In another chapter of this book the change that has come over London feeding has already been indicated. The times when respectability edicted that one should eat only within the family circle, when all that could be obtained abroad was a stodgy meal of bread and cheese at a coffee-house, or the lightest refreshment at Vauxhall or Cremorne, are long gone by; to-day, almost as many meals are consumed at restaurants as under homely roofs. It was a long battle the restaurants waged under the early banners of Hatchett’s or the CafÉ Royal and, strange to say, the Grand Hotel. Yes, once upon a time the Grand Hotel, that ancestor, was the latest thing; in the eighties it was ‘the thing’ to lunch or stay at the Grand Hotel. But, in those days, ‘the thing’ was rather a scandalous thing, and if one lunched or dined away from home one felt dissipated; one had to choose one’s company when taking a meal thus, for the worst was easily thought of one in 1880, while to-day, the best is hoped for. (There is, perhaps, no great difference between the two attitudes.) In those days the home was a British institution; it figured in the solemn list which numbered suet pudding, the royal family, bustles, Tennyson, the evangelical attitude, and chenille decoration of mantelpieces. The home had its rights; indeed, it had all rights; it was the place where you ought to want to be, and far from which you would naturally feel remorse; it was the thing you had to ‘keep together,’ the thing you had to ‘make,’ to ‘save’; your self-abnegation should have told you that you had no rights except to add the pillar of your person to those of the porch. It has gone, this Victorian rectitude; it has gone the way of Dundreary whiskers and of weepers round the hat; I suspect that the restaurant habit, as it is called, has turned some of the sods for its grave. There is something relaxing in a restaurant, at least to a people such as ours, afflicted with a considerable sense of private licence and of public dignity. Restaurant dining SOHO MARKET From this sense of sin arose in the beginning the popularity of the Soho restaurants. I do not know when they began to be popular. Some, such as the Restaurant d’Italie, the Monico, the Villa Villa, are old stagers, but when I first came to town their customers were mostly men; if couples came they generally included a man who did not care to take his womenkind to such places, but did not mind taking other people’s womenkind. (Thus it worked out just the same in the end.) The growth of London, which compelled men to live farther and farther out, favoured the restaurants, for distant dormitories drive men to proximate refectories. The Soho restaurant grew in numbers, together with the Cabins, the Lyons’s, the J.P.’s, and others, but at the same time, because they provided pleasant fare at low prices, they gained advertisement from the men who first frequented In true cooking one does not avoid vice. One courts vice. One says: ‘Eating is a sensuality, and we shall satisfy our senses as much as we can. We shall sing hymns to it; people have sung hymns to drinking, why not to eating? We are not ashamed of “feasting” our eyes and our ears; why not our palates?’ Some people understand this. Mr Anatole France sums it up well when analysing a Castelnaudary stew:— ‘The Castelnaudary stew contains the preserved thighs of geese, whitened beans, bacon, and a little sausage. To be good it must have been cooked lengthily upon a gentle fire. Clemence’s stew has been cooking for twenty years. She puts into the stew sometimes goose or bacon, sometimes sausage or beans, but it is always the same stew. The foundation endures; this ancient and precious foundation gives the stew the quality that in the picture of old Venetian masters you find in the women’s amber flesh.’ If you are a proper person you will call this disgusting; you will feel that this is an indecent subject, and that an author who But, leaving aside Soho, which is, after all, only the culinary frontier, we find that the restaurant has spread over the whole of London, carrying everywhere its gospel of satisfaction. This gospel takes various forms, for restaurants fall into different classes according to their locality and their prices. There are the pompous, like the Carlton, the Savoy, the Popular CafÉ; there are the distinguished, such as Claridge’s, Jules’s, DieudonnÉ’s; there are the fanciful, such as Pagani, Verrey’s, old Gambrinus, Bellomo’s, Gustave, the Savoyard, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Greek; there is the slab-of-meat class, such as Gatti’s, Simpson’s, to say nothing of the Shepherd’s Bush Restaurant, and the Tulse Hill Hotel; above all there is the restaurant of the Joseph Lyons civilisation, the Strand Palace Hotel, the Regent Palace, the Strand Corner House. They all deserve their little word, and it is difficult to say of each of them just what should be said, because they have so much in common, yet are so far apart, like brothers and sisters. There is a flavour of Joseph Lyons at the Savoy, while Gatti has Reggiori for a little relative. Yet, when one comes to know them well, they are all so different. No one, for instance, could mistake the Carlton for the Savoy; both have a broad spaciousness born of their size, of the comparative expensiveness of their meats; THE SAVOY Others, too, Americans, who are happier in those big hotels than any of the English, because hotel-life is, in many of them, an acquired characteristic. They are interesting, those Savoy Americans, abundant women, exquisite girls made of beautifully tinted steel-plate, those men with the square shoulders, square chins, square heads, cubic cheeks; you know, without being told, that they are connected with the cinema trade, or that they are producing a play by Mr Montague Glass or Mr Bayard Veiller, or that they are selling many motor-cars, or something like that. (The American who comes to Europe for the purpose of exporting One thinks of that in the small restaurants that have survived, such as Verrey’s. To many people it seems a queer thing to lunch at Verrey’s; it seems rather out of date, and, indeed, when one approaches that frontage, painted a sort of faded 1850 blue and provided with coloured glass, one has a sense of antiquity. Inside antiquity is still more striking, for the big, square room under the skylight manages at the same time to be drab in colour and Moorish Gothic in architecture. It still has the many mirrors of the ’fifties, an air of being comfortably off enough to afford to be dowdy. Rakish and dowdy! Can anything better translate the amusements of two generations ago? To-day, Verrey’s gives you a fair lunch, and at its cafÉ tables, which are somehow more substantial than the cafÉ tables of Paris, you understand what England thought the Continent must be like in the days of the Grand Tour. There are other places, fanciful as Verrey’s. There is Bellomo’s, in Jermyn Street, a modest, pleasant little place, a long, narrow back room filled with agreeable young couples. Bellomo’s is rather like a young-old man, with its panelled wainscoting, its wallpaper of faded gold, and its moulded, early Victorian frieze. There is something solid about its dumb waiters; Bellomo’s is somehow benevolent. But then Verrey’s and Bellomo’s are within limited flights of fancy. The curious gastronome will, in London, easily find queerer places and foods. At Pagani’s he can come to understand that risotto may well be eaten in Valhalla; at Gambrinus’s, the Regent But the truly curious go not to foreigners like Pagani or Gambrinus, or even to Gustave, where the foods are truly French, or to the Savoyard, where they are French and eatable under the eye of strange pictures; the truly curious go not to the foreigner, but to the professional foreigner, to restaurants such as the Greek, the Chinese, or the Japanese. Of these the Chinese is the most attractive. I mean the Cathay, next door to the Monico, not the Chinese restaurants in Limehouse, where nothing is eatable, and nothing is tragic, and nothing is coloured, let Mr Thomas Burke say what he likes. A lunch at the Chinese restaurant is really an adventure, for nearly all the dishes are made of the same things, and yet they all taste different. There is an admirable dish, hang-yang-kai-ting, made of fried chicken with almonds and bamboo shoots. That is a simple one, and the curious will find more profit in a dish the name of which I have forgotten, which contains fried sliced pork, celery, beans, sprouts, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and green chutney. Eat that, and it is a very large, overflowing, savoury portion; flavour it well with chop-suey (which you can call liquid salt if you are a foreign devil). Eat it immediately after chicken liver soup, and if you do not forget before swallowing the bamboo shoots to chew, and chew, and chew, then a true mellowness will be known to you. Also, do not forget the great bowl of boiled rice, pure, white rice, perfectly dried, not sticky rice À la A.B.C., but rice where every grain remembers that it has a personality. Don’t ask for chopsticks: the best people in China do not use chopsticks; they use forks. (There used to be a Chinese restaurant where they provided chopsticks for the English; it was great fun watching them pour their food down their sleeves with that conscious air of duty that But, in a way, all those places, the very rich and the very odd, are running on their own ticket, and do not express the times in which we live. Our modern times are the Strand Corner House. I should not wonder if many of my readers had never been into the Strand Corner House; that is, if they are incurious of life. If they repent their acceptance of things as they are, they will find an unexpectedly large building decorated with heavily flowered stucco mouldings, with plate-glass, with stained glass, with panels of crimson satin. They will find light, co-operative luxury; superposed tiers, bearing crowds of people lunching on the top of one another’s heads, and at the bottom of a deep well, a band that can be heard above the clatter of twelve hundred pairs of jaws. A thousand people at a time really eat all together at the Strand Corner House, and, in a way, no wonder. The place is quite clean, not offensive in its appurtenances, and can supply three courses for less than two shillings; the music is the ordinary dance or sentimental music, the sort that makes you feel friendly or affectionate as required. The public of the Strand Corner House is, therefore, the world. Its variety is much greater than that of any other place. One might think that this public would consist exclusively of flappers and their escorts, and, indeed, the flapper is prevalent, though she comes in threes and fours quite as much as more ostentatiously with a ‘boy.’ Also the suburbs, middle-aged couples, when the wife has been shopping in St Paul’s Churchyard and has strayed down the Strand; unexpectedly you see people with an air of modish vanity, dashing people who smoke cigarettes and drink claret, damning both the expense and the consequences. Though very few of the frequenters could be mistaken for members of the classes, none are members of the masses; they seem to be in a state of social suspension; they are, especially the girls, of a rather crystalline type. I mean that you realise their good looks at once instead These great crowds of young people with a little money in their pocket and much zest in their hearts tend to fall into uniform types. The men nearly all buy their collars at the Regent Street branches of city hosiers; the girls seem to skim the lighter froth of the big West End stores, except that Marshall’s knows them not. This produces a uniform quality: they have to overtake the fashions, and so become a little outrÉes. Women, more readily than men, respond to the stratifications of restaurants, because they are more adaptable. Their very clothes show it; women are like cats, they have no bones, and easily suit themselves to bell-mouthed skirt or hobble. The female form is infinitely squashable and extensible; any fashion can transform it, and if a woman has the wit to shun the becoming, she can always be in the fashion if she dares. If she fails, it is because she does not dare to underline her deficiency. If I were a woman and extraordinarily tall, I should dress myself in vertical stripes; if I were very short and very stout, I should insert the hoops of barrels under my skirt; I should be hideous, but I should be It, for the essence of true fashion is extremism. I said fashion, not elegance; that is quite another story, but then, to be elegant you must be born as the greyhound, and if you strive to elegance you are more likely to resemble the mouse. Fashion is much easier. SHOPPING Not only in her clothes, but in herself, does the metropolitan girl define her city. She is always the creature of the day, who heavily overlays the creature of all time. In soups and stews she has little part, for a woman is a poor partner at the table. She eats and drinks, as a rule, without much science or much intentness; she eats too little, she bolts; she does not realise that she is doing something important and artistic. Oh, it is not that she |