Part 14
The Burford Bridge Hotel, which takes its name from the wide brick bridge near by, over the River Mole, stands alongside the high road where it curves from the hill-side down to the level. It is a picturesque building, for when the Surrey Trust, of which more anon, took the house, it was a mere wayside inn. It has been gradually built on to, and is now more a group of houses of white rough-cast and slate roofs than one house. It has rambling tiled-roofed stables and a garage alongside it, and is surrounded by tall trees. Behind it, just where the hill begins to rise, are its gardens, with turf terraces and geraniums in terra-cotta pots on white pedestals. A great cedar stands in the midst of one of the lawns and another lawn is a bowling-green. Some of the trees on the hill-side stretch out great branches which give shadow to the garden-seats.
Creepers climb over the house, there are rose-bushes by the paths, and out beyond the bowling-green an orchard of old fruit-trees is on the banks of the Mole, a brown stream in which the weeds wave gently as it moves with a pleasant rustle through the down country on its way to join the Thames. There are two dovecotes in the garden of the hotel, and the flutter of white wings in the sunlight is pretty to see. Behind the gardens is Box Hill, one part of which is steep, grassy down scored with white footpaths, the other half stony slopes so steep as to be almost cliffs, up which the woods and undergrowth climb. On the Sunday of my visit the dark green of these woods was scarcely touched by the russet and orange of the autumn tints.
In the old portion of the house there are small rooms on the ground floor, and above, a dozen little bedrooms with flower-boxes in their windows and bell-pulls hanging by the fireplaces; for though there is electric light all over the house, the old-fashioned bell-pulls and the long line of bells in the corridor have been left as an old-world touch. Out into the garden there juts a newly built part of the house, with a large dining-room on the ground floor and bedrooms above. The dining-room is panelled with chestnut wood to within a couple of feet from the ceiling. It has on one side recesses, one of which forms an ingle-nook for the fireplace, and opposite to them, in the wall facing the garden, are many French windows which give on to the lawns. At one end of this pleasant room is a great bow-window looking down the length of the lawns and orchard, and the tables in this bow are the ones most sought after. The strips of red carpet on the polished wooden floor deaden the sound of the feet of the waiters as they go to and fro, the chairs are handsome ones of red leather, and as they bear on their backs a scroll with "The Gaiety" on it, I presume they were bought when the Gaiety Restaurant breathed its last.
All the classes for which the old inn, turned hotel, caters are provided for. There is a refreshment-room for the chauffeurs, a bar for the rustics. There is also a very pleasant sanctum, which I should have called the bar parlour, but which is dubbed the lounge, in which are the heads of some of the foxes killed by the local pack of hounds, and a photograph of a meet at the hotel, some coaching prints, a picture of a racehorse and its jockey, some little stags' heads which were in the house when it was bought by the Trust, a grandfather clock, some Japanese bronzes and Wedgwood vases, some old-fashioned wooden arm-chairs and some big leather ones. It is in this comfortable room, with a long stretch of window looking on to the road, that the worthies of the neighbourhood assemble to talk over local politics and other important matters. There is a little ante-chamber to the dining-room with comfortable seats in it, a coffee-room and a drawing-room which runs the full width of the old house and is the room in which the ladies staying in the house sit after dinner.
The Surrey Public House Trust, which bought the Burford Bridge Inn, and in whose hands it has become one of the most flourishing small country hotels in England, is an association of noblemen and gentlemen of Surrey who have bought a dozen inns and hotels in the county, and who run them on the sanest and soundest possible lines. The sale of alcoholic drinks is not looked to as the principal source of profit, and as none of the houses owned by the Trust are tied houses, the goods, eatable and drinkable, are purchased in the best and cheapest markets. The company has as its manager at Burford Bridge Mr "Mike" Hunt, who comes of the family who were the lessees of the Star and Garter at Richmond in its palmy days. Mr Hunt, plump, light-haired, with a moustache somewhat resembling that of the German Emperor, knows all there is to know of hotel management, and the eight and a half years he has been at Burford Bridge are the years in which the hotel has risen to its present fame. He knows pretty nearly every motorist who uses the Brighton road, and is a keen supporter of local sport.
The road to Dorking at certain times of the day, especially on Sundays, is alive with motor cars and motor cycles, and the cars at lunch-time and at tea-time cluster in front of the hotel like swarming bees. In the big dining-room the lunch that is served is an excellent one. There is a choice of two soups, one thick, one clear; fish--on this particular Sunday there were some excellent lobsters--a great choice of cold meats and one hot meat dish, and a choice of puddings. A cut from the cheese is the ending of lunch, and then a cup of coffee served under one of the trees on the lawn. Half-a-crown is the charge made for this very ample meal.
If you are making a day of it, as I did on this Sunday, it is pleasant in the afternoon to stroll past the station, near which a little wooden chapel stands thatched with reeds, and on through country roads where the little roses of the brambles were turning to blackberries, and past garden hedges where the box and holly mingle, out towards Updown Woods. Once away from the clatter and roar of the main road one is soon in the heart of the most beautiful country in Surrey, and one comes back to the hotel, when the rush of the motors returning to town is lulling, to find a little blue mist coming up from the valley before the distant wooded hills, and all the rooks winging their way homeward to their rookery in the great trees, and in the broad meadow by the Mole across the road, scores and scores of rabbits out for a frolic.
This is the dinner that I ate on that Sunday evening at Burford Bridge:
Consommé à la Reine. Thick Giblet Soup. Boiled Turbot, Sauce Hollandaise. Roast Leg of Mutton. French Beans. Potatoes. Roast Duckling or Roast Partridge. Salad. Beignets Soufflés. Tartlets Confiture. Cheese, etc.
The giblet soup was excellent, the turbot fresh, and, though the mutton might have been the more tender for another day of hanging, the partridge and the salad were capital and the _beignet_ made with a very light hand. The price of the dinner was 4s. 6d., and I drank with it a pint of Rüdesheimer, which cost me 2s. 9d.
A large party of ladies and men who were staying in the hotel had a table in the centre of the big room and were very merry over their meal. Two pretty girls and a young man, motoring up to London, who stopped at the hotel to eat a dinner on their way, two pleasant-faced ladies staying at the hotel, and various couples of men, were some of the diners that night. After dinner I watched the departure of the motorists, who were completing their journey up to London, sat for a while by the fire in the drawing-room, for there was sharpness in the September night air, and at ten o'clock, gently tired by my afternoon's walk on the hills, went up to bed in a clean little bedroom with some good old prints on its walls. Next morning the sound that woke me was the cawing of the rooks on their way to the fields.
XXVIII
THE RITZ
The Ritz Hotel and Restaurant will keep in the remembrance of Londoners the name of the foremost _hôtelier_ of our days, M. Ritz, a man whose genius is written across Europe and America, from Paris to Frankfort, from Biarritz to Salsomaggiore, from Lucerne to Madrid, from Budapest to New York. Too much quick brain work unfortunately has broken down M. Ritz's health, and he is never likely to take any share again in the control of the hotels which bear his name. He was the man who first taught the mass of the rich English how to dine in cultured comfort in their own capital; yet to the great majority of those who benefited by his perfect taste and his genius for giving unostentatious luxury to the gourmets of the world he was an unknown personality. Duchesses and actresses, legislators and actors, explorers and curates, all are known to the public by their photographs in shop windows and in the newspapers, but I never saw a photograph of Ritz in a Regent Street shop or in a journal.
It was by chance that he first came to England. When the Savoy Hotel was opened M. Ritz was manager of the Hotel National at Lucerne and of the Grand Hotel at Monte Carlo: Mr D'Oyly Carte found him at the Grand Hotel, and asked him if he would come to the Savoy for six months to put the restaurant in order. He came, bringing with him M. Escoffier, who had been chef at the Grand. Ritz at the Savoy made the supper after the theatre the popular meal it still continues to be, though it is, thanks to the Early Closing Act, a scramble to eat five-shillings' worth of food in half-an-hour, and he also discovered, while at the Savoy, that if a restaurant wishes a large number of its guests to be of the softer sex a band is a necessity. He saw that an Austrian band, engaged at the suggestion of Mr Hwfa Williams, kept the diners half-an-hour longer at their tables over their cigars and coffee, and that ladies soon came to consider a dinner unaccompanied by music a tame feast. For the music, often over-loud, to the accompaniment of which I eat my meals in most restaurants, I am not in the least thankful to M. Ritz; but the majority of diners, especially those in petticoats, if such things exist nowadays, think differently.
The fight to obtain music at restaurants on Sundays was one of M. Ritz's great battles. I remember the days, not so very long ago, when a band could not play on Sunday in a restaurant unless some individual dinner-giver engaged it to play for his guests, and had no objection to the other diners listening to it. Another advance made by Ritz was the obtaining of newly baked bread for those who lunched and dined at the Savoy restaurant on a Sunday. The baker who at first supplied this bread broke some law or some regulation in doing this, and was summoned; but M. Ritz, not to be beaten, established a bakery in the hotel to supply the bread. Other restaurants followed suit. He had an enormous facility for quick work, no detail was too small for him, and when he had made up his mind that a thing should be done he took unlimited trouble to have it carried out. At one time, when he managed the Carlton, he could not understand why the coffee made there should not be quite up to the level of the coffee at his hotels on the Continent. He tried every experiment possible, brought water from all parts of England, took every precaution against the dampness of our climate, and finally asked one of the Rümpelmayers, the great pastrycook family of the south of France, to come to London to advise him in this matter.
I used to see M. Ritz at this period of his life very often, and used to chat with him on matters of _gourmandise_. Very slim, very quiet, with nervous hands clasped tightly together, he would move through the big restaurant seeing everything, saying a word under his breath to a head waiter, bowing to some of the diners, staying by a table to speak to others, possessing a marvellous knowledge of faces and of what the interests were of all the important people of his clientele. There was a maxim, he said, which should be carved in golden letters above the door of every _maître d'hôtel_, and that maxim was, in English, "A customer is always right," and he always bore this in mind. Whenever at that period M. Escoffier invented a new dish a little jury of three, M. Escoffier, Madame Ritz and M. Ritz, used to sit in judgment on it in solemn conclave before it was allowed to appear on a menu in the restaurant. I once asked Madame Ritz, who has been M. Ritz's real helpmate and counsellor throughout his married life, to what quality she attributed her husband's success in life, and she answered, "sensibility," giving the word its French meaning.
M. Ritz had a talent for doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. I once saw him in the early morning on the platform of the station in Rome. He looked, as he always looked, as though he had come out of a band-box, well-shaved and well-brushed, the ends of his moustache pointed upwards, his whiskers brought down to the level of his mouth, wearing those dark garments of extreme neatness which one always associates with the manager of hotels. He was the one male person on the platform that morning who was not dishevelled, nor tired, nor unshaven; but he had raced across the Continent as fast as trains could carry him to be there to receive a duke and duchess who were going to stay at the hotel in which he had an interest.
A _coup du maître d'hôtel_, of which he told me afterwards with a smile, was the method by which he put a large luncheon-party of ladies on easy terms with each other. It was a luncheon given at the Carlton and attended by the ladies who were sending the hospital-ship out to South Africa during the Boer War. Many of the ladies did not know each other well, and M. Ritz, exceedingly anxious that the luncheon should be a success, feared that they might not be easily conversational, so at the commencement of the feast he took round a bottle of Château Yquem and suggested to each lady that a little glass of white wine made a good beginning to lunch. In two minutes every lady was chatting most pleasantly to her neighbours whether she had ever seen them before or not. Of the determination of M. Ritz in his early days to learn everything that was to be learned in the restaurant world, I remember one instance, told me by his wife. He held a well-paid post in one of the smart Parisian restaurants, but left it to go to Voisin's at a smaller salary, because he thought there was more to be learned in the good old restaurant in the Rue St Honoré than in the other place of good cheer.
[Illustration: M. RITZ]
But it is of the Ritz Restaurant, not of Ritz himself, that I am writing in this chapter. I have read that the Ritz has swallowed up the site of the old "White Horse" cellars, from which so many of the coaches used to start, but the White Horse cellars had crossed the road a century and a half before I began to know my London. The Isthmian Club-house at one time occupied the portion of the site overlooking the Green Park, and when the Club moved on to other quarters it became the Walsingham, part chambers, part restaurant, one of the group of houses and hotels which stretched from the Green Park to Arlington Street. When M. Gehlardi managed the Walsingham, and M. Dutru was its chef, there was no better dining place in London.
The great white stone building of the Ritz, with its arcaded front and its entrance to the restaurant and ballrooms right in the middle of the arcade, is a comparative new-comer to London, in that it was opened in 1906. It is a building, inside and out, of the Louis XVI. period, with every modern luxury added. The Winter Garden, where one awaits one's guests, is a delightful place of creamy marble pillars and gilt trellis-work, casemented mirrors, carved amorini and a fountain with a gilt lead figure of "La Source" looking up at the golden cupids poised above her. The little orchestra of the hotel plays in this Winter Garden, and its music in no way interferes with the conversation in the restaurant.
The restaurant itself may be said to be dedicated to Marie Antoinette, for the gilt bronze garlands which hang from electrolier to electrolier, forming an oval below the painted sky, were designed to represent the flower decorations at one of Marie Antoinette's feasts, and though the garlands have been much lightened, for at first they were too heavy in design, they are still reminiscent of the poor little queen who lived such a merry life and met so sad an end. It is a restaurant of soft colours, of marbles, cream and rose and soft green, of tapestried recesses and of handsome consoles in the niches. Towards the Green Park long arched windows look on to one of the pleasantest prospects in London, and below these windows and between them and the Park is a little forecourt, in which a green tent is pitched when a great ball is to be held in the suite of rooms below the restaurant, and where on hot summer evenings dinner is served in the open air. At one end of the restaurant is a gilt group of Father Thames contemplating an exceedingly attractive lady who represents the Ocean. Everything in the restaurant is of the Louis XVI. period, and the Aubusson carpets and the chairs and all the silver and the china and the glass used in the restaurant and the banqueting rooms harmonise with that period.
The restaurant is not a very large one, and sometimes tables for its guests are set in the Marie Antoinette room with which it connects, and in that portion of the corridor which forms an ante-room. But though it is not of a very great size, the Ritz has a most aristocratic clientele. Royal personages often lunch and dine there, and diplomacy regards it as its own particular dining place, for tables are retained by the secretaries and attachés of two of the Embassies, the German and the Austrian, and, I fancy, by a third one also.
Lady Amalthea had very graciously said she would dine with me at the Ritz, so I went in the afternoon of a hot day to interview M. Kroell, the manager, who stepped across Piccadilly from the Berkeley to succeed M. Elles, who, for a time, managed both the Ritz in Paris and the Ritz in London. With M. Kroell was M. Charles, the manager in charge of the restaurant, and I asked that I might be given that evening a little dinner for two, not of necessity an expensive dinner, but one suitable for a warm evening, and I sent my compliments to M. Malley, the _chef de cuisine_, and said that I hoped that I should find some of the specialities of his kitchen amongst the dishes.
M. Malley came from the Ritz at Paris when the London Ritz was first opened, having acquired his art at the Grand Véfour and the Café Anglais. He presides over a very spacious range of white-tiled kitchens, in which all the rooms which should be hot are divided by a wide corridor from the rooms which should be cold, and he has a talent for the invention of new dishes, amongst these being a very splendid dish of salmon with a _mousse_ of crayfish, which he has named after the Marquise de Sévigné, a reminiscence of his days at Vichy, and his _pêches Belle Dijonnaise_, of which more anon. Russian soups are one of the specialities of the Ritz kitchen, and there is a Viennese pastrycook amongst the members of M. Malley's brigade, who makes exquisite pastry. The late King Edward had a special fancy for the cakes made at the Ritz, and a supply used to be sent to Buckingham Palace, but M. Elles told me that this was a State secret, for M. Ménager, the King's chef, might not have liked it to be known that anything from another kitchen entered Buckingham Palace.
As I had left my dinner in the safe hands of the experts, so I also left the question of the champagne we should drink, only asking that it should be one recommended by the house.
Before going on my way I reminded M. Kroell that on the last occasion that I had word with him he was presented with a miniature in brilliants of the order bestowed on him by the King of Spain, and I asked him if he had been awarded any other decorations. M. Kroell laughed, and then modestly owned to the German military medal, and as he told me this he involuntarily squared his shoulders as an old soldier.
Lady Amalthea arrived with military punctuality (she is a soldier's wife) in the best of spirits, wearing a dream of a dress, and her diamonds and turquoises. A table had been kept for us at the upper end of the room, where Lady Amalthea could both see all the guests and be seen by them. She ran through a little selection from Debrett as she took her seat, having scanned most of the diners as she came in, and I was enabled to add to this by identifying a group at one of the tables as some of the Peace Delegates from the Balkans.
Then we settled down to the infinitely important matter of seeing what the dinner was that M. Malley and M. Charles in counsel had arranged for us.
This is the menu, and though at first sight it seems a long one for two people it is an exceedingly light dinner, and we neither of us ate the tiny cutlets which were the _gros pièce_ of the feast. The wine to go with it was a bottle of Roederer 1906:
Melon. Consommé Glacé Madrilène. Filet de Sole Romanoff. Cailles des Gourmets. Côtes de Pauillac Montpensir. Petits Pois. Velouté Palestine. Poulet en Chaudfroid. Salade à la Ritz. Pêche Belle Dijonnaise.