at a time when object lessons in science were considered essential
for the improvement of youthful minds; and in the long gallery, which
is now a part of the restaurant, were working models of shaft wheels,
while down its centre ran, waist-high, a long tank with a suspension
bridge across it and a lighthouse in its midst. In this tank, working
models of steamboats with very long smoke stacks puffed up and down.
A gallery ran round this long hall and had pictures on its walls and
models on stands of the various forms of architectural pillars. The
Polytechnic, opened six years later, which this generation still
remembers in its Diving Bell and Pepper's Ghost days, was run on
similar lines. The gallery became subsequently a Marionette theatre, a
casino and the home of some negro minstrels, but it never settled down
successfully to any form of moneymaking until the young Gattis started
it on its career as a café restaurant. An habitué of the Gallery in
its scientific or in its casino days would only recognise the building
to-day by its arched ceiling and by the circular openings in the roof
for light and air.
Agostino and Stefano Gatti put marble-topped tables in the Gallery,
couches against the walls and chairs on the other side of the tables,
and in the basement they made billiard-rooms. Chops and steaks and
chip potatoes, the last a novelty to London, were the trump cards of
their catering. At first the magistrates, possibly suspecting that the
casino might be revived under another name, refused the Gallery a music
licence, but that was granted later on in its existence. The Adelaide
Gallery as a restaurant was a direct challenge to the old chop-houses.
It gave very much the same fare under more airy and more cheerful
conditions, and the Londoners took a wonderful fancy to the "chips."
My earliest memory of a visit to the Adelaide Gallery is a schoolboy
one, for I was taken there to sup after seeing Fechter play in _The
Duke's Motto_ at, I think, the Lyceum. I ate on that occasion chops and
tomato sauce, went on to pastry, and finished with a Welsh rarebit--a
schoolboy has no fear of indigestion. I came to know the restaurant
very well in the eighties, when I was quartered at Canterbury and at
Shorncliffe for a spell of home service. I got at that time as much fun
out of life in London as a Captain's pay and a small allowance would
permit. I had sufficient knowledge of matters gastronomic to know that
I received excellent value for my money at Gatti's, and the ladies to
whom I used to give dinners said that they liked Asti Spumante and
Sparkling Hock just as well as champagne--and perhaps they really did,
bless them.
Early in the eighties most of the improvements made to the Gallery had
been completed, and the restaurant ran right up to Adelaide Street and
down to the Strand. Whether the entrance and new rooms on the King
William Street side had then been made I forget, but if they had not
been they soon after came into existence. One special friend of mine in
those days was the big man in uniform who stood at the Strand entrance,
and whose constant companion was a large St Bernard dog. The big man
always had a cheerful turn of conversation, and if by any chance I
grew impatient because a lady whom I expected to dine did not appear,
he would console me by saying that "probably nothing worse than a cab
accident has happened." The St Bernard in its old age grew snappy, and
eventually, when it had come back twice from new homes which had been
provided for it, had to be destroyed. Both Messrs Agostino and Stefano
Gatti were still alive in those days, grave-faced, pleasant gentlemen,
who lunched together and dined together at a table not far from the
entrance to the kitchen, and who when their meals were finished, sat at
a semicircular desk and took the counters from the waiters as they had
done ever since the first days of the restaurant.
I was somewhat later to make their acquaintance, and this was how
it happened. Little "Willie" Goldberg, who was known to all the
English-speaking world as The Shifter, was a man of brilliant ideas,
which he rarely had the patience to carry into effect. I received
one morning from him a telegram asking me to meet him at ten minutes
past one at the Strand entrance of Gatti's, adding that it concerned
a matter of the highest importance, which would bring much profit to
both of us. I arrived at Gatti's in time, and was met at the door by
The Shifter, who told me that the Gattis wanted a military melodrama
for the Adelphi, that theatre being their property; that he had thought
of a splendid title for a soldier play; that he and I would write it
together; that the Gattis had asked him to lunch to talk the matter
over; and that he had suggested that I should come too. Then we hurried
into the restaurant. We lunched with Messrs Gatti, and when, after
lunch, they very gently said that they were ready to hear anything that
we might have to tell them, The Shifter disclosed the title, which
pleased them, and then sat back in his seat as though the matter was
settled. The Messrs Gatti asked for some slight outline of the play,
but The Shifter put it to them that an advance of authors' fees should
be the next step in the business. This, the Gattis said, was not the
way in which they transacted the business of their theatre, whereon The
Shifter closed the discussion by saying farewell. When we were outside
in the street again, I suggested that the next thing to do would be to
get out a scenario to submit to the Gattis; but The Shifter was in high
dudgeon; he wrinkled up his long nose in haughty scorn and then said:
"These Gattis don't understand our English ways of doing business"--and
that was the beginning and the end of our great military melodrama. But
I had made the acquaintance of the Gattis, and was always afterwards on
very pleasant terms with them.
It is not within the scope of this article to deal with the Gattis'
enterprises in theatres, but the tale of their purchase of the
Vaudeville Theatre should be told as an instance of their kindness
of heart. Amongst the many Gatti enterprises was the establishment
of a great electric-light-distributing business. This began with a
very small installation in the cellars of the Adelaide Gallery, and
increased and increased until it is now one of the greatest electric
light companies in London. At one time the electric light plant was
established in a building just behind the Vaudeville Theatre, and Mr
Tom Thorne, the actor, whose management had not prospered greatly,
told the Messrs Gatti that his ill-success of late was owing to the
noise the engines made behind the stage. Messrs Gatti, to obviate this
grievance, bought the theatre, or at least as much of it as is freehold.
There always has been a strong theatrical element amongst the clientele
of Gatti's, and the authors who wrote the Adelphi melodramas--Dion
Boucicault, Henry Pettitt, George R. Sims, Robert Buchanan and
others--used constantly to be amongst the people lunching and dining
in the Gallery. In their theatrical enterprises the Gattis never
forgot the Adelaide Gallery, and the one thing essential in an Adelphi
melodrama was that it should conclude in time to allow the audience
to sup at the restaurant. All the black-coated classes patronised the
Gallery, from the comfortable business man, who got as good a chop
there in the evening as he did in his City restaurant in the middle
of the day, to the little clerk who took the girl he was engaged to
there because she liked the music and the brightness of the place. The
country cousins all knew Gatti's, and knew that it was a place where
they would get a good meal at a reasonable price, and that no advantage
would be taken of their ignorance of London charges. Salvini, the great
actor, used to take his meals at Gatti's when he was in England, and
the great Lord Salisbury had a fondness for a chop and chips, and used
to gratify it by going to the Adelaide Gallery. An old Garibaldian, a
fine, white-haired old gentleman in a slouch hat and a long, threadbare
cloak, was the most remarkable of the clientele of Gatti's in the early
eighties; he was evidently very poor and one dish with him constituted
a meal, but because he had fought as a red-shirted hero, the waiters
at Gatti's treated him with more deference than they would show to any
prince, and took the copper he gave as a tip with as much gratitude as
they would have expressed for the gold of the millionaire.
The Gatti's of to-day has adapted itself to modern requirements,
but it caters for much the same class as of yore, and its food is
still excellent material, well cooked, though there is a great deal
more variety now than there was in the old chops and chips days. It
retains, however, all its old democratic ways. Its clients choose
their own tables and their own seats, hang up their own coats and then
catch the attention of the waiter who has charge of the table. The
restaurant--cream and gold, with French grey panels in its roof--has
now four entrances: the Adelaide Street one, two in King William
Street and one in the Strand. While the main restaurant remains an _à
la carte_ establishment with a plentiful choice of dishes, including
a list of grills, there is a _table d'hôte_ room at the King William
Street side, a handsome hall with a gilded roof and pink-shaded
electroliers, which throw their light up on to the ceiling. The latest
addition to the dining-rooms is a banqueting hall, reached by marble
stairs from King William Street. It is a handsome and well-proportioned
room, with a musicians' gallery at one side, and an ante-room half-way
up its stairs, and it holds one hundred and fifty feasters quite
comfortably.
At the same little table where their father and their uncle sat,
the two Messrs Gatti of to-day--John (ex-Mayor of Westminster) and
Rocco--sit, young copies of their predecessors, in that one of them
has kept a plentiful head of hair, whereas the other one has been less
conservative. They give the same attention to the business of the
restaurant that the original Gattis did, but the semicircular desk has
vanished and the work of taking the counters is now done by deputies on
either side of a great screen which stretches before the wide entrance
to the kitchen. Mr de Rossi, dapper and energetic, is the manager of
the restaurant, and it is always a comfort to me that when I lunch or
dine under the musicians' gallery the _maître d'hôtel_, whom I have
known for thirty years, comes and gives me fatherly advice as to the
choice of dishes for a meal.
The kitchen of the Adelaide Gallery is one of the few in London that
possess a large open fire for roasting, and its Old English cookery
is, therefore, always good. It caters, however, for all nationalities,
and as an indication of what its prices are, and of the variety of its
fare, I cannot do better than give you the list of entrées I find on
the _carte du jour_, which I took away the last time I dined at Gatti's:
_Carbonnade de bœuf à la Berlinoise_, 1s. 2d.; _lapin sauté Chasseur_,
1s. 4d.; _vol-au-vent de ris d'agneau Financière_, 1s. 6d.; _pieds
de porc grillés Sainte Menehould_, 1s. 2d.; _fegatino di pollo alla
Forestiera_, 1s. 4d.; _terrine de lièvre St Hubert_ (cold), 1s. 9d.;
_côte de veau en casserole aux cèpes_, 1s. 9d.; _tournedos Rouennaise_,
2s.; _chump chop d'agneau, purée Bruxelloise_, 1s. 6d.; _tête de veau
en tortue_, 1s. 6d.; _salmis de perdreaux au Chambertin_, 2s.; _langue
de bœuf braisée aux nouilles fraîches_, 1s. 6d.; _escalopes de veau
Viennoise_, 1s. 6d.; _mironton de bœuf au gratin_, 1s. 4d.; _côtelettes
d'agneau Provençale_, 2s.; _pigeon St Charles_, 2s. 6d.; _noisettes
de pré-salé Maréchal_, 1s. 9d.; _entrecôte Marchand de Vin_, 2s. 6d.;
_demi faisan en casserole_, 4s.
And here is the menu of the five-shilling dinner I ate one Friday in
October in the _table d'hôte_ room, in company with many people, who
were evidently going later to theatres:--
Hors d'œuvre à la Parisienne.
Consommé Julienne.
Crème d'Huîtres.
Turbotin d'Ostende Réjane.
Anguilles Frites. Sce. Tyrolienne.
Côtelettes de Volaille Pojarski.
Petit Pois au Sucre. Pommes Comtesse.
Faisan Ecossaise Rôti en Casserole.
Salade Sauté.
Glacé Mokatine.
Délicatesses.
Gatti's, like every other restaurant of standing, has its own special
dishes, and some of these were included in a lunch which I ate with
Messrs John and Rocco Gatti when they were good enough in a chat we had
to refresh my memory in regard to the early days of the restaurant:
Hors d'œuvre à la Parisienne.
Zéphire de Sole Adelaide.
Suprême de Volaille Royal.
Asperges vertes. Sce. Chantilly.
Perdreau Rôti à la Broche.
Cœur-de-Laitue à la Française.
Cerises Montmorency Sarah-Bernhardt.
Corbeille de Délices.
Café.
The _zéphire de sole Adelaide_ is an admirable _filet de sole_
and oysters therewith; the breast of the chicken was served with
an excellent white sauce; and the _entremet_ was worthy of the
distinguished tragedienne after whom it is named.
The wine list at Gatti's is a document to be carefully studied. The
Gattis of the previous generation laid down some very fine wines,
and clarets and Burgundies of the great years of the end of the last
century are to be found in the Adelaide cellars. The champagnes of
great years and of great houses are priced far lower than they are
to be found on the lists of fashionable restaurants, and there is
some old cognac in the cellars to which I take off my hat whenever I
am privileged to meet it. It was bought by the Gattis at the time of
the Franco-Prussian War, when stocks of old brandy were sold at low
prices. It is marked so as to show a profit on the purchase-money--not
at its worth--and I know of no better brandy at any London restaurant,
whatever price customers may choose to give.
XXXVI
THE COMPLEAT ANGLER
I deserted, shamelessly and openly deserted, but I had an excuse.
When we started, a boatload of men in a launch from above Boulter's
Lock on a still, hot summer Sunday afternoon, the sky was grey above
and the river and Cliveden Woods were all in pleasant shadow; but when
we were come to Odney Weir and Cookham Ferry the sun broke through the
clouds and sucked them up, and at Bourne End the river sparkled and the
sails of the sailing-boats tacking up the long stretch below Winter
Hill gleamed in the sunlight. It was as hot an afternoon as we ever get
in England, and as we steered into the eye of the sun the glare hurt my
eyes, and there was no dodging it. When we came to the Compleat Angler,
just below Marlow Bridge, and lay alongside its green lawn, with the
flower beds and rose-trees right at the garden edge, I looked at the
people sitting on the rustic chairs by the rustic tables in the shadow
of the line of trees that acts as a screen against the western sun, and
the villagers who loll the Sunday through on the railing of the bridge
and stare at the hotel, and I thought how pleasant it would be to sit
in the shade until dinner-time came, to eat that meal with the burble
of the water falling over the weir in my ears, and afterwards to go
back to town by a late train. So I deserted openly and shamelessly.
The Compleat Angler is a very old inn, so old that no one knows when
it was built. But it was very probably in existence when the bodies
of Warwick, the King-maker, and his brother Montacute were carried to
Bisham Abbey to be buried. An engraving of a hundred years ago shows
the old inn with a rope walk by its side, where the gardens of the
hotel now stretch on the bank of the swift stream below the weir. The
old wooden bridge which the present suspension bridge has replaced
started at the angle of land by the weir, an angle now covered by the
dining-room of the hotel, and it was under this bridge--not the present
one--that a legendary hero of gastronomy, the Marlow bargee, ate the
Puppy Pie.
In the pre-railway days the Compleat Angler looked for its patrons
amongst the fishermen and the simple folk who gained their living
on the river. The hotel to-day is one of the most comfortable
old-fashioned riverside inns between Oxford and London, an inn that
stoutly upholds its old English characteristics. The brown roofs of
the old building and its old brick walls are still there, and the
old fruit-trees of the orchard give shade on its lawn; but new wings
have been built on as the custom of the hotel has increased, and the
great stretch of delightful garden behind the hotel, from which there
is a glorious view of the Quarry Woods, must be a comparatively new
addition. Mr Kilby, the present landlord, his face tanned by the river
air and river sunshine, his hair and moustache almost white, has been
in possession of the house for twenty-two or twenty-three years; but
before this time it had been in the hands of one family from generation
to generation, right back into the misty past. Mr Kilby has kept the
hotel Old English in character in all essential particulars. There
is good black old oak panelling in the little hall, and Jacobean
furniture and an old grandfather clock, and on its walls, in glazed
cases, are monster perch and other giants of the Thames caught at
Marlow, and engravings of local celebrities and local magnates of past
days; while in the dining-room are caricatures by Gillray and other
wielders of the pencil in Georgian days. The gardens, kitchen garden
and flower garden and lawns, behind the house, are also delightfully
English, for the flowers that grow there are the Old English flowers,
roses and lilies, stocks and pinks, ladies'-slippers and cherry pie,
and a host of others, flowers that are old friends and which fill the
air with scent on a hot afternoon. There are roses everywhere around
the Compleat Angler. Those who land from their boats pass under a great
arch of roses, and in the garden the roses climb over many bowers--for
"pergola" is a word I hesitate to use in writing of this Old English
pleasance. Honeysuckles grow up the supports of the verandah that gives
shade to the windows of the dining-room, and there are bright flowers
in all the window-boxes. Above all, there is the charm of the river,
the indescribable freshness that always comes with tumbling water, the
delight of the long, trembling reflections thrown by the trees and the
spire of the church across the river, the grace of the white-clad girls
who punt upstream and of the swans that sail quite secure by the edge
of the weir, and the pleasant "lap, lap" of the water as the launches
cut through it. If I wished in one hour to give an American friend an
idea of the charm of the Thames I would take him to the chairs under
the great willow that stands by the weir in the grounds of the Compleat
Angler, and when he had sat in this shade for half-an-hour watching the
calmness of the river and the eddies of the weir stream, the rushes,
the reeds, the trees, the long line of wooded hills, the swans and the
boats, if he did not understand what the Thames is to an Englishman,
I should despair of him. If I was interested in a young couple who
were hesitating on the brink of matrimony, and I wished to push them
into it, I would invite them to take tea with me on the lawn of the
Compleat Angler, and when the sun dropped low and the shadows of the
trees lengthened and the air grew heavy with the scent of the roses, I
would leave them together for an hour, and if in that hour the man had
not proposed I would consider him a base deceiver, a heartless wretch
incapable of sentiment.
In the late afternoon, when the bells of the church were ringing for
evening service, I walked up the High Street, in which the lads of the
village and the lasses all in white were abroad, and looked at Marlow's
sole antiquarian relic--the stocks, which stand in an enclosure of turf
and trees and flower-beds. I continued my pilgrimage to Shelley's house
in West Street, and then on over the wooden bridge of old grey wood to
the Lock.
The sun had set and the west was all opal with the dying light when
I came back to the lawn of the Compleat Angler. The launch that had
lain the afternoon through by the steps was gone, with its load of
merry people, and the motor cars were all off on their return journey
to London. Only the people staying in the hotel remained. It was
dinner-time, but I was loth to leave the open air, for the hush of the
evening had fallen. I could hear faintly the sound of a hymn being sung
in the church, and that sentimentality, which is not religious feeling,
but which is akin to it, had fallen upon me. I was at peace with all
mankind. I forgave the architect who designed Marlow Church tower for
the triviality of his Gothic; I had no rancour against the tailor who
took three weeks to make me three white evening waistcoats; I could
think kindly of the people who send me insufficiently stamped letters
from abroad, and I could remember that even the income-tax collector is
a fellow-man. Had there been anyone by to whom I could recite poetry
I would have been prepared to quote Herbert to my purpose, but the
only companionable soul available at the moment was a friendly Irish
terrier, and terriers have no soul for verse.
At last I went in to dinner. A corner table in the biggest of the three
dining-rooms, a real summer-house, its walls being all windows, had
been reserved for me, and from my seat I could look across the river to
one side and on to the weir stream on the other. The light of day was
not all gone, and I hardly needed the shaded lamp which kept company on
the table with a great bunch of sweet-smelling flowers from the garden.
I had not ordered any special dinner, but ate the _table d'hôte_ meal
of the house, the charge for which is six shillings. It was a good
English dinner, and my only complaint regarding it is that there were
some tags of unnecessary French upon the menu card. This, in plain
English, was the dinner I ate and enjoyed:
Thick Mock Turtle.
Salmon.
Clear Butter Sauce.
Braised Ham.
Broad Beans.
Madeira Sauce.
Roast Chicken.
Chip Potatoes.
Green Peas.
Raspberries and Cream Ice.
I might have added a savoury to this, but I like to end my dinner
with a sweet taste to linger on my palate. My bill altogether came to
seven-and-six.
Feeling contented with myself, and life, the Compleat Angler, and my
fellow-men, I sauntered to the railway station in time to catch the
nine-forty train back to London.
XXXVII
ARTISTS' ROOMS
DIEUDONNÉ'S. PAGANI'S
There used to be two little rooms in London restaurants with walls
made interesting by the signatures of great artists of song and colour
and sculpture and music, who, some of them, had sketched little scenes
above their names, and others had dotted down a few notes of music.
One of these little chambers was the sitting-room of Madame Dieudonné,
in Ryder Street. Madame Dieudonné was an old French lady who kept a
boarding-house much patronised by the great artists who came over to
London from France. In her kitchen was an admirable chef, and the fame
of the _table d'hôte_--a real _table d'hôte_ in its original sense,
for Madame always sat at the head of her own table--was so great that
people who loved good cooking used to ask permission to be allowed
to dine at it. But Madame Dieudonné did not give this permission
to all comers, and it was necessary that the would-be guest should
be presented to Madame and should obtain from her an invitation to
her circle before a place was laid for him. Any special favourites
amongst the guests were asked by Madame to come after dinner into her
sitting-room, there to drink coffee and to chat, and amongst these
favourites were the great musicians, and the great actors and great
painters of her own land, who stayed at the boarding-house. When
any man, or any lady, was asked for the first time into this holy of
holies, he or she placed a signature upon the wall and any further
embellishment that came to mind. Gradually the middle portion of the
walls became a perfect treasure-house of autographs.