I was sending him to a restaurant into which I had never myself been,
and concerning which I knew nothing, except that I always look into its
windows and at its bill of fare whenever I pass down Chandos Street;
and, therefore, in order that I might be able to give the old man some
detailed information from my own experience, I went next day to Chandos
Street to lunch.
Before I set down what my experiences were, I wish to express my
personal admiration for the single-mindedness of Mr Miles and his
wife in doing the work they have set themselves to do. That Eustace
Miles, half trained, went into a tennis court to defend his title of
amateur world champion against a young American gentleman trained to
the second, and that he made a fine fight for the championship with
the odds desperately against him, shows that a diet of non-flesh food
doesn't kill pluck or stamina. And before the authorities asked Mrs
Miles not to send the E.M. soup barrow down to the Embankment on winter
nights, as they wished to clear that thoroughfare of derelicts, she
and her helpers had done much to feed the hungry and to reclaim some
of those who were not irreclaimable, which shows that a kind heart
thrives on Emprote and Protonnic and Compacto, and the other meatless
foods with strange names. Lastly, that the Eustace Miles Restaurant
celebrated last year the seventh anniversary of its opening, shows that
London wanted such a restaurant, and that it has kept its clientele.
The big windows of the Eustace Miles Restaurant are "dressed" as if
they were shop-windows. Sometimes they are full of tins and packets
of the non-flesh foods arranged in piles and pyramids; sometimes they
look like the windows of a book shop, piles of literature and charts
of the human frame being in evidence; and sometimes boxing-gloves
and foils and pictures of young men holding themselves upright and
sticking out chests as full as those of pouter-pigeons draw attention
to the fact that a physical school high up in the building is one of
the Eustace Miles activities. Sometimes the windows look like those
of a pastry-cook's shop, and sometimes they bristle with copies of
_Healthward Ho!_ the monthly magazine which Mr Miles edits. Always
outside the door in a glazed case is the bill of fare for the day
printed in red and green type, and I have often wondered what "Egg and
Mushroom Fillets and Duxelles Sauce with Asparagus and New Potatoes
(N.)," or "Pinekernel Quenelles and Onion Sauce with Spring Cabbage
and Potatoes (N., F.U.)," or "Hazel-nut Sausages and Gravy with
Cauliflower and Roast Potatoes (N., F.U.)," taste like, and what the
capital letters after each dish mean. Now, however, there was no reason
to linger and look at the card. I was about to plunge into the great
unknown, to sample the dishes with strange names, and to learn the
secret of N.N. and F.U.
A commissionaire, looking just like other commissionaires, though he,
like all the other employees of the restaurant, eats the food of the
restaurant, opened the door to me and gave me a card for my bill, and
my first impression was that I was in a Food and Cookery Exhibition,
for in front of me was a stall piled high with tins of Emprote and a
cash desk with a little model of the E.M. barrow by it, a stall for
pastry and biscuits, and a book-stall; but beyond this first line of
defence I saw little tables with white cloths on them, and many people
sitting at them, and I walked on looking for a vacant seat. I came to a
table with only one occupant, and sat down; a little waitress in a neat
brown dress put the red and green printed bill of fare into my hand,
and I found myself suddenly faced by a puzzle to which the purple ink
_carte du jour_ of a small provincial French restaurant is as ABC is to
a jig-saw puzzle. However, in larger print than anything else on the
card was the announcement that a half-crown _table d'hôte_ luncheon and
dinner was served, so I said to the waitress in an offhand manner, as
though I were an habitué: "I'll take the half-crown lunch, please." She
never budged. "Compacta _croûtes_ or roasted cashews?" she asked me,
and I gasped out, "Compacta," and wondered what on earth I was going to
eat.
Then, while the little waitress had gone to get me the first instalment
of the unknown, I looked down the menu and made up my mind which of the
two soups, the two entrées, the two sweets and two savouries I would
order when the waitress came back again, and then turned my attention
to the room and the people at the tables. There is a suggestion of a
gymnasium about the restaurant, for it is a high room with a broad
gallery running round it about half-way up its height, and it is
lighted by a great space of skylight. All the boarding, and there
is a good deal of it, is painted dark green, and on the walls is a
dark green and white paper. A tea-stall, green and white, and a long
buffet of green wood, with pots of flowers on it, are at one end of the
restaurant; the floor is covered with oilcloth, with strips of crimson
cocoa-nut matting laid over it, and there are flowers in vases on the
little white-clothed tables which occupy all the floor space below and
in the gallery. There is a sense of airiness and spotless cleanliness
about the place. Big notices draw attention to the Normal Physical
School and other of the Eustace Miles activities, and a request to
gentlemen not to smoke till after six P.M. was just above my head.
The people at the tables were just like the people one sees at any
other restaurant where the prices are not high--ladies who might be
stenographers, or country cousins up for a day's shopping, young
men who, I daresay, are bank clerks--a good, level, healthy-looking
gathering. A man with clear blue eyes and a close-clipped white
beard sat down in the seat opposite to mine, and ordered something
without looking at the menu; a youngster in golfing kit took the other
unoccupied place at the table, and a wrinkle came across his forehead
as he plunged mentally into the intricacies of the _à la carte_ sheet,
until the waitress helped him by pointing with her pencil to some dish
printed in red ink, and he joyfully assented to her suggestion. A young
man brought in a bull-dog on a leash, and the dog was petted on his
progress up the floor by all the little waitresses.
The waitress who had me in her charge returned with the Compacto
_croûtes_, two little angles of hot toast with something spread on
them, and she took my order for the next course, of lettuce and
sorrel _potage_, and for some ginger ale, which I ordered as having a
vague feeling that it would be in keeping with the meal. The Compacto
had a far-off taste of potted meat, and I had noticed that it was
labelled N., F.U., which a note at the top of the menu told me meant
nourishing and free from uric acid. The dishes marked N.N. are "Very
Nourishing." The lettuce and sorrel soup, when it came, was distinctly
to be commended, a trifle thin, perhaps, but having the taste of the
vegetables in it, and being excellently hot. This also, I was pleased
to see, was noted as N. and F.U.; and had I been subject to gout,
which--"touch wood," I am not, I should have been eating an admirable
non-gouty meal. Then came what on the menu was described as a main
dish. It was asparagus and lentil timbale, cucumber sauce, stuffed
vegetable marrow and new potatoes _sautés_. I rather hope that this
will not be the main dish that old "Rats" will stumble up against when
he takes his niece to dine at the Eustace Miles Restaurant, for the
timbale did not seem to me to have any strong taste of asparagus in
it--perhaps the lentils had killed it. The stuffed vegetable marrow was
rather a watery delicacy, but I ate up the _sautés_ potatoes, feeling
quite glad that I knew what their taste was going to be. The next dish,
however--honey shortbread and stewed apricots--I can unreservedly
praise; the shortbread was excellently light and the stewed apricots
were good things of their kind. I had told the waitress that as a
savoury I would have _matelote_ eggs on toast, but I cancelled that
order, for I look on savouries as superfluities, and ate some cheese as
a finish to my repast.
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.