corrective to the exceeding richness of the liquid, and when the
chairman and myself had eaten it with great relish I suggested to him
that part of the pleasure it had given us was the fact that neither
of us ought to have touched it at all, for the chairman had only just
recovered from a second bout of influenza, and my tame doctor would
have had a fit if he had known that I made a clean plate of such a rich
delicacy. The dinner throughout was admirable, and I asked my host who
was the _chef de cuisine_, and what was his history. The chef to the
House, he told me, is M. Roux, who looks to M. Escoffier as the great
master under whom he learned his art.
My host had told me to ask him any questions I liked concerning the
catering and the management of the kitchens and dining-rooms, and I
learned that the committee consists of sixteen members drawn from
every party in the House, and that it meets once a week; that the
allowance made by the House for the upkeep of its dining-rooms is £2600
a year, and that the turn-over is usually about £17,000 a year, but
that in 1912, being an exceptionally busy one, it rose to £25,000. I
also learned that there is always first-class specialist advice ready
to be called in, for no matter what subject is under discussion--be
it tablecloths, or cutlery or glass--there is sure to be amongst the
members of the House someone who is the highest authority on the
subject, and who willingly comes to the assistance of the Kitchen
Committee.
When I began to ask questions about the regular House dinner and
about that celebrated shilling dinner of which the outside public
hear so much, the Chairman sent for the manager, a young man who has
stepped from the post of assistant into the full-blown dignity of the
managerial frock-coat, and asked him to show me the menus of the day
and the wine list. There was a tone of pride in the manager's voice
when he said that 300 dinners had been served that evening in the
upstairs rooms, and he also told me the number of the guests in the
downstairs rooms--186, I think he said, in all. The shilling dinner,
of which about 150 are served each night, consists of fish or entrée,
or joints, two vegetables, bread or plain toast, a pat of butter
and Cheddar or Cheshire cheese. There is also a vegetarian dinner
ready at a quarter of an hour's notice, from six till nine o'clock,
which on that particular night consisted of _crème d'asperges, œufs
a la tripe, carottes à la crème,_ or _haricots verts au beurre_ or
_macaroni Milanaise,_ and cheese and butter. And there is a half-crown
dinner of the day of four courses, vegetables and cheese and butter.
Sixpence table money is charged for guests. This is the menu of the
five-shilling dinner of that day, and it reads to me a very good one:
Melon Glacé.
Consommé Froide or Crème d'Asperges.
Filets de Sole Dejazet.
Quartier d'Agneau à la Broche.
Pommes Fondantes.
Petits Pois au Beurre.
Cailles de Vigne Casserole.
Salade Romaine.
Bombe Fraisalia.
Croustades Maltaises.
Dessert.
There is also a grill menu and a long list of cold joints. To make the
list of menus complete, the manager showed me that of the two-shilling
dinner, which is ready at six o'clock, served in the dining-room of the
Press Gallery. Later on in the evening I was shown the separate kitchen
which serves the dining-room of the Gallery and saw that it was as well
organised as is everything else in the kitchen department of the House.
Looking through the wine list, I noticed that some of the sherries have
come from Windsor Castle, Marlborough House and Sandringham; the most
expensive of these being that--bottled 1875--from Windsor, for which
12s. 6d. a bottle is charged. But a glass of Amontillado costs no more
than 4d. Sixpence a glass is the lowest price charged for any port, and
the most expensive on the list is Cockburn's 1847, bottled 1850, which
is a guinea a bottle. There are some 1898 champagnes still on the list,
and some 1900. The wines of 1904 make the longest list, Veuve Clicquot
heading the roll at 13s. 6d. a bottle; Heidsieck Dry Monopole, Pommery
and Greno, Pol Roger, Moët and Chandon, Krug and Monte Bello varying in
price from 13s. 6d. to 10s. a bottle. The brand Deutz and Gelderman is
represented by pints at 6s. 6d., and the magnums of Monte Bello cost
18s. 6d.
Our dinner finished and all the questions that I could think of asked
and answered, my host took me out on to the terrace to drink our
coffee. All the light of the sunset had died out, and the long lines
of lamps on the Embankment across the river were shining brilliantly.
Across Westminster Bridge the tramcars, all blazing with light, were
passing and repassing each other, an effect I commend to Mr Arthur
Collins for use in some future Drury Lane production. The terrace
itself is dimly lighted by gas lamps, but this half light, pleasant and
in keeping with the solemn mystery of the great, dark river that flows
past, seems to frame fittingly the brilliance of the wonderful night
scene. Little groups of ladies were about the tables in that centre
space where members may dispense hospitality. The talk of the men who
came to speak to my host was all of what was in progress in the chamber
of debate upstairs, of the pity of it that no agreement had been come
to and that a division was necessary, of the admirable speech that Mr
Balfour had made in the afternoon, and such-like matters.
I felt that I had kept my host too long from his place and wished to
bid him good-night there and then, but he said that though he had
failed to obtain a ticket for me in the afternoon to hear the debate,
he would try again; so upstairs we went, and he left me in charge, in
the Members' Lobby, of a benign old gentleman with a pointed white
beard and wearing knee-breeches, while he went inside to see what he
could do. He returned waving a card, the white-bearded gentleman looked
even more benign, and took my hat and coat, and I was sent with the
card up a little flight of stairs. In perfect comfort I listened to
Mr Bonar Law making his points on the Unionist side, rapping with his
finger-nails on the big box on the table as he did so, and then heard
Sir Edward Grey, tucking his right hand under his frock-coat as though
that garment pinched him below the arm, reply for the Government;
watched the members stream out for the division, heard the numbers read
out, and saw the end of an historic debate.
A most pleasant and interesting evening.
XIX
A REGIMENTAL DINNER
AT THE TROCADERO
The Commissionaire at the centre entrance to the Trocadero greets me
with "Regimental dinner, sir? First floor, leave your coat and hat to
the right." A very intelligent man this commissionaire, an old soldier
who knows another old soldier when he sees him. I leave my coat and
hat as directed, ascend in the lift, and am disgorged into a corridor,
the walls of which are covered with an inlay of gold Venetian glass
tesseræ, pay the very small sum that subscribers to the Regimental
Dinner Club are mulcted, and go into a screened-off space of the large
banqueting-room in which the feast is to be held. Here two score
gentlemen, old and young, most of them with a bar of miniature medals
on the lapels of their evening coats, are talking, laughing, moving to
and fro, and shaking hands with great heartiness. It is by no means a
_mauvais quart d'heure_ these minutes of assembling before a regimental
dinner, for old friends who see each other only once a year meet
then, and the inquiries as to each other's health and prosperity and
happiness are no formal compliments, but a real desire to know how the
world wags with old comrades in arms.
The screens that divide the room in two are withdrawn and the company
take their places at the table in no set order, though the veterans
all try to sit next to some old friend of their soldiering days and
the subalterns cling together in little swarms at the far ends of the
table. The room in which we are dining, the Alexandra, is panelled to
a man's height with dark marbles, with central squares of light marble,
and there are at one end pillars of black wood fluted with gold.
It is a room with a dignity of its own. Through the lace-curtained
windows can be seen the electric advertisements on the other side
of Shaftesbury Avenue, advertisements which set forth in a blaze of
alternating red and green and white light the virtues of somebody's
whisky and somebody else's cigarettes, and through the open windows
come the roar of the traffic and the hoots of the motor horns. We
are dining on the very hub of London. The table for the dinner is of
horseshoe shape, with another length of table running up the centre.
There are candles with pink shades, and pink flowers in vases and
strewn on the table in garlands. The Major-General, who is the full
Colonel of the regiment, who served in it for many long years, and
was at one time the Adjutant of one of the battalions, sits at the
top of the bend of the horseshoe, and chance, not precedence, has put
me on one side of him. The two Brigadier-Generals who are amongst
the diners, each of whom wears, as our chairman does, his C.B. cross
at one end of his long bars of miniature medals and decorations, are
somewhere farther down the curve of the horseshoe, and brevet colonels
and subalterns and captains and lieutenant-colonels and majors all sit
where fancy leads them, some of the seniors to talk to the son of an
old friend, a boy who has just joined, some to talk polo, or fishing,
or gardening, or shooting, or the iniquities of the Land Tax with
friends of like tastes.
A Regimental Dinner ought to be described by some lady novelist who
has never been to one and is in no way hampered by any unromantic
facts. Grizzled men bearing the scars of old wounds should talk to
each other of midnight marches and fierce charges and hand-to-hand
combats, and tell the tale over their port of how Billy Bright Eyes,
the curly-headed drummer of Company B, won the Victoria Cross on some
day of awful slaughter. Unfortunately for picturesqueness' sake the
grizzled men talk about nothing of the kind. The man who could narrate
as moving stories as ever Othello dropped into Desdemona's willing ear
tells his next-door neighbour of the fishing in Norway he has taken
this year and of the advantages of travelling to it from the port in a
motor car instead of going on the old country conveyances. The man who
really earned a V.C. in South Africa, though there were no lookers-on
to write glowing accounts to headquarters, is discussing with another
man of many battles the advantages of Waterloo over other late-bearing
strawberry plants, and laments that there are no pears this year on
any of his trees. Tales of a big night at mess in "The Shiny," when
a Highland regiment, passing through, was entertained at a dinner
which only ended when the pipes were playing "Hey Johnnie Cope" in the
grey before sunrise, may stray casually into the conversation, and a
regretful word or two may be said that the regimental polo fund in
India had not enough ready money to buy a certain pony which would just
have won a match for the regiment in an important tournament. Cricket,
polo, grouse moors, the coming hunting season, the present play at the
Gaiety, the merits of the various revues are the things talked about,
and "shop" is almost as rigidly excluded from the conversation as
though the dinner was taking place in the regimental mess.
The length of a regimental dinner is as difficult to curtail as is that
of a City feast or a Masonic banquet, for any manager of a restaurant
or any _maître d'hôtel_ considers it to be an "important" meal, and
believes that the guests will not think they have dined satisfactorily
unless they have eaten prodigiously. But the three officers who manage
our Regimental Dinner Club are happily men of the world as well as old
soldiers, and they insist that the dinner shall be ordered to please
the tastes of those who dine, and not of those who serve the dinner.
This is the menu of the Trocadero dinner. The little circle of beef
offered to each man is the only heavy dish in it, and the chicken with
its tempting stuffing is the only rich dish that it contains:
Melon Glacé.
Hors d'œuvre de Choix.
Tortue Claire.
Truite de Rivière au bleu, Beurre fondu.
Pommes nature.
Poularde du Mans Favorite.
Médaillon de Bœuf Rossini.
Spoom au Kummel.
Caille de Vigne sur Croustade.
Salade Romaine.
Asperges nouvelles, Sauce Maltaise.
Fraises à la Zouave.
Corbeille de Friandises.
Pailles au Parmesan.
Dessert.
Café.
VINS.
Punch.
Johannisberger, 1900.
Chas. Heidsieck, 1904.
Moët et Chandon, 1904.
Château Branaire Ducru, 1900.
Dow's 1890 Port.
Courvoisier's 1831 Brandy.
The menu, according to custom immemorial, is decorated with the crests
of the regiment, with the date of its raising, 1572, and with a little
picture of the uniform of the regiment in the year 1684, when the full
privates wore black boy-scout hats, bands such as barristers still
wear, and coats with very long skirts.
Twenty years ago no regimental dinner could have been held without
interminable speeches, which were sometimes listened to with scant
patience by the subalterns, who wanted to get to the Empire or the
Alhambra before the performance ended. Nowadays there are no speeches,
at all events at our dinner, and the only toast proposed is that of
"The King." After this loyal toast has been drunk and the cigars
lighted, all formality vanishes, every man moves from his place and
goes to talk to those of his old friends who have been out of earshot
during dinner; the subalterns make inquiries as to whether the Cabaret
Club or the Four Hundred Club is the most amusing place in which to
keep awake after all the restaurants are shut, and as eleven o'clock
comes some of the guests go off to the Service clubs, some have to
catch last trains, and the commissionaire downstairs has a busy time
whistling for taxis.
There is not much ancient history to delve into with regard to the
Trocadero Restaurant. Part of it stands on the ground which, when Great
Windmill Street was a cul-de-sac, before Shaftesbury Avenue was made,
was occupied by the Argyle Dancing Rooms, familiarly known as "The
Duke's." "The Duke's" played its part in the night life of London in
the sixties and seventies, when Kate Hamilton's and the other night
houses still existed in the Haymarket, and though there were occasional
rows there, some of the officers of one of the Household cavalry
regiments being on one occasion marched off to the police station,
it was on the whole a well-conducted establishment, with an admirable
orchestra to play dance music. But the spasm of morality which passed
over London towards the end of the last century swept the Argyle Rooms
out of existence, and their proprietor, Mr "Bob" Bignell, converted
the vacant rooms into the Trocadero Music Hall. Mr "Sam" Adams was the
next proprietor of the music-hall, and then Mr Joseph Lyons, who was
not yet a knight, saw the possibilities of the site for a restaurant,
and gave a very large price for the old hall. The Trocadero Restaurant,
when it first was built, was only half as large as it is now, for that
red-brick portion of it which faces Shaftesbury Avenue was a nest of
flats and chambers, and the conversion of this building when Lyons &
Company bought it, into restaurant premises, was an architectural feat.
Where the old building ends and the additions begin can be clearly seen
by the difference in the architecture.
It is a curious fact that Sir Joseph Lyons, the head and mainspring
of the great organisation which controls the scores of restaurants
and hundreds of tea-shops belonging to Lyons & Company, wished in his
youthful days to be an artist, and that his amusement now, whenever he
has any leisure, which he rarely has, is to paint sunsets.
XX
"JOLLY GOOD"
A HALF-GUINEA DINNER AT THE TROCADERO
No account of the Trocadero would be complete without an allusion to
the _table d'hôte_ dinners which are served in the great hall of the
restaurant, and I do not think that I can do better than reprint the
account of a half-guinea dinner I gave there some ten years ago to a
small Harrow boy. The Mr Lyons of the article is now Sir Joseph, and
I fancy that the Messrs Salmon, who are now County Councillors and
members of many other important bodies, are too busy to show even
such an important person as a young Harrovian all the glories of the
restaurant. But in all essentials the half-guinea dinner of to-day at
the Trocadero is much as it was ten years ago. It was excellent then
and is excellent now.
* * * * *
I dined one day early last week at the Trocadero, a little specially
ordered _tête-à-tête_ dinner over which the chef had taken much
trouble--his _Suprêmes de sole Trocadéro_ and _Poulet de printemps
Rodisi_ are well worth remembering--and while I drank the Moët '84,
cuvée 1714, and luxuriated in some brandy dating back to 1815, the
solution of a problem that had puzzled me mildly came to me.
An old friend was sending his son, a boy at Harrow, up to London to
see a dentist before going back to school, and asked me if I would
mind giving him something to eat, and taking him to a performance
of some kind. I said "Yes," of course; but I felt it was something
of an undertaking. When I was at Harrow my ideas of luxury consisted
of ices at Fuller's and sausages and mashed potatoes carried home in
a paper bag. I had no idea as to what Jones minor's tastes might be;
but if he was anything like what I was then he would prefer plenty of
good food, combined with music and gorgeousness and excitement, to
the most delicate _mousse_ ever made, eaten in philosophic calm. The
Trocadero was the place; if he was not impressed by the dinner, by the
magnificence of the rooms, by the beautiful staircase, by the music,
then I did not know my Harrow boy.
Jones minor arrived at my club at five minutes to the half-past seven,
and I saw at once that he was not a young gentleman to be easily
impressed. He had on a faultless black short jacket and trousers, a
white waistcoat, and a tuberose in his buttonhole. I asked him if he
knew the Trocadero, and he said that he had not dined there; but plenty
of boys in his house had, and had said that it was jolly good.
When we came to the entrance of the Trocadero, an entrance that always
impresses me by its palatial splendour, I pointed out to him the veined
marble of the walls and the magnificent frieze in which Messrs Moira
and Jenkins, two of the cleverest of our young artists, have struck out
a new line of decoration; and when I had paused a while to let him take
it in I asked him what he thought of it, and he said he thought it was
jolly good.
Mr Alfred Salmon, in chief command, and the good-looking _maître
d'hôtel_, both saw us to our table, and a plump waiter whom I remember
of old at the Savoy was there with the various menu cards in his hand.
The table had been heaped with roses in our honour, and I felt that all
this attention must impress Jones minor; but he unfolded his napkin
with the calm of unconcern, and I regretted that I had not arranged to
have the band play "See the Conquering Hero Comes" and have a triumphal
arch erected in his honour.
I had intended to give him the five-shilling _table d'hôte_ meal;
but in face of this calm superiority I abandoned that, skipped the
seven-and-six _table d'hôte_ as well, and ordered the half-guinea one.
I had thought that three-and-sixpennyworth of wine should be ample for
a growing boy, but having rushed into reckless extravagance over the
food I thought I would let him try seven-and-sixpenny worth of wine. I
personally ordered a pint of 277, which is an excellent wine. I told
Jones minor that the doctor told me not to mix my wines, and he said
something about having to be careful when one got old that I did not
think sounded at all nice.
While we paused, waiting for the _hors d'œuvre_, I drew his attention
to all the gorgeousness of the grand restaurant, the cream and gold,
the hand-painted ceiling-panels, on which the cupids sport, the
brocades and silks of the wall-panels, the broad band of gold of the
gallery running round the room, the crimson and gold draperies, the
glimpse of the blue and white and gold of the _salon_ seen through the
dark framing of the _portières_; I bade him note the morocco leather
chairs with gold initials on the back, and the same initials on the
collars of the servants. It is a blaze of gorgeousness that recalls
to me some dream of the Arabian Nights; but Jones minor said somewhat
coldly that he thought it jolly good.
We drank our _potage vert-pré_ out of silver plates, but this had no
more effect on Jones minor than if they had been earthenware. I drew
his attention to the excellent band up above, in their gilded cage. I
pointed out to him amidst the crowd of diners two ex-Lord Mayors, an
A.D.C. to Royalty, the most popular low comedian of the day, a member
of the last Cabinet, our foremost dramatic critic and his wife, and one
of our leading lawyers. Jones minor had no objection to their presence,
but nothing more. The only interest he showed was in a table at which
an Irish M.P. was entertaining his family, among them two Eton boys,
and towards them his attitude was haughty but hostile.
So I tried to thaw him while we ate our whitebait, which was capitally
cooked, by telling him tales of the criminal existence I led when I was
a boy at Harrow. I told him how I put my foot in the door of Mr Bull's
classroom when it was being closed at early morning school time. I told
him how I took up alternate halves of one exercise of rule of three
through one whole term to "Old Teek." I told him how I and another bad
boy lay for two hours in a bed of nettles on Kingsbury race-course,
because we thought a man watching the races with his back to us was Mr
Middlemist. And I asked him if Harrow was likely to be badly beaten by
Eton in the coming match at Lord's.
This for a moment thawed Jones minor into humanity. Harrow, he said,
was going to jolly well lick Eton in one innings, and before the boy
froze up again I learned that the Headmaster's had beaten some other
house in the final of the Torpid football matches, and several other
items of interesting news.
The _filets mignons_, from his face, Jones minor seemed to like; but
he restrained all his emotions with Spartan severity. He did not
contradict me when I said that the _petites bouchées à la St-Hubert_
were good; but he ate three _sorbets_, and looked as if he could tackle
three more, which showed me that the real spirit of the Harrow boy was
there somewhere under the glacial surface, if I could only get at it.
Mr Lyons, piercing of eye, his head-covering worn a little through by
the worries of the magnitude of his many undertakings, with little
side-whiskers and a little moustache, passed by, and I introduced the
boy to him, and afterwards explained the number of strings pulled by
this Napoleon of supply, and at the mention of a "grub shop in every
other street" Jones minor's eyes brightened.
When Jones minor had made a clean sweep of the plate of _petits fours_,
and had drained the last drops of his glass of Chartreuse, I thought I
might venture to ask him how he liked his dinner, as a whole. This was
what he had conscientiously eaten through:
Hors d'œuvre variés.
Consommé Monte Carlo. Potage vert-pré.
Petites soles à la Florentine. Blanchailles au citron.
Filets mignons à la Rachel.
Petites bouchées à la St-Hubert.
Sorbet.
Poularde de Surrey à la broche.
Salade saison.
Asperges nouvelles. Sauce mousseux.
Charlotte russe.
Soufflé glacé Pompadour.
Petits fours. Dessert.
He had drunk a glass of Amontillado, a glass of '89 Liebfraumilch,
two glasses of Deutz and Gelderman, a glass of dessert claret, and a
glass of liqueur, and when pressed for a critical opinion, said that he
thought that it was jolly good.
Impressed into using a new adjective Jones minor should be somehow. So,
with Mr Isidore Salmon as escort, I took him over the big house from
top to bottom. He shook the chef's hand with the serenity of a prince
in the kitchen at the top of the house, and showed some interest in the
wonderful roasting arrangements worked by electricity and the clever
method of registering orders. He gazed at the mighty stores of meat and
vegetables, peeped into the cosy private dining-rooms, had the beauties
of the noble Empire ballroom explained to him, and finally, in the
grill-room, amid the surroundings of Cippolini marble and old copper,
the excellent string band played a gavotte, at my request, as being
likely to take his fancy.
Then I asked Jones minor what he thought of it all, and he said that he
thought it jolly good.