Part 21

A little farther down the street on the same side is a restaurant and hotel controlled by another old acquaintance of mine in the restaurant world. The restaurant is Bellomo's, and the hotel of which it forms a part is Morle's Hotel. In the days when I thought it my duty to do my share of drinking, at the Café Royal, a particularly excellent cuvée of Cliquot Vin Rosé, the waiter who was in charge of the table at which I usually sat, and who attended to all my wants with admirable intuition, was not at all one of the lean kind, and to identify him from his fellows I always called him, and wrote of him as, "the fat waiter." He prospered and ran up the tree of promotion, as good waiters do at the Café Royal, so that in his later development he became _maître d'hôtel_ in charge of the grill-room, and wore a frock-coat and a black tie. But the anxieties of his new position in no way caused him to grow thin. A year or two ago a friend wrote to me saying that he and some others had found the money to set up Bellomo, whom, of course, I remembered at the Café Royal, in a restaurant of his own in Jermyn Street, and hoped that I would go and see how he prospered there. I went, not feeling quite sure who Bellomo was, and found my fat waiter of old, now a plump proprietor. His restaurant, which consists of two rooms thrown into one, has walls with a light shade of pink on them, and at night is lit by electroliers with pink shades. A few steps lead from the front to the back. The restaurant is a cosy little establishment, and the two dinners which are served there--one a three-and-six one and the other a five-shilling one--are invariably well cooked, for M. Bellomo has brought the good Café Royal traditions with him to his new home. This is a typical menu, a winter one, of Bellomo's three-and-six dinner:

Hors d'œuvre. Consommé Rothschild or Thick Mock Turtle. Filet de Sole Chauchat. Carré de Mouton Niçoise. Oie rôti. Salade. Glacé Mont Blanc. Gaufrettes.

* * * * *

Farther along the street and on the opposite side is Les Lauriers, which takes its name from the two little evergreen trees which stand in tubs at its door, and which is higher and more airy than most of the restaurants of its size, for at some time or another the entresol has been thrown into the rooms on the ground floor. Les Lauriers consists, like most of the Jermyn Street restaurants, of two rooms joined together with a space screened off by the door to form a tiny ante-room. Its walls are panelled and painted cream colour, and lamps with pink shades hang from the ceiling. The green carpet and the dark wooden chairs at the three rows of tables give a comfortable look to the place. The proprietor is M. Giolitto, who was a head waiter at the Savoy before he came to Jermyn Street to make his fortune. A very comfortable clientele patronises Les Lauriers, and there are two dinners provided for them, one a short dinner which is served until a quarter to eight, and the other a more elaborate one, priced 3s. 9d. and 5s. 6d. respectively. The last time I dined at Les Lauriers I, feeling rich, indulged in the longer dinner. This was the menu:

Melon Cantaloup or Driver's Royal Natives. Consommé Viveur or Crème Doria. Homard froid, Sce. Mayonnaise or Aiguillettes de Turbot en Goujons. Tournedos à la Florentine. Perdreau rôti sur Canapé. Petits Pois à la Française. Salade. Ananas Master Joe. Mignardises.

It was a well-cooked dinner, and I do not wonder that M. Giolitto was able to tell me that his restaurant flourishes exceedingly.

XLII

THE MEN WHO MADE THE SAVOY

If I were to attempt to give you all the early history of the ground on which the Savoy stands I should have to delve back to Tudor times, and the Savoy Palace and the politics of that very turbulent period. For me, however, the past history of the Savoy begins with the time when the Savoy Theatre was built on reclaimed ground and opened in 1881. The offices of the theatre were in Beaufort House, which stood on the hill, and beside the theatre was a space of rough waste land, much like the County Council's wilderness in Aldwych. On this unoccupied land Mr D'Oyly Carte put up a shed to house the electric light plant for the theatre, for the Savoy was the first theatre in London that used electric light. The Savoy Hotel and Restaurant eventually rose where the electric light shed first stood, and they were opened in 1889. The hotel and restaurant then faced the Embankment, and had no Strand frontage. To get to the restaurant one had either to do a glissade in a hansom down the steep Savoy hill to the side entrance which led into a courtyard, in the centre of which stood a majolica fountain, or to go to the front entrance opposite to the Embankment Gardens. The restaurant was smaller than it is now; it was panelled with mahogany; it had a red and gold frieze and a ceiling of dead gold. It was a very comfortable restaurant, and the mahogany walls gave it a homelike feeling, though, of course, they absorbed a great deal of the light. The private rooms, named after the various Gilbert and Sullivan operas, were, as they are now, next to the restaurant. The grill-room was tucked away in the middle of a block of buildings. There was below the restaurant a _table d'hôte_ dining-room, and on the garden level was a ballroom and its ante-rooms. The balcony was but half its present width. No block of buildings has been more greatly improved from time to time than the Savoy has been. There has hardly been a year without some adornment being added, and in 1904 the largest additions during the history of the hotel were completed, and the hotel and restaurant gained their Strand outlet.

It would be possible to write a history of the Savoy by taking note of the successive improvements and additions made to it. It would also be possible to tell the history of the great restaurant by an account of some of the eras of great dinners, the period, for instance, when the South African millionaires were spending money like water during the great "boom," and the period of freak dinners, when Caruso sang from a gondola to diners sitting by a canal in Venice, which was really the flooded courtyard; and when, on another occasion, the same space was turned into a Japanese garden for a Japanese dinner. I was a guest at some of these great dinners, at the Rouge et Noire one which two magnates of the financial world gave to celebrate a great _coup_ at Monte Carlo, when all the decorations of the table, all the flowers, as much of the napery as was possible, reproduced the two colours, when the waiters wore red shirts and red gloves, and the number on which the money was won was to be found everywhere in various forms on the table. And I was bidden to the return banquet, a white and green one, which strove to outdo the luxury of the former one, whereat fruit-trees bearing fruit grew apparently through the table, and each chair was a little bower of foliage.

But I prefer to chat concerning the men who made the history of the house. Not the men who pulled the strings behind the scenes, the Board of Directors and their admirable managing director, Mr Reeves Smith, but the men whom the public saw or heard of in the restaurant, the general managers, the managers of the restaurant, and the chefs. The managers whom I knew were Ritz, Mengay, Pruger, Gustave, and now Blond. In the restaurant were Echenard, Joseph, Jules, Renault, and now Soi. The chefs have been Escoffier, Thouraud, whom Joseph brought over with him from Paris, Tripod, and now Rouget; and most of these I knew well.

When Mr D'Oyly Carte was putting in order the organisation of the newly opened Savoy Hotel, he, at Monte Carlo, asked M. Ritz, who was then at the Grand Hotel there, to come to London and take charge of the Savoy Restaurant. M. Ritz came and brought M. Escoffier with him to make history in the kitchens. When M. Ritz permanently took over the management of the hotel and the restaurant he asked M. Echenard, the proprietor of the Hotel du Louvre at Marseilles, to come to London and assist him in the restaurant. This triumvirate worked admirably together. M. Ritz, thin, nervous, splendidly neat, knowing all his patrons and their tastes, was a great _maître d'hôtel_ as well as a great manager. The saying which he constantly quoted, "The customer is always right," he acted up to. If some ignorant diner found fault with one of M. Escoffier's most exquisite creations it would be swept away without a word and something suited to a lower intelligence and an uncultivated palate substituted for it. If an old and valued customer had come into the restaurant and had ordered for dinner, tripe and onions and sausages and mashed potatoes, M. Ritz would have greeted such an order as though it were a flash of genius, and would probably have sent out to the nearest cab shelter for the dishes.

During the early days of the Savoy M. Ritz was quietly teaching the English with money to spend that a good dinner is not of necessity a long dinner, and that a few dishes exquisitely cooked are better than a long catalogue of rich dishes. M. Echenard, looking like a Spanish hidalgo, quite understood the ways of his two great colleagues--for MM. Ritz and Escoffier are two of the greatest men in gastronomic history--and backed them up nobly. The cholera year in Marseilles took M. Echenard back to his hotel in the south, and he has prospered exceedingly there, being now the proprietor of the Reserve and the hotel just below it on the Corniche, as well as the Louvre. MM. Ritz and Escoffier have since made the fortunes of other London restaurants.

When the Ritz-Escoffier regime at the Savoy came to an end the directors bought the Restaurant Marivaux in the street by the side of the Opéra Comique in Paris, and brought over M. Joseph, the presiding genius of that restaurant, to take charge of the Savoy Restaurant. The Marivaux had a unique reputation in the Paris of that day for its cookery. Joseph came, bringing with him his chef, M. Thouraud. Joseph was, I think, the most inspired _maître d'hôtel_, with the exception, perhaps, of Frederic of the Tour d'Argent, I have ever met. The Savoy Restaurant was rather too large for his system of management, for he liked to take a personal interest in each dinner that was progressing in his restaurant and to give it his constant supervision. He was born of French parents in Birmingham, and his one great amusement was that northern sport, pigeon flying. He had pleasant brown eyes and bushy eyebrows, he wore all that remained of his hair rather long, and had a tiny moustache. He was quite wrapped up in his profession, and, as he told me once, looked at his boots the whole time that he took his afternoon constitutional walk, that he might think of new dishes. Whenever any novel idea occurred to him he tried it at home in his own little kitchen before asking M. Thouraud to make experiment on a larger scale. To see Joseph carve a duck was to see a very splendid exhibition of ornate swordsmanship, and his preparation of a _canard à la presse_ was quite sacrificial in its solemnity. There was in his day a dinner given at the Savoy at which Madame Sarah Bernhardt was the chief guest, and most of the other people present were "stars" of our British stage. Joseph cooked before them at a side table most of the dishes of the dinner, and told me that he did so because he wished to show actresses and actors, who constantly appeal to the imagination of their audiences, that there was something also in his art to please the eye and stimulate the imagination. When I asked why he never went to the theatre, he told me that he would sooner see six gourmets eating a well-cooked dinner than watch the finest performance that Madame Bernhardt and Coquelin could give. Joseph had quite a pretty wit and facile pen. This was the _jeu d'esprit_ that he once wrote in a young lady's album:--"C'était la première côtelette qui coûta le plus cher à l'homme--Dieu en ayant fait une femme." And he wrote for me a little essay on the duties of a _maître d'hôtel_ that was very sprightly in style. He was even a greater believer than M. Ritz in the short dinner, and declared that we in England only tasted our dinners and did not eat them. Three dishes he considered quite enough for a good dinner, and this was a tiny feast which he ordered for me on one occasion when I took a lady to dine at the Savoy:

Petite marmite. Sole Reichenberg. Caneton à la presse. Salade de saison. Fonds d'artichauts à la Reine. Bombe pralinée. Petits fours. Panier fleuri.

The _panier fleuri_ he carved himself at table from an orange.

Joseph became homesick, for he was a thorough Parisian, and went back eventually to the Marivaux, but he soon after died.

[Illustration: JOSEPH CARVING A DUCK _After a drawing by Paul Renouard_]

The directors of the Savoy Company, which owns the Berkeley and Claridge's as well as the Savoy Hotel, brought jolly, genial, rosy-faced M. Jules, under whose rule the Berkeley had prospered exceedingly, from that white-faced hotel to the Savoy, and his rule on the Thames Embankment was as successful as it had been in Piccadilly. It was during his managership that the additions that were to give the entrance on to the Strand were planned, and, I fancy, were begun, and when M. Jules left the Savoy to make for himself a restaurant and hotel in Jermyn Street, M. Renault, from the Casino at Biarritz, came to the Savoy Restaurant, and the quick-witted M. Pruger became general manager.

This was a period of great activity and of many alterations in the building. No Savoy manager has ever had more brilliant inspirations for great feasts than M. Pruger had. The gondola dinner was one of his ideas and he always thought of something novel and amusing for the Christmas and New Year's Eve parties. M. Renault is now in Rome at the hotel there owned by the Savoy Company; M. Pruger was tempted away to America to manage a mammoth restaurant on modern lines, but came back from New York to take over the management of the Royal Automobile Club when its great club-house in Pall Mall was opened. M. Gustave, of the russet beard, who had steered the newly built Café Parisien of the Savoy to great success, next became manager of the hotel, and that brings us down to the history of to-day, for when he resigned his appointment M. Blond, the present manager, succeeded him.

XLIII

THE DUTIES OF A _MAÎTRE D'HÔTEL_

I have mentioned in the previous chapter that Joseph wrote me a sprightly letter on the duties of a _maître d'hôtel_. This is it:

MON CHER COLONEL,--Vous me demandez pour votre nouveau livre des recettes. Méfiez-vous des recettes. Depuis la cuisinière bourgeoise et le Baron Brisse on a chanté la chanson sur tous les airs et sur tous les tons. Et qu'en reste-t-il; qui s'en souvient? Je veux dire dans le public aristocratique pour qui vous écrivez, et que vous comptez intéresser avec votre nouvelle publication, cherchez le nouveau dans les à propos de table, donnez des conseils aux maîtresses de maison, qui dépensent beaucoup d'argent pour donner des dîners fatiguants, trop longs, trop compliqués; dîtes leur qu'un bon dîner doit être court, que les convives doivent manger et non goûter, qu'elles exigent de leur cuisinier ou cuisinière de n'être pas trop savants, qu'ils respectent avant tout le goût que le bon Dieu a donné à toutes choses de ne pas les dénaturer par des combinaisons, qui à force d'être raffinées deviennent barbares.

On a beaucoup parlé du cuisinier. Si nous exposions un peu ce que doit être le Maître d'Hôtel.

LE MAÎTRE D'HÔTEL FRANÇAIS

La plus grande force du Maître d'hôtel Français, je dis Maître d'hôtel Français à dessein, car si le cuisinier Français a su tirer parti des produits de la nature avec un art infini, pour en faire des aliments aimables, agréables, et bienfaisants, le Maître d'hôtel Français seul est susceptible de les faire accepter et désirer. Or voilà pour le Maître d'hôtel le champ qu'il a à explorer. Champ vaste s'il en fût, car deviner avec tact ce qui peut plaire à celui-ci et ne pas plaire à celui-là, est un problème à résoudre selon la nature, le tempérament et la nationalité de celui qu'il doit faire manger. Il doit donc être le conseil, le tentateur, et le metteur en scène. Il faut pour être un maître d'hôtel accompli, mettre de côté, ou de moins ne pas laisser percer le but commercial, tout en étant un commerçant hors ligne (je parle ici du maître d'hôtel public de restaurant, attendu que dans la maison particulière, le commerce n'a rien à voir, ce qui simplifie énormement le rôle du maître d'hôtel. Pour cela il faut être un peu diplomate, et un peu artiste dans l'art de dire, afin de colorer le projet de repas que l'on doit soumettre à son dîneur). Il faut donc agir sur l'imagination pour fair oublier la machine que l'on va alimenter, en un mot masquer le côté matériel de manger. J'ai acquis la certitude qu'un plat savamment préparé par un cuisinier hors ligne peut passer inaperçu, ou inapprécié si le maître d'hôtel, qui devient alors metteur en scène, ne sait pas présenter l'œuvre, de façon à le faire désirer, de sorte que si ce mets est servi par un maître d'hôtel qui n'en comprend pas le caractère, il lui sera impossible de lui donner tout son relief, et alors l'œuvre de cuisinier sera anéanti et passera inaperçu.

Ce maître d'hôtel doit être aussi un observateur et un juge et doit transmettre son appréciation au chef de cuisine, mais pour apprécier il faut savoir, pour savoir il faut aimer son art, le maître d'hôtel doit être un apôtre.

Il doit transmettre les observations qu'il a pu entendre pendant le cours d'un dîner de la part des convives, observations favorables ou défavorables, il doit les transmettre au chef et aviser avec lui. Il doit aussi être en observation, car il arrive le plus souvent que les convives ne disent rien à cause de leur amphitryon mais ne mangent pas avec plaisir et entrain le mets présenté: là encore le maître d'hôtel doit chercher le pourquoi. Il y a aussi dans un déjeuner ou un dîner un rôle très important réservé au maître d'hôtel. La variété agréable des hors-d'œuvre, la salade qui accompagne le rôti, le façon de découper ce rôti avec élégance, de bien disposer ce rôti sur son plat une fois découpé, découper bien et vite, afin d'éviter le réchaud qui sèche. Savoir mettre à point une selle de mouton, avec juste ce qu'il faut de sel sur la partie grasse, qui lui donnera un goût agréable.

Pour découper le maître d'hôtel doit se placer ni trop près ni trop loin des convives, afin que ceux-ci soient intéressés, et voient que tous les détails sont observés avec goût et élégance, de façon à tenter encore les appétits qui n'en peuvent presque plus mais qui renaissent encore un peu aiguillonnés par le désir qu'a su faire naître l'artiste préposé au repas, et qui a su donner encore envie à l'imagination, quand l'estomac commençait à capituler.

Le maître d'hôtel a de plus cette partie de la fin du dîner, le choix d'un bon fromage, les fruits, les soins de température à donner aux vins, la façon de décanter ceux-ci pour leur donner le maximum de bouquet; le maître d'hôtel ne peut-il encore être un tentateur avec la fraise frappée à la Marivaux? ou avec la pêche à la cardinal, qu'accompagne si bien le doux parfum de la framboise, légèrement acidulé d'une cuillerée de jus de groseille. Notre grand Carême qualifiait certains plats le "manger des Dieux." Combien l'expression est heureuse!

Depuis que je suis à Londres j'ai trouvé un nombre incalculable d'inventeurs de ma "pêche à la Cardinal." Il me faudra leur donner la recette un jour que j'en aurai l'occasion.

N'est-ce pas de l'art chez le maître d'hôtel qui tente et charme les convives par ces raffinements, et qui comme un cavalier sur une moture essoufflée sait encore relever son courage et lui faire faire la dernière foulée qui décide de la victoire? Après un bon repas le maître d'hôtel a la grande satisfaction d'avoir donné un peu de bonheur à de pauvres gens riches, qui ne sont pas toujours des heureux.

Et comme l'a dit Brillat Savarin "Le plaisir de la table ne nuit pas aux autres plaisirs." Au contraire, qui sait si _indirectement_ je ne suis pas le papa de bien des Bébés rieurs, ou la cause au moins de certaines aventures que mes jolies clientes n'évoquent qu'en souriant derrière leur éventail?

JOSEPH

_Directeur du Savoy Restaurant, Londres, et du Restaurant de Marivaux, Paris._

XLIV

THE SAVOY TO-DAY

After the Houses of Parliament, the Law Courts, the National Gallery, St Paul's and Westminster Abbey, the Savoy Hotel is probably the building that the well-to-do Londoner knows best. He cannot walk or drive down the Strand without his eye being caught by its milk-white frontage on that tumultuous street, and by the stern-faced gilded warrior above the courtyard entrance who leans on a shield that bears an heraldic bird, which I have no doubt is a very noble eagle, but which looks as though it had been plucked. When he comes home from abroad he, if he is looking to the right as he crosses the railway bridge to Charing Cross, sees the garden front of the hotel, with its balconies and many windows, and its flag aflutter, and recalling many good dinners in the past, looks forward to many others in the immediate future.

All the preliminaries to a dinner at the Savoy are pleasantly dignified. The drive into the courtyard, the cessation of noise as the wheels of car or carriage come upon the india-rubber paving under the glazed roof, the cream and dark green marbles of the entrance front, the trellis and flowers outside the Café, all contribute to pleasant anticipation; and once inside the doors, the hall panelled with dark woods, the glimpse through a long window of the light-coloured reading-room, and the progress down a flight of crimson-carpeted stairs, with walls of buff and brown marble on either side, form the first stage of the diner's progress to the restaurant.