful things of their kind I have ever seen in a temple. Mr Amendt, having his master key in his pocket, took us through many ante-rooms and small banqueting-rooms, with pictures by Lely of some of the beauties of Charles II.'s Court on the walls, and we looked in, on my way to the street, at the great Hamilton Hall, a replica of the banqueting-room of the Palais Soubise, where the waiters, lunch being finished, were putting the chairs upside down on the tables, and at the grill-room, named after the county of Norfolk, which, with its violet marble pilasters and its paintings of City celebrities--Nell Gwynne being cheek by jowl with such eminent respectabilities as Whittington and Gresham--is at night one of the pleasantest little banqueting-rooms in which I have ever feasted.

As I said good-bye to my host and to Mr Amendt, I remarked that I should be at Liverpool Street again early next morning, as I was going down to Southend for the week-end, and that if I had not been due at a London theatre that night I should have enjoyed sleeping in the fresh sea air. Whereon Mr Amendt pointed out to me that I could perfectly well go to the play and catch the supper train down to Southend at midnight. If this suited me I had only to telegraph to the hotel at which I was going to stay, and Mr Amendt said that he himself would order my supper for me. It all seemed to fit in so admirably that I said, "Thank you very much," and sent off my telegram at once.

I had abundant time to change my clothes after the theatre, and taxied down to Liverpool Street Station through the deserted City streets. At the station, however, there were many people on the platforms, the refreshment rooms blazed with light, and scores of little parties in them seemed to be partaking of midnight tea. I found that a table had been reserved for me in the restaurant car of the Southend train, and a white-jacketed waiter told me that my supper would be served immediately the train started, and that a compartment in the carriage next to the restaurant car was at my disposal. Mr Amendt had been even better than his word.

Waiting on the platform, I watched another train, a suburban one, on the next line of rails, fill up. Bare-headed ladies, clutching in their hands the programmes of the theatres to which they had been, came sailing along; little messenger boys, their evening's work over, climbed into the carriages, and one gentleman, who evidently thought his time for rest had arrived, took the whole of one side of a third-class compartment to himself, lay down, and went at once to sleep.

When the suburban train had left, a few minutes before midnight, the stream of passengers set towards the Southend train, and I wondered which of them were going to be my fellow-supperers in the restaurant car. A party consisting of an elderly gentleman--I am sure he was an uncle, for he had the good-natured look that all genuine Dickensy uncles acquire--had evidently brought up two nieces and a little schoolboy nephew to see some play. They were returning in the highest of spirits, and got into the restaurant car at once, the uncle asking whether his champagne had been properly iced. A clergyman with a paper bag in his hand, which I think must have contained sponge cakes, looked regretfully at the car, and told the guard that had he known that it was running he would not have brought his supper with him. I saw nobody else who was an obvious supperer, but when the whistle blew and the flag was waved, and the train started, I found that in the section of the restaurant car where my table was there were two elderly ladies at one of the tables, a young man in spectacles at another, the good uncle and his little party at the third and that the fourth was reserved for me. There was on my table a little bunch of chrysanthemums in a glass vase with a heavy foot to prevent it from overturning, and I noticed with appreciation several devices for holding in their places cruets, water bottles, salt cellars and glasses should the train at express pace threaten to shake things off the table. This was the menu of the supper that Mr Amendt had ordered for me:

Lobster Mayonnaise.
Mutton Cutlets Reform.
Roast Grouse. Straw Potatoes.
Salad.
Omelette au Confiture.
Devilled Sardines.
Cheese. Biscuits. Butter.
Watercress. Lettuce. Celery.
Black Coffee.

Like my lunch earlier in the day, the Great Eastern offered me more than I had sufficient appetite to cope with. I found the _mayonnaise_ excellent, and did full justice to the grouse, the _omelette_ and the devilled sardines. The young man in spectacles, I could see, had ordered for his supper fried cod and a glass of porter; the elderly ladies were drinking tea and eating cake; and the uncle and his little party were, like myself, eating a sumptuous meal.wAs I ate my supper the train rushed through the East of London, and Bethnal Green and Stratford were patches of lighted windows in the darkness, but when we were out of the zone of bricks and mortar and in the country there was a full moon high above, and fields and trees all grey and shadowy in the mist that was rising.

The two elderly ladies had gone back to their compartment, the young man in spectacles paid his bill, and I judged from this that we must be nearing Southend, and asked for mine. The waiter bowed politely and informed me that I was the guest of the Great Eastern Company. As I could not argue with such an indefinite thing as a railway company, I had to accept the situation, and therefore I cannot set down how much the excellent meal I ate should have cost me.

When the train ran in to the terminus at Southend it certainly did not seem to me that I had been travelling for an hour.

XXXV

THE ADELAIDE GALLERY

There is no story of the success of a London restaurant more interesting than that of the Adelaide Gallery, which is more generally known as Gatti's.

The first Gatti to come to this country from the Val Blegno in the Ticino Canton of Switzerland, on the Italian side of the Alps, was the pioneer of penny ices in England, and his shop in Villiers Street by the steps leading down to the steamboat pier below Hungerford Market was for the sale of these ices and _gaufres_, the thin batter cakes pressed in a mould and baked, a delicacy the small children of Continental countries love, but which has never ousted the British penny bun for its pre-eminence in these islands. When Hungerford Market was swept away to give space for the building of Charing Cross Station, its name, however, being perpetuated by the bridge, the first Gatti's was re-established under the arches of the station and became in due course the Charing Cross Music Hall.

To the Gatti of Villiers Street and the Arches came from their native village two of his young nephews, Agostino and Stefano--the wags of the later Victorian days called them Angostura and Stephanotis. They determined, as soon as they felt their feet, to launch out on their own account. They leased the derelict Adelaide Gallery, which had its entrance in Adelaide Street, converted it into a café restaurant after the Continental pattern, and opened it on 21st May 1862. So juvenile were these enterprising young Swiss that the younger brother could not legally sign the lease, being under twenty-one. The Adelaide Gallery was then right in the centre of the triangle of buildings bounded by King William Street, Adelaide Street and the Strand: it was parallel to the Lowther Arcade, and the entrance to it was by a narrow corridor from Adelaide Street, a street named, of course, after King William the Fourth's queen.

The gallery had been built in 1832 as the Gallery of Practical Science, at a time when object lessons in science were considered essential for the improvement of youthful minds; and in the long gallery, which is now a part of the restaurant, were working models of shaft wheels, while down its centre ran, waist-high, a long tank with a suspension bridge across it and a lighthouse in its midst. In this tank, working models of steamboats with very long smoke stacks puffed up and down. A gallery ran round this long hall and had pictures on its walls and models on stands of the various forms of architectural pillars. The Polytechnic, opened six years later, which this generation still remembers in its Diving Bell and Pepper's Ghost days, was run on similar lines. The gallery became subsequently a Marionette theatre, a casino and the home of some negro minstrels, but it never settled down successfully to any form of moneymaking until the young Gattis started it on its career as a café restaurant. An habitué of the Gallery in its scientific or in its casino days would only recognise the building to-day by its arched ceiling and by the circular openings in the roof for light and air.

Agostino and Stefano Gatti put marble-topped tables in the Gallery, couches against the walls and chairs on the other side of the tables, and in the basement they made billiard-rooms. Chops and steaks and chip potatoes, the last a novelty to London, were the trump cards of their catering. At first the magistrates, possibly suspecting that the casino might be revived under another name, refused the Gallery a music licence, but that was granted later on in its existence. The Adelaide Gallery as a restaurant was a direct challenge to the old chop-houses. It gave very much the same fare under more airy and more cheerful conditions, and the Londoners took a wonderful fancy to the "chips."

My earliest memory of a visit to the Adelaide Gallery is a schoolboy one, for I was taken there to sup after seeing Fechter play in _The Duke's Motto_ at, I think, the Lyceum. I ate on that occasion chops and tomato sauce, went on to pastry, and finished with a Welsh rarebit--a schoolboy has no fear of indigestion. I came to know the restaurant very well in the eighties, when I was quartered at Canterbury and at Shorncliffe for a spell of home service. I got at that time as much fun out of life in London as a Captain's pay and a small allowance would permit. I had sufficient knowledge of matters gastronomic to know that I received excellent value for my money at Gatti's, and the ladies to whom I used to give dinners said that they liked Asti Spumante and Sparkling Hock just as well as champagne--and perhaps they really did, bless them.

Early in the eighties most of the improvements made to the Gallery had been completed, and the restaurant ran right up to Adelaide Street and down to the Strand. Whether the entrance and new rooms on the King William Street side had then been made I forget, but if they had not been they soon after came into existence. One special friend of mine in those days was the big man in uniform who stood at the Strand entrance, and whose constant companion was a large St Bernard dog. The big man always had a cheerful turn of conversation, and if by any chance I grew impatient because a lady whom I expected to dine did not appear, he would console me by saying that "probably nothing worse than a cab accident has happened." The St Bernard in its old age grew snappy, and eventually, when it had come back twice from new homes which had been provided for it, had to be destroyed. Both Messrs Agostino and Stefano Gatti were still alive in those days, grave-faced, pleasant gentlemen, who lunched together and dined together at a table not far from the entrance to the kitchen, and who when their meals were finished, sat at a semicircular desk and took the counters from the waiters as they had done ever since the first days of the restaurant.

I was somewhat later to make their acquaintance, and this was how it happened. Little "Willie" Goldberg, who was known to all the English-speaking world as The Shifter, was a man of brilliant ideas, which he rarely had the patience to carry into effect. I received one morning from him a telegram asking me to meet him at ten minutes past one at the Strand entrance of Gatti's, adding that it concerned a matter of the highest importance, which would bring much profit to both of us. I arrived at Gatti's in time, and was met at the door by The Shifter, who told me that the Gattis wanted a military melodrama for the Adelphi, that theatre being their property; that he had thought of a splendid title for a soldier play; that he and I would write it together; that the Gattis had asked him to lunch to talk the matter over; and that he had suggested that I should come too. Then we hurried into the restaurant. We lunched with Messrs Gatti, and when, after lunch, they very gently said that they were ready to hear anything that we might have to tell them, The Shifter disclosed the title, which pleased them, and then sat back in his seat as though the matter was settled. The Messrs Gatti asked for some slight outline of the play, but The Shifter put it to them that an advance of authors' fees should be the next step in the business. This, the Gattis said, was not the way in which they transacted the business of their theatre, whereon The Shifter closed the discussion by saying farewell. When we were outside in the street again, I suggested that the next thing to do would be to get out a scenario to submit to the Gattis; but The Shifter was in high dudgeon; he wrinkled up his long nose in haughty scorn and then said: "These Gattis don't understand our English ways of doing business"--and that was the beginning and the end of our great military melodrama. But I had made the acquaintance of the Gattis, and was always afterwards on very pleasant terms with them.

It is not within the scope of this article to deal with the Gattis' enterprises in theatres, but the tale of their purchase of the Vaudeville Theatre should be told as an instance of their kindness of heart. Amongst the many Gatti enterprises was the establishment of a great electric-light-distributing business. This began with a very small installation in the cellars of the Adelaide Gallery, and increased and increased until it is now one of the greatest electric light companies in London. At one time the electric light plant was established in a building just behind the Vaudeville Theatre, and Mr Tom Thorne, the actor, whose management had not prospered greatly, told the Messrs Gatti that his ill-success of late was owing to the noise the engines made behind the stage. Messrs Gatti, to obviate this grievance, bought the theatre, or at least as much of it as is freehold.

There always has been a strong theatrical element amongst the clientele of Gatti's, and the authors who wrote the Adelphi melodramas--Dion Boucicault, Henry Pettitt, George R. Sims, Robert Buchanan and others--used constantly to be amongst the people lunching and dining in the Gallery. In their theatrical enterprises the Gattis never forgot the Adelaide Gallery, and the one thing essential in an Adelphi melodrama was that it should conclude in time to allow the audience to sup at the restaurant. All the black-coated classes patronised the Gallery, from the comfortable business man, who got as good a chop there in the evening as he did in his City restaurant in the middle of the day, to the little clerk who took the girl he was engaged to there because she liked the music and the brightness of the place. The country cousins all knew Gatti's, and knew that it was a place where they would get a good meal at a reasonable price, and that no advantage would be taken of their ignorance of London charges. Salvini, the great actor, used to take his meals at Gatti's when he was in England, and the great Lord Salisbury had a fondness for a chop and chips, and used to gratify it by going to the Adelaide Gallery. An old Garibaldian, a fine, white-haired old gentleman in a slouch hat and a long, threadbare cloak, was the most remarkable of the clientele of Gatti's in the early eighties; he was evidently very poor and one dish with him constituted a meal, but because he had fought as a red-shirted hero, the waiters at Gatti's treated him with more deference than they would show to any prince, and took the copper he gave as a tip with as much gratitude as they would have expressed for the gold of the millionaire.

The Gatti's of to-day has adapted itself to modern requirements, but it caters for much the same class as of yore, and its food is still excellent material, well cooked, though there is a great deal more variety now than there was in the old chops and chips days. It retains, however, all its old democratic ways. Its clients choose their own tables and their own seats, hang up their own coats and then catch the attention of the waiter who has charge of the table. The restaurant--cream and gold, with French grey panels in its roof--has now four entrances: the Adelaide Street one, two in King William Street and one in the Strand. While the main restaurant remains an _à la carte_ establishment with a plentiful choice of dishes, including a list of grills, there is a _table d'hôte_ room at the King William Street side, a handsome hall with a gilded roof and pink-shaded electroliers, which throw their light up on to the ceiling. The latest addition to the dining-rooms is a banqueting hall, reached by marble stairs from King William Street. It is a handsome and well-proportioned room, with a musicians' gallery at one side, and an ante-room half-way up its stairs, and it holds one hundred and fifty feasters quite comfortably.

At the same little table where their father and their uncle sat, the two Messrs Gatti of to-day--John (ex-Mayor of Westminster) and Rocco--sit, young copies of their predecessors, in that one of them has kept a plentiful head of hair, whereas the other one has been less conservative. They give the same attention to the business of the restaurant that the original Gattis did, but the semicircular desk has vanished and the work of taking the counters is now done by deputies on either side of a great screen which stretches before the wide entrance to the kitchen. Mr de Rossi, dapper and energetic, is the manager of the restaurant, and it is always a comfort to me that when I lunch or dine under the musicians' gallery the _maître d'hôtel_, whom I have known for thirty years, comes and gives me fatherly advice as to the choice of dishes for a meal.

The kitchen of the Adelaide Gallery is one of the few in London that possess a large open fire for roasting, and its Old English cookery is, therefore, always good. It caters, however, for all nationalities, and as an indication of what its prices are, and of the variety of its fare, I cannot do better than give you the list of entrées I find on the _carte du jour_, which I took away the last time I dined at Gatti's:

_Carbonnade de bœuf à la Berlinoise_, 1s. 2d.; _lapin sauté Chasseur_, 1s. 4d.; _vol-au-vent de ris d'agneau Financière_, 1s. 6d.; _pieds de porc grillés Sainte Menehould_, 1s. 2d.; _fegatino di pollo alla Forestiera_, 1s. 4d.; _terrine de lièvre St Hubert_ (cold), 1s. 9d.; _côte de veau en casserole aux cèpes_, 1s. 9d.; _tournedos Rouennaise_, 2s.; _chump chop d'agneau, purée Bruxelloise_, 1s. 6d.; _tête de veau en tortue_, 1s. 6d.; _salmis de perdreaux au Chambertin_, 2s.; _langue de bœuf braisée aux nouilles fraîches_, 1s. 6d.; _escalopes de veau Viennoise_, 1s. 6d.; _mironton de bœuf au gratin_, 1s. 4d.; _côtelettes d'agneau Provençale_, 2s.; _pigeon St Charles_, 2s. 6d.; _noisettes de pré-salé Maréchal_, 1s. 9d.; _entrecôte Marchand de Vin_, 2s. 6d.; _demi faisan en casserole_, 4s.

And here is the menu of the five-shilling dinner I ate one Friday in October in the _table d'hôte_ room, in company with many people, who were evidently going later to theatres:--

Hors d'œuvre à la Parisienne.
Consommé Julienne.
Crème d'Huîtres.
Turbotin d'Ostende Réjane.
Anguilles Frites. Sce. Tyrolienne.
Côtelettes de Volaille Pojarski.
Petit Pois au Sucre. Pommes Comtesse.
Faisan Ecossaise Rôti en Casserole.
Salade Sauté.
Glacé Mokatine.
Délicatesses.

Gatti's, like every other restaurant of standing, has its own special dishes, and some of these were included in a lunch which I ate with Messrs John and Rocco Gatti when they were good enough in a chat we had to refresh my memory in regard to the early days of the restaurant:

Hors d'œuvre à la Parisienne.
Zéphire de Sole Adelaide.
Suprême de Volaille Royal.
Asperges vertes. Sce. Chantilly.
Perdreau Rôti à la Broche.
Cœur-de-Laitue à la Française.
Cerises Montmorency Sarah-Bernhardt.
Corbeille de Délices.
Café.

The _zéphire de sole Adelaide_ is an admirable _filet de sole_ and oysters therewith; the breast of the chicken was served with an excellent white sauce; and the _entremet_ was worthy of the distinguished tragedienne after whom it is named.

The wine list at Gatti's is a document to be carefully studied. The Gattis of the previous generation laid down some very fine wines, and clarets and Burgundies of the great years of the end of the last century are to be found in the Adelaide cellars. The champagnes of great years and of great houses are priced far lower than they are to be found on the lists of fashionable restaurants, and there is some old cognac in the cellars to which I take off my hat whenever I am privileged to meet it. It was bought by the Gattis at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, when stocks of old brandy were sold at low prices. It is marked so as to show a profit on the purchase-money--not at its worth--and I know of no better brandy at any London restaurant, whatever price customers may choose to give.

XXXVI

THE COMPLEAT ANGLER

I deserted, shamelessly and openly deserted, but I had an excuse.

When we started, a boatload of men in a launch from above Boulter's Lock on a still, hot summer Sunday afternoon, the sky was grey above and the river and Cliveden Woods were all in pleasant shadow; but when we were come to Odney Weir and Cookham Ferry the sun broke through the clouds and sucked them up, and at Bourne End the river sparkled and the sails of the sailing-boats tacking up the long stretch below Winter Hill gleamed in the sunlight. It was as hot an afternoon as we ever get in England, and as we steered into the eye of the sun the glare hurt my eyes, and there was no dodging it. When we came to the Compleat Angler, just below Marlow Bridge, and lay alongside its green lawn, with the flower beds and rose-trees right at the garden edge, I looked at the people sitting on the rustic chairs by the rustic tables in the shadow of the line of trees that acts as a screen against the western sun, and the villagers who loll the Sunday through on the railing of the bridge and stare at the hotel, and I thought how pleasant it would be to sit in the shade until dinner-time came, to eat that meal with the burble of the water falling over the weir in my ears, and afterwards to go back to town by a late train. So I deserted openly and shamelessly.

The Compleat Angler is a very old inn, so old that no one knows when it was built. But it was very probably in existence when the bodies of Warwick, the King-maker, and his brother Montacute were carried to Bisham Abbey to be buried. An engraving of a hundred years ago shows the old inn with a rope walk by its side, where the gardens of the hotel now stretch on the bank of the swift stream below the weir. The old wooden bridge which the present suspension bridge has replaced started at the angle of land by the weir, an angle now covered by the dining-room of the hotel, and it was under this bridge--not the present one--that a legendary hero of gastronomy, the Marlow bargee, ate the Puppy Pie.

In the pre-railway days the Compleat Angler looked for its patrons amongst the fishermen and the simple folk who gained their living on the river. The hotel to-day is one of the most comfortable old-fashioned riverside inns between Oxford and London, an inn that stoutly upholds its old English characteristics. The brown roofs of the old building and its old brick walls are still there, and the old fruit-trees of the orchard give shade on its lawn; but new wings have been built on as the custom of the hotel has increased, and the great stretch of delightful garden behind the hotel, from which there is a glorious view of the Quarry Woods, must be a comparatively new addition. Mr Kilby, the present landlord, his face tanned by the river air and river sunshine, his hair and moustache almost white, has been in possession of the house for twenty-two or twenty-three years; but before this time it had been in the hands of one family from generation to generation, right back into the misty past. Mr Kilby has kept the hotel Old English in character in all essential particulars. There is good black old oak panelling in the little hall, and Jacobean furniture and an old grandfather clock, and on its walls, in glazed cases, are monster perch and other giants of the Thames caught at Marlow, and engravings of local celebrities and local magnates of past days; while in the dining-room are caricatures by Gillray and other wielders of the pencil in Georgian days. The gardens, kitchen garden and flower garden and lawns, behind the house, are also delightfully English, for the flowers that grow there are the Old English flowers, roses and lilies, stocks and pinks, ladies'-slippers and cherry pie, and a host of others, flowers that are old friends and which fill the air with scent on a hot afternoon. There are roses everywhere around the Compleat Angler. Those who land from their boats pass under a great arch of roses, and in the garden the roses climb over many bowers--for "pergola" is a word I hesitate to use in writing of this Old English pleasance. Honeysuckles grow up the supports of the verandah that gives shade to the windows of the dining-room, and there are bright flowers in all the window-boxes. Above all, there is the charm of the river, the indescribable freshness that always comes with tumbling water, the delight of the long, trembling reflections thrown by the trees and the spire of the church across the river, the grace of the white-clad girls who punt upstream and of the swans that sail quite secure by the edge of the weir, and the pleasant "lap, lap" of the water as the launches cut through it. If I wished in one hour to give an American friend an idea of the charm of the Thames I would take him to the chairs under the great willow that stands by the weir in the grounds of the Compleat Angler, and when he had sat in this shade for half-an-hour watching the calmness of the river and the eddies of the weir stream, the rushes, the reeds, the trees, the long line of wooded hills, the swans and the boats, if he did not understand what the Thames is to an Englishman, I should despair of him. If I was interested in a young couple who were hesitating on the brink of matrimony, and I wished to push them into it, I would invite them to take tea with me on the lawn of the Compleat Angler, and when the sun dropped low and the shadows of the trees lengthened and the air grew heavy with the scent of the roses, I would leave them together for an hour, and if in that hour the man had not proposed I would consider him a base deceiver, a heartless wretch incapable of sentiment.

In the late afternoon, when the bells of the church were ringing for evening service, I walked up the High Street, in which the lads of the village and the lasses all in white were abroad, and looked at Marlow's sole antiquarian relic--the stocks, which stand in an enclosure of turf and trees and flower-beds. I continued my pilgrimage to Shelley's house in West Street, and then on over the wooden bridge of old grey wood to the Lock.

The sun had set and the west was all opal with the dying light when I came back to the lawn of the Compleat Angler. The launch that had lain the afternoon through by the steps was gone, with its load of merry people, and the motor cars were all off on their return journey to London. Only the people staying in the hotel remained. It was dinner-time, but I was loth to leave the open air, for the hush of the evening had fallen. I could hear faintly the sound of a hymn being sung in the church, and that sentimentality, which is not religious feeling, but which is akin to it, had fallen upon me. I was at peace with all mankind. I forgave the architect who designed Marlow Church tower for the triviality of his Gothic; I had no rancour against the tailor who took three weeks to make me three white evening waistcoats; I could think kindly of the people who send me insufficiently stamped letters from abroad, and I could remember that even the income-tax collector is a fellow-man. Had there been anyone by to whom I could recite poetry I would have been prepared to quote Herbert to my purpose, but the only companionable soul available at the moment was a friendly Irish terrier, and terriers have no soul for verse.

At last I went in to dinner. A corner table in the biggest of the three dining-rooms, a real summer-house, its walls being all windows, had been reserved for me, and from my seat I could look across the river to one side and on to the weir stream on the other. The light of day was not all gone, and I hardly needed the shaded lamp which kept company on the table with a great bunch of sweet-smelling flowers from the garden. I had not ordered any special dinner, but ate the _table d'hôte_ meal of the house, the charge for which is six shillings. It was a good English dinner, and my only complaint regarding it is that there were some tags of unnecessary French upon the menu card. This, in plain English, was the dinner I ate and enjoyed:

Thick Mock Turtle.
Salmon.
Clear Butter Sauce.
Braised Ham.
Broad Beans.
Madeira Sauce.
Roast Chicken.
Chip Potatoes.
Green Peas.
Raspberries and Cream Ice.

I might have added a savoury to this, but I like to end my dinner with a sweet taste to linger on my palate. My bill altogether came to seven-and-six.

Feeling contented with myself, and life, the Compleat Angler, and my fellow-men, I sauntered to the railway station in time to catch the nine-forty train back to London.

XXXVII

ARTISTS' ROOMS

DIEUDONNÉ'S. PAGANI'S

There used to be two little rooms in London restaurants with walls made interesting by the signatures of great artists of song and colour and sculpture and music, who, some of them, had sketched little scenes above their names, and others had dotted down a few notes of music.

One of these little chambers was the sitting-room of Madame Dieudonné, in Ryder Street. Madame Dieudonné was an old French lady who kept a boarding-house much patronised by the great artists who came over to London from France. In her kitchen was an admirable chef, and the fame of the _table d'hôte_--a real _table d'hôte_ in its original sense, for Madame always sat at the head of her own table--was so great that people who loved good cooking used to ask permission to be allowed to dine at it. But Madame Dieudonné did not give this permission to all comers, and it was necessary that the would-be guest should be presented to Madame and should obtain from her an invitation to her circle before a place was laid for him. Any special favourites amongst the guests were asked by Madame to come after dinner into her sitting-room, there to drink coffee and to chat, and amongst these favourites were the great musicians, and the great actors and great painters of her own land, who stayed at the boarding-house. When any man, or any lady, was asked for the first time into this holy of holies, he or she placed a signature upon the wall and any further embellishment that came to mind. Gradually the middle portion of the walls became a perfect treasure-house of autographs.

Madame Dieudonné died, and her circle was broken up, the old lodging-house became a hotel, and when M. Guffanti, its present owner, brought his great energy to bear upon it, it soon became prosperous. Alterations were made, the white room on the first floor, with its panel pictures of gallants and ladies in silks and brocades, which is now used for banquets, was constructed, and when Madame Dieudonné's little room was thrown into what is now the entrance hall, the workmen destroyed the signatures on the walls, evidently regarding them as mere dirt, in spite of all the precautions M. Guffanti had made to preserve them, and the only remembrances left of the stately old lady who used to sit at the head of her own table is in the name of the hotel and restaurant.

Dieudonné's has flourished exceedingly, and M. Guffanti, his hair a little thinner on the top of his head than when first I made his acquaintance, but with the same majestic curve to his moustache ends, and possessing the same invincible energy, has increased the size of his hotel by taking in several other houses.

The Dieudonné's of the present day is a large building of white stone and red brick, always very spick and span, and decked out with flower boxes. The restaurant on the ground floor is a fine room in the Adams style, a very light grey in colour, with some of the ornamentation just touched with gold. At one end are three large bow-windows, and at the other end there is a musicians' gallery for the orchestra. On the side walls the ornamentation suggests doorways with mirrored panels, pink shades on the electroliers have subdued the light, which, when the room was first built, I found too white and too brilliant, and the lamps on the tables are also pink-shaded. The carpet is of a deep rose, and the white chairs are also upholstered in that colour. It is a very pleasant dining-room, and the people who dine there are all pleasant to look at, and do good food the compliment of going dressed in becoming garments. I very rarely dine at Dieudonné's without seeing a ladies' dinner-party in progress, for Dieudonné's has always been a favourite dining place of the gentler sex since the early days when Giovanini, the old _maître d'hôtel_, with bushy eyebrows and Piccadilly weepers, used to consider any ladies without an escort as being put under his special and fatherly protection.

Dieudonné's chiefly relies on two _table d'hôte_ dinners, one the opera dinner, at six-and-six, and the other the Dieudonné dinner, at eight shillings. On the last occasion that I dined at Dieudonné's before going on to the Russian Opera at Drury Lane I ate the opera dinner, the menu of which I give below. It was the day of President Poincaré's state entry into London, and that event is celebrated by two of the dishes in the dinner:

MENU.
Hors d'œuvre Variés.
Consommé à la Française.
Crème de Laitues aux Perles.
Saumon d'Ecosse Poché.
Sauce Mousseline.
Pommes Nature Concombres.
Côtes de Pré-Salé Poincaré.
Canetons d'Aylesbury à l'Anglaise.
Petits Pois Nouveaux.
Coupe Entente Cordiale.
Friandises.

The Dieudonné dinner on this day only differed from the shorter one by the inclusion in it of _escaloppes de ris de veau George V._

The other restaurant which created and retains an artists' room is Pagani's, in Great Portland Street, in the immediate neighbourhood of the Queen's Hall and St George's Hall. When, in 1871, Mario Pagani opened a little shop, which became a restaurant, in a house in Great Portland Street, the German Reeds were in possession of St George's Hall, with, I think, Corney Grain, as a newly risen star, in their company. The Queen's Hall had not been built and St James's Hall, the site of which is now occupied by the Piccadilly Hotel, was the musical centre of London. M. Pagani, being an Italian, gave his customers Italian cookery, and very good Italian cookery too, and the journalists and the painters and the singers soon heard of the new little restaurant where there were always Italian dishes on the bill of fare. Pellegrini, the _Vanity Fair_ cartoonist, and Signor Tosti were two of the first patrons of the restaurant. Mr George R. Sims, doyen to-day of literary gourmets, loved the restaurant as it was in its early state, and wrote of the good Italian food to be obtained there, and his portrait, on a china plaque, occupies, rightly enough, the centre of one of the walls up in the artists' room. In 1887 M. Mario Pagani retired, and for a time his brother and his cousin carried on the restaurant; the latter, M. Giuseppe Pagani--left, in 1895, in sole control--taking as partner M. Meschini, the latter of whom eventually became the sole proprietor, bequeathing, when he died, the restaurant to his widow and to his son.

Pagani's in the forty odd years of its existence, has increased in size to an extraordinary extent, and the building, with its elaborately ornamented front of glazed tiles with complicated figures in the pattern and ornaments of Della Robbia ware, its squat pillars of blue and its arches, luminous at night with electric light, differs immensely from the little, stuffy Italian restaurant that it originally was. It has a second entrance now in a side street, and a Masonic banqueting-room, and a lift, and its restaurant on the ground floor is a very large one and always reminds me of those great establishments that I see in the German cities. It is a very comfortable restaurant, and its brown walls, its mirrors with trellis-work and creepers painted on them set in brown wooden frames, and its ceiling painted in quiet colours, all give a sense of cosiness. There is in this downstairs restaurant a dispense bar, which looks very picturesque seen through a glazed screen, and just by this screen is the entrance from which the waiters stream out from the kitchen carrying the dishes ordered by the patrons of the restaurant, which they show as they pass to a clerk. To dine habitually at Pagani's at a table facing the kitchen entrance is to obtain a complete knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of the Italian waiter. He is not run into a mould as a French waiter is, but retains many individualities. He always wears a moustache, and is pleasantly conversational with his fellows and with the customers.

In its early days, the cookery at Pagani's was Italian and nothing but Italian, but with ever-increasing prosperity the scope of the kitchen has broadened, and now most of the dishes on the _carte du jour_ have French names. The head cook, however, is a good Italian, M. Faustin Notari, who has climbed the ladder of promotion to the top during the twenty years he has been in the kitchens of Pagani's, and there are always some Italian dishes on the bill of fare. The following are the dishes that I most frequently see on the card:--_Minestrone, minestrone alla Genovese, zuppa alla Pavese, filetti di sole alla Livornesse, spaghetti,_ and Macaroni done in every way possible, _ravioli al sugo_ or _alla Bolognese, gnocchi alla Romana, fritto misto alla Tosti, ossi buchi, arrostino annegato,_ and I generally finish my dinner at Pagani's with a _zambaglione_. Pagani's has its specialities of the house apart from Italian dishes, and when I have dined, as I often do, as one of the committee of an amateur dramatic club, in the Artists' Room, I generally find _poulet à la Pagani_--a very toothsome way of cooking the domestic fowl--on the menu of our little feasts. _Filet de sole Pagani_ is another excellent dish, an invention of the house. _Poule au pot_ and _cassôlet à la Provençale_ and the _bisque_, and the _bortsch_ at Pagani's are always excellent. The diners whom I see at the other tables downstairs at Pagani's all seem to me to belong to that very pleasant world, artistic Bohemia. The great singers of the opera and the great musicians who play at the Queen's Hall go there to lunch and dine and sup, and their artistic perception is not confined entirely to music, for I notice that they generally bring very pretty ladies with them to eat the good dishes of the restaurant. A little touch of Bohemia that always pleases me at Pagani's is the boy who comes round with a tray selling cigars and cigarettes. The restaurant-rooms on the first floor used, in the early days when Pagani's was quite a small place, to be the rooms to which the sterner sex used to take ladies to dine, and there was a particular corner by a window with a tiny conservatory in it which was the favourite spot in the room. The gentler sex now dines everywhere in the restaurant, but in the first-floor rooms, with pleasant red walls, glazed screens put between the tables give a sense of privacy.