Part 7
The little waitress totalled up my bill on the card that the commissionaire at the door had given me, and I was making my way to the pay-desk when I saw in a corner by the book-stall a lady engaged in opening letters; and, thinking that this must be Mrs Eustace Miles, I asked her if such was the case, and when she said "Yes," introduced myself. She welcomed me to the restaurant, explained that her husband was away playing a championship game at tennis, and said how sorry she was that she had not met me before I lunched, as she would have liked to suggest to me the dishes that best suit anyone making their first essay on non-flesh foods. I told her, however, that I had wished to make my first attack just as any other meat-eating member of the public would do, and I was very glad to be able to compliment her on the cook's soup and the shortbread. I had bought at the book-stall the May number of _Healthward Ho!_ and had carried off from the dinner-table a sheaf of leaflets giving information concerning the restaurant and the _salons_, and in addition to these Mrs Miles gave me a leaflet describing the exhibit that the then chef of the restaurant, Mr Blatch, N.C.A., sent to the Food and Cookery Exhibition in 1910, and which won a gold medal there, and an account of the _déjeuner_ at which M. Escoffier and the editor of _Food and Cookery_ and _The Catering World_ were present, and which was described by the latter in glowing terms, "excellent," "delightful" and "delicious" being adjectives used for every course. This was the menu of the feast:
Milk Cheese and Celery Mayonnaise. Salsify and Barley Cream Soup. Cashew Nut Timbale and Cranberry Sauce. Nut and Vegetable en Casserole. Vegetables (Conservatively Cooked). Jamaican Fruit Salad. Devilled Compacto.
It was recorded that M. Escoffier very much enjoyed the devilled Compacto, and praised the work of the chef who had prepared the _hors d'œuvre_ and the entrées. As, however, since the date of this _déjeuner_, which was in March 1910, M. Escoffier has given the world his famous _Dodine_, and his not less famous _Poularde Poincaré_, he was evidently not weaned from the errors of flesh-eating by his visit to the Eustace Miles Restaurant, nor shall I be lured away by any stuffed vegetable marrow from creamy salmon and plump quails.
But I shall say no word to dissuade old "Rats" from going to dine at the Eustace Miles Restaurant, for I am quite sure that what he will eat there will certainly do him no harm, and if he chooses F.U. dishes may probably do him a lot of good, but I should like to be present when the old man first looks down the green and red bill of fare of the day and finds himself faced by all the strange new dishes, for his remarks will be worthy of the occasion.
XIII
THE PRINCES' RESTAURANT
When the house for the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours--that classic stone building with busts of great painters in the ovals that ornament its façade, busts on which the sparrows perch and watch the traffic in Piccadilly--was put up in the early eighties, there was space below the galleries for some shops and for a large hall. It occurred to somebody, probably M. Benoist, whose great charcutier's shop was just over the way, that Princes' Hall was eminently suitable to be a dining-room, and Princes' Restaurant came into existence, M. Benoist being the moving spirit, his brother-in-law, M. Fourault, being the manager, and M. Azema, a chef of much fame, being at the head of the kitchen.
Princes' Restaurant, as I first remember it, was not the beautiful room it is now. The painted ceiling with its concealed lights, as fine an example of this kind of art as we have in London, was a later addition; the garden outside the windows of the restaurant had still to be made, and I think that the windows which look towards St James's Church were not in the great room when it was first built. The hotel, which has an entrance in Jermyn Street, and in which there are some noble rooms for banquets and balls, was another afterthought. The lessees of some of the shops on the Piccadilly front were bought out before the palm garden, in which impatient gentlemen wait for ladies who are late, and where satisfied diners smoke their after-dinner cigars and drink their coffee, could be made, and comparatively lately communication has been established between the restaurant and the galleries above, in order that when there is a ball in the picture-hung halls the dancers can troop down to sup below.
If Princes' Restaurant and Princes' grill-room and Princes' Hotel are like Rome in that they were not built in a day, they are very good to look upon in their finished state. The restaurant has a great height, and the early diners can smoke there without the least taint of tobacco greeting the later comers. Its ceiling is, as I have already written, a beautiful example of decorative art, and a bill of exceeding length, the sum total of which astonished me when I was told how many figures it comprised, was paid for this embellishment. Its walls are creamy in colour, the curtains are of soft pink, and the tall windows south and east are reflected in mirrors, looking like other windows on the northern side, where the space is not occupied by the Palm Lounge. A musicians' gallery runs along the western side, and the doors into the kitchen are below this, but the red-coated musicians have forsaken their aerie, which now forms a way to ballrooms and galleries, and have found a snug corner on the floor of the restaurant. There are some fine marble statues of nymphs on pedestals and palms and banked-up plants and flowers in the restaurant, and the general effect suggests that one has stepped out of London greyness into some Southern clime where all is light and bright and spacious. At night the electroliers are shaded so as to give a mixed golden and pink light, which is most comfortable to the eyes, and is, I am sure, very becoming to the complexions of the ladies, and the carpets and the upholstering of the chairs carry on the harmony of deep rose and pink.
The history of the present success of the Princes' Restaurant is the story of the triumph of the short dinner over the long one. As a lunching place Princes' was a great success from the day its doors first opened. The ladies of Mayfair and Belgravia and Tyburnia found that it was comfortably near their shopping centres, and the little ladies of the stage also liked to lunch there. The musical comedy ladies monopolised the first half-dozen tables to the right as one entered, leaving the rest of the tables to the other ladies, and Stage looked at Society's hats, and Society looked at Stage's furs, and no doubt each envied what the other wore. But for quite a while--it seemed a long while to the shareholders--Princes' did not find its destiny as a dining place. M. Benoist wished it to be a great _à la carte_ restaurant such as he has made the restaurant of the Hermitage at Monte Carlo, but for some unexplainable reason diners did not flock to Princes' to eat expensive dinners, nor did a long _table d'hôte_ dinner tempt them. At last it was determined that new methods should be tried and new men came on to the Board of Directors to try them, that very energetic and very successful organiser, Mr Harry Preston, of Brighton, being one of them. A short theatre dinner became the trump card of the restaurant in the evening, the Princes' ballrooms became the scene of most of the dances organised in theatreland, and when the company began to earn an annual dividend for its shareholders the advantages of brief dinners became very apparent to them.
This was the dinner of the day that I took a lady to eat at seven o'clock on an evening on which Sir George Alexander produced a new play at the St James's:--
Hors d'œuvre à la Russe. Petite Marmite Henri IV. Crème Lamballe. Suprême de Saumon Doria. Agneau de Pauillac à la Grecque. Boutons de Crucifères aux Fines Herbes. Chapons à la Broche. Salade. Biscuit Glacé au Chocolat Praliné. Friandises.
This was the six-and-six theatre dinner of the day, not too long to be eaten during the hour that theatre-goers allow themselves for a meal, and quite long enough for those for whom dinner is the one event of an evening. M. Roux, the _maître d'hôtel_, who has been at the Princes' for eighteen years, also showed me the menu of a half-guinea dinner which the Princes' holds in reserve should the little dinner not be impressive enough for some of its clients. The dinner was excellently cooked, and the tiny _pilau_ which came to the table with the lamb would have caught the appreciative attention of any gourmet, and assured me that M. Génie, the present head of the kitchen, who had previously won his spurs at the Carlton and the Brighton Metropole, and had at one period learned all there is to learn in Egypt, the land of _pilau_, is a worthy successor to M. Azema and M. Granvilliers. The lady who dined with me was much impressed by the two Pierrots sitting on the moon, a work of art which came to table with the _biscuit_, and was enthusiastic as to the playing of the orchestra. I thought myself that the musicians insisted a little too much that their music and not my conversation was what the pretty lady had come to Princes' to hear, but the question of music in a restaurant is a matter on which the gentler sex and the denser one are never in accord and the managers of most establishments find it a thorny question. If an orchestra of distinction is engaged nothing in the world will persuade its head that his music should be merely an accompaniment to conversation, and the opinion concerning music of a young man who has so much to say to a pretty girl that a dinner never lasts long enough to allow him to say it all, is very different to that of a bored husband, who has nothing in particular to remark to his wife after they have reached the soup course.
At seven, when we commenced our dinner, two other tables were already occupied. By half-past seven the room was comfortably full, and at a quarter to eight, when we left to go to the St James's, diners were still coming in to their tables. Most certainly what the dwellers in the leafy lanes of Mayfair and by the snipe-ground of Belgrave Square required was a restaurant in Piccadilly, where they can dine well and at not too great a length, nor at too great a price, on their way to the theatre, and Princes' has at last given them what they wanted.
XIV
THE CRITERION
The East Room at the Criterion is a trophy of one of woman's victories over man, for it was one of the first, if not the very first, restaurant-rooms designed and decorated to harmonise with feminine frocks and frills, and made beautiful that mankind should bring beautiful womankind there to eat things delicate. In the sixties, restaurants were few and far between, and were mostly places where men dined without their feminine belongings. But all this was changed in the seventies, and the East Room did its full share in persuading man that it added pleasure to a good dinner in a restaurant to be faced by a pretty woman. The East Room of to-day is twice the size of the one that Messrs Spiers and Pond first built, and its decoration of white and gold, and panels painted with Watteau subjects, its harmony of greys and pink in carpets and furniture and curtains, its ante-room with old French furniture, and the satisfactory arrangement by which the music of the orchestra, perched in a gilded cage above the big entrance hall, comes softened by distance to the diners in the East Room, are all happy second thoughts. But the East Room was, in 1873, when it was first opened, the dining place to which every lady asked her husband to take her, and it has held its own against ever-increasing competition through the years. Its windows look down on the rush and swirl of Piccadilly Circus, a wonderful scene either by day or night, and it adds to the pleasure of an unhurried meal to watch the hurry of thousands of one's fellow-creatures.
At one period, after the extension of the building, there were two East Rooms, a dividing wall being where the arches and curtains now are. The one of these nearest the grand staircase was a strictly _à la carte_ restaurant, while in the other, approached through a corridor, a _table d'hôte_ meal was served. The East Room of to-day smiles on both classes of diners. When a man sits down at his table there at dinner-time, M. Kugi, the _maître d'hôtel_, puts before him the _carte du jour_, an ample one, with any special delicacies in larger print than the others, and also lays on the table the menus of the half-sovereign and seven-and-six _table d'hôte_ dinners, and it is his experience that the greater number of diners look at the _carte du jour_ and then, mistrusting their own judgment, order one or the other of the _table d'hôte_ meals.
This was the menu of the seven-and-six dinner one night when I dined at the East Room at a tiny dinner-party, before going to the theatre down in the cellars of the big building to see the play running there:
Hors d'œuvre. Consommé Rossolnick. Crème aux huîtres. Truite de rivière Dona Louise. Selle d'Agneau Mascotte. Pommes nouvelles. Poularde du Surrey à la broche. Salade. Parfait au moka. Friandises. Dessert.
It was a very well-selected, well-served dinner. Had we chosen the half-guinea dinner we should have had an addition to this menu of _cailles à la Grecque_ and _chou de mer, sauce vierge_. The _Rossolnick_, with its flavour of cucumber, was excellent, the trout were fresh and firm, and the Surrey fowl as plump as any foreigner from Mans. M. Auguste Pannier, the chef of to-day, is worthy of the great men who have preceded him in the kitchen of the East Room. And not only have there been great cooks, but great managers as well at the Criterion, with the East Room as the particular object of their care. Oddenino, Mantell, Gerard, who all moved on to other posts, were predecessors of M. Emile Campenhaut, the manager of to-day, as was also M. Lefèvre, whose health broke down, but whom I remember as being an enthusiast on the subject of the art of cookery, a man who brought plenty of brain power to bear on the subject of delicate food. I think that the best of the many dinners I have eaten _à deux_ in the East Room was one ordered in consultation with him, and I subjoin it as a good specimen of an East Room _à la carte_ feast:
Caviar. Consommé à la Diane. Filets de sole aux délices. Suprêmes de volaille grillés. Carottes nouvelles à la crème. Laitues braisées en cocotte. Cailles à la Sainte-Alliance. Salade de chicorée frisée. Croûtes à la Caume. Soufflé glacé à la mandarine.
The _caille à la Sainte-Alliance_, in imitation of Brillat Savarin's _faisan à la Sainte-Alliance_, consisted of a truffle in an ortolan, the ortolan being in the quail. The _Croûte Caume_ is an admirable banana dish in which the tastes of the banana and pine-apple and apricot and kirsch all mingle.
The East Room is, of course, only one of the many restaurant-rooms in the great stone building. Immediately under the East Room are the Marble Restaurant and the grill-room. The Marble Restaurant, in old days, when men of position did not think it undignified to stand at a bar and drink brandy and soda, was the Long Bar, and a wonderful sight this bar, running the whole length of the building, used to be at midnight, crowded with Londoners of all the leisured classes and with a score or more of good-looking barmaids in black behind the bar. When the habits of the men of London began to change, and the Long Bar did not draw so many devotees, the firm of Spiers and Pond was not quite convinced for some time that the "palmy" days of the bars were gone, and they made the Long Bar one of the most beautiful saloons in London, decorating it with marbles and inlay of Venetian glass. That beautiful saloon is now the Marble Restaurant, in which a five-shilling _table d'hôte_ meal is served, and where singers on Sundays discourse music to the diners.
The American Bar had its period of great success, and in the grill-room, which formed part of the bar's surroundings, chops and steaks, unsurpassed anywhere in London, used to be grilled. But the character of some of the habitués of the American Bar was too pronouncedly sporting to be altogether satisfactory, and the American Bar passed away from the front part of the building as the Long Bar did. There is a buffet now at the Jermyn Street side, but it is no longer the haunt of the gentlemen who were so overwhelmingly devoted to sport. The grill-room, without the American Bar, is a very flourishing section of the Criterion. It differs from most other grill-rooms in having plenty of sunlight and fresh air, and has this distinctive feature, that there is an American cook in its kitchen and that American dishes can always be obtained there even when they are not on the bill of fare. I have eaten clam broth, terrapin, dry hash, scalloped sweet potatoes, and Graham pudding, when dining there with Americans.
The Criterion contains a score of banqueting-rooms, including a huge one at the top of the house, where a statue of Shakespeare looks down upon the diners. The West Room, which is now one of the banqueting-rooms, has been used by the management for many experiments. For a long time a _Dîner Parisien_ was served there, and as its cost was only five shillings, and as one got a great deal of very good food to eat for that sum, I used to patronise it very regularly in my subaltern days, when a dinner in the East Room could not be budgeted for. At one time it was given over to the vegetarians, and good-looking damsels in art clothing brought the diners dishes of nut cutlets and vegetable steaks; but the nut-eaters did not hold possession of the room for long.
It is not easy to-day to associate the great stone building in Piccadilly Circus with the revels of miners in an Australian township. But it was in Melbourne, during the gold fever, that the seed was sown which blossomed into the big stone house in the centre of London. Felix Spiers and Christopher Pond were both young Englishmen. Felix was born in one of the old houses on Tower Hill, which was then the office of the General Steam Navigation Company, whose agent his father then was. The family of the Spiers moved to Paris, and young Felix was put into a banking house, where he remained until he was eighteen. Then he went to Melbourne, with the gold fever upon him, to make his fortune. In Melbourne, he met young Christopher Pond, also an Englishman, and also determined to make his pile. Spiers had become, for the time being, a wine merchant, an experience which later was to serve him to excellent purpose at the Criterion, for he laid down some admirable wine there, amongst it some hock which as long as it lasted I used to drink in preference to any other wine on the Criterion list. The miners were spending money in Melbourne as though it were water, and the Theatre Royal, Melbourne, received much of the golden shower. It occurred to young Spiers and young Pond that it would be a profitable undertaking to start a restaurant next door to a theatre, and they established, in Collins Street, the Café de Paris. Their next enterprise was to become caterers for the Melbourne and Ballarat Railway. They were full of ideas in those days, and one of these was to bring out to Australia a team of English cricketers and to tour them as a speculation. This was the thought of which the test matches were born. Spiers and Pond came to England intending to persuade Charles Dickens to make a great reading tour in Australia, and then it was that they espied the nakedness of the land in regard to railway catering. Dickens came to their aid with his attack on Mugby Junction, and he wrote an article in _All the World_ entitled "The Genii of the Cave," in which he described the then novelty of the "Silver Grill" under the arch at Ludgate Circus, which Spiers and Pond established. The Criterion was the pet child of the two great caterers. It rose on historic ground, for it occupied the site of the old "White Bear," which had been a celebrated coaching-house, one of those fine old inns of many galleries. The theatre was opened four months later than the restaurant; but it was not until 1879 that Sir Charles Wyndham, with whom so many of its successes are associated, took over sole management, though he had been a partner for the previous three years with Mr Alexander Henderson in its control.
XV
SOME CHOP-HOUSES
Many of the City chop-houses nestle together in the alleys and courts between Cornhill and Lombard Street. There, on either side of one of the narrow little passages, you will find Simpson's Chop-houses, with pleasant grey-green walls to their rooms and a window in which simple food, cooked and uncooked, is shown as bait to draw in the hungry passer-by; and there in Castle Court is the George and Vulture, which is also Thomas' Chop-rooms, which dates back to 1660, is proud of its Dickens' traditions, and is more ambitious in its bill of fare than most of the chop-houses.
There also, in Chance Alley, is Baker's Chop-house, which, that there may be no mistake as to its pretensions, describes itself on a board at the Lombard Street entrance to the alley as a tavern, and a chop-house, a coffee-house, and soup-rooms. It is a dignified little house, which bears its years well--it was founded in the seventeenth century--and which, with its two bow-windows with small panes of glass and its glass door in between, commands confidence even before one has crossed the threshold. Inside one of the windows are wire screens to give privacy to the company in the house, but the other window begs all men to look in and see the fish and the joints, the vegetables, the salad stuff, and, perhaps, a loin of cold beef, samples of what the larder contains. Beyond this rampart of good things edible you may see dames and damsels attired in black, busy in a glassed-in little room drawing beer, taking payment from satisfied customers for what they have eaten, and a grave gentleman, with white hair and beard, making entries in a large ledger; for the little portioned-off space you are looking into serves as bar and counting-house, some old punch-bowls on a shelf giving it its right old-world note.