which the Savoy stands I should have to delve back to Tudor times, and
the Savoy Palace and the politics of that very turbulent period. For
me, however, the past history of the Savoy begins with the time when
the Savoy Theatre was built on reclaimed ground and opened in 1881.
The offices of the theatre were in Beaufort House, which stood on the
hill, and beside the theatre was a space of rough waste land, much like
the County Council's wilderness in Aldwych. On this unoccupied land
Mr D'Oyly Carte put up a shed to house the electric light plant for
the theatre, for the Savoy was the first theatre in London that used
electric light. The Savoy Hotel and Restaurant eventually rose where
the electric light shed first stood, and they were opened in 1889.
The hotel and restaurant then faced the Embankment, and had no Strand
frontage. To get to the restaurant one had either to do a glissade
in a hansom down the steep Savoy hill to the side entrance which led
into a courtyard, in the centre of which stood a majolica fountain, or
to go to the front entrance opposite to the Embankment Gardens. The
restaurant was smaller than it is now; it was panelled with mahogany;
it had a red and gold frieze and a ceiling of dead gold. It was a very
comfortable restaurant, and the mahogany walls gave it a homelike
feeling, though, of course, they absorbed a great deal of the light.
The private rooms, named after the various Gilbert and Sullivan operas,
were, as they are now, next to the restaurant. The grill-room was
tucked away in the middle of a block of buildings. There was below the
restaurant a _table d'hôte_ dining-room, and on the garden level was
a ballroom and its ante-rooms. The balcony was but half its present
width. No block of buildings has been more greatly improved from time
to time than the Savoy has been. There has hardly been a year without
some adornment being added, and in 1904 the largest additions during
the history of the hotel were completed, and the hotel and restaurant
gained their Strand outlet.
It would be possible to write a history of the Savoy by taking note of
the successive improvements and additions made to it. It would also be
possible to tell the history of the great restaurant by an account of
some of the eras of great dinners, the period, for instance, when the
South African millionaires were spending money like water during the
great "boom," and the period of freak dinners, when Caruso sang from a
gondola to diners sitting by a canal in Venice, which was really the
flooded courtyard; and when, on another occasion, the same space was
turned into a Japanese garden for a Japanese dinner. I was a guest
at some of these great dinners, at the Rouge et Noire one which two
magnates of the financial world gave to celebrate a great _coup_ at
Monte Carlo, when all the decorations of the table, all the flowers, as
much of the napery as was possible, reproduced the two colours, when
the waiters wore red shirts and red gloves, and the number on which the
money was won was to be found everywhere in various forms on the table.
And I was bidden to the return banquet, a white and green one, which
strove to outdo the luxury of the former one, whereat fruit-trees
bearing fruit grew apparently through the table, and each chair was a
little bower of foliage.
But I prefer to chat concerning the men who made the history of the
house. Not the men who pulled the strings behind the scenes, the Board
of Directors and their admirable managing director, Mr Reeves Smith,
but the men whom the public saw or heard of in the restaurant, the
general managers, the managers of the restaurant, and the chefs. The
managers whom I knew were Ritz, Mengay, Pruger, Gustave, and now Blond.
In the restaurant were Echenard, Joseph, Jules, Renault, and now Soi.
The chefs have been Escoffier, Thouraud, whom Joseph brought over with
him from Paris, Tripod, and now Rouget; and most of these I knew well.
When Mr D'Oyly Carte was putting in order the organisation of the
newly opened Savoy Hotel, he, at Monte Carlo, asked M. Ritz, who was
then at the Grand Hotel there, to come to London and take charge of
the Savoy Restaurant. M. Ritz came and brought M. Escoffier with him
to make history in the kitchens. When M. Ritz permanently took over
the management of the hotel and the restaurant he asked M. Echenard,
the proprietor of the Hotel du Louvre at Marseilles, to come to London
and assist him in the restaurant. This triumvirate worked admirably
together. M. Ritz, thin, nervous, splendidly neat, knowing all his
patrons and their tastes, was a great _maître d'hôtel_ as well as a
great manager. The saying which he constantly quoted, "The customer
is always right," he acted up to. If some ignorant diner found fault
with one of M. Escoffier's most exquisite creations it would be swept
away without a word and something suited to a lower intelligence and an
uncultivated palate substituted for it. If an old and valued customer
had come into the restaurant and had ordered for dinner, tripe and
onions and sausages and mashed potatoes, M. Ritz would have greeted
such an order as though it were a flash of genius, and would probably
have sent out to the nearest cab shelter for the dishes.
During the early days of the Savoy M. Ritz was quietly teaching the
English with money to spend that a good dinner is not of necessity a
long dinner, and that a few dishes exquisitely cooked are better than
a long catalogue of rich dishes. M. Echenard, looking like a Spanish
hidalgo, quite understood the ways of his two great colleagues--for
MM. Ritz and Escoffier are two of the greatest men in gastronomic
history--and backed them up nobly. The cholera year in Marseilles
took M. Echenard back to his hotel in the south, and he has prospered
exceedingly there, being now the proprietor of the Reserve and the
hotel just below it on the Corniche, as well as the Louvre. MM. Ritz
and Escoffier have since made the fortunes of other London restaurants.
When the Ritz-Escoffier regime at the Savoy came to an end the
directors bought the Restaurant Marivaux in the street by the side of
the Opéra Comique in Paris, and brought over M. Joseph, the presiding
genius of that restaurant, to take charge of the Savoy Restaurant.
The Marivaux had a unique reputation in the Paris of that day for its
cookery. Joseph came, bringing with him his chef, M. Thouraud. Joseph
was, I think, the most inspired _maître d'hôtel_, with the exception,
perhaps, of Frederic of the Tour d'Argent, I have ever met. The Savoy
Restaurant was rather too large for his system of management, for he
liked to take a personal interest in each dinner that was progressing
in his restaurant and to give it his constant supervision. He was born
of French parents in Birmingham, and his one great amusement was that
northern sport, pigeon flying. He had pleasant brown eyes and bushy
eyebrows, he wore all that remained of his hair rather long, and had
a tiny moustache. He was quite wrapped up in his profession, and, as
he told me once, looked at his boots the whole time that he took his
afternoon constitutional walk, that he might think of new dishes.
Whenever any novel idea occurred to him he tried it at home in his
own little kitchen before asking M. Thouraud to make experiment on a
larger scale. To see Joseph carve a duck was to see a very splendid
exhibition of ornate swordsmanship, and his preparation of a _canard
à la presse_ was quite sacrificial in its solemnity. There was in his
day a dinner given at the Savoy at which Madame Sarah Bernhardt was the
chief guest, and most of the other people present were "stars" of our
British stage. Joseph cooked before them at a side table most of the
dishes of the dinner, and told me that he did so because he wished to
show actresses and actors, who constantly appeal to the imagination of
their audiences, that there was something also in his art to please the
eye and stimulate the imagination. When I asked why he never went to
the theatre, he told me that he would sooner see six gourmets eating
a well-cooked dinner than watch the finest performance that Madame
Bernhardt and Coquelin could give. Joseph had quite a pretty wit and
facile pen. This was the _jeu d'esprit_ that he once wrote in a young
lady's album:--"C'était la première côtelette qui coûta le plus cher à
l'homme--Dieu en ayant fait une femme." And he wrote for me a little
essay on the duties of a _maître d'hôtel_ that was very sprightly in
style. He was even a greater believer than M. Ritz in the short dinner,
and declared that we in England only tasted our dinners and did not eat
them. Three dishes he considered quite enough for a good dinner, and
this was a tiny feast which he ordered for me on one occasion when I
took a lady to dine at the Savoy:
Petite marmite.
Sole Reichenberg.
Caneton à la presse. Salade de saison.
Fonds d'artichauts à la Reine.
Bombe pralinée. Petits fours.
Panier fleuri.
The _panier fleuri_ he carved himself at table from an orange.
Joseph became homesick, for he was a thorough Parisian, and went back
eventually to the Marivaux, but he soon after died.
[Illustration: JOSEPH CARVING A DUCK _After a drawing by Paul Renouard_]
The directors of the Savoy Company, which owns the Berkeley and
Claridge's as well as the Savoy Hotel, brought jolly, genial,
rosy-faced M. Jules, under whose rule the Berkeley had prospered
exceedingly, from that white-faced hotel to the Savoy, and his rule on
the Thames Embankment was as successful as it had been in Piccadilly.
It was during his managership that the additions that were to give the
entrance on to the Strand were planned, and, I fancy, were begun, and
when M. Jules left the Savoy to make for himself a restaurant and hotel
in Jermyn Street, M. Renault, from the Casino at Biarritz, came to the
Savoy Restaurant, and the quick-witted M. Pruger became general manager.
This was a period of great activity and of many alterations in the
building. No Savoy manager has ever had more brilliant inspirations
for great feasts than M. Pruger had. The gondola dinner was one of his
ideas and he always thought of something novel and amusing for the
Christmas and New Year's Eve parties. M. Renault is now in Rome at the
hotel there owned by the Savoy Company; M. Pruger was tempted away
to America to manage a mammoth restaurant on modern lines, but came
back from New York to take over the management of the Royal Automobile
Club when its great club-house in Pall Mall was opened. M. Gustave,
of the russet beard, who had steered the newly built Café Parisien
of the Savoy to great success, next became manager of the hotel, and
that brings us down to the history of to-day, for when he resigned his
appointment M. Blond, the present manager, succeeded him.
XLIII
THE DUTIES OF A _MAÎTRE D'HÔTEL_
I have mentioned in the previous chapter that Joseph wrote me a
sprightly letter on the duties of a _maître d'hôtel_. This is it:
MON CHER COLONEL,--Vous me demandez pour votre nouveau livre des
recettes. Méfiez-vous des recettes. Depuis la cuisinière bourgeoise et
le Baron Brisse on a chanté la chanson sur tous les airs et sur tous
les tons. Et qu'en reste-t-il; qui s'en souvient? Je veux dire dans
le public aristocratique pour qui vous écrivez, et que vous comptez
intéresser avec votre nouvelle publication, cherchez le nouveau dans
les à propos de table, donnez des conseils aux maîtresses de maison,
qui dépensent beaucoup d'argent pour donner des dîners fatiguants,
trop longs, trop compliqués; dîtes leur qu'un bon dîner doit être
court, que les convives doivent manger et non goûter, qu'elles exigent
de leur cuisinier ou cuisinière de n'être pas trop savants, qu'ils
respectent avant tout le goût que le bon Dieu a donné à toutes choses
de ne pas les dénaturer par des combinaisons, qui à force d'être
raffinées deviennent barbares.
On a beaucoup parlé du cuisinier. Si nous exposions un peu ce que doit
être le Maître d'Hôtel.
LE MAÎTRE D'HÔTEL FRANÇAIS
La plus grande force du Maître d'hôtel Français, je dis Maître d'hôtel
Français à dessein, car si le cuisinier Français a su tirer parti des
produits de la nature avec un art infini, pour en faire des aliments
aimables, agréables, et bienfaisants, le Maître d'hôtel Français seul
est susceptible de les faire accepter et désirer. Or voilà pour le
Maître d'hôtel le champ qu'il a à explorer. Champ vaste s'il en fût,
car deviner avec tact ce qui peut plaire à celui-ci et ne pas plaire à
celui-là, est un problème à résoudre selon la nature, le tempérament
et la nationalité de celui qu'il doit faire manger. Il doit donc être
le conseil, le tentateur, et le metteur en scène. Il faut pour être un
maître d'hôtel accompli, mettre de côté, ou de moins ne pas laisser
percer le but commercial, tout en étant un commerçant hors ligne (je
parle ici du maître d'hôtel public de restaurant, attendu que dans la
maison particulière, le commerce n'a rien à voir, ce qui simplifie
énormement le rôle du maître d'hôtel. Pour cela il faut être un peu
diplomate, et un peu artiste dans l'art de dire, afin de colorer
le projet de repas que l'on doit soumettre à son dîneur). Il faut
donc agir sur l'imagination pour fair oublier la machine que l'on va
alimenter, en un mot masquer le côté matériel de manger. J'ai acquis
la certitude qu'un plat savamment préparé par un cuisinier hors ligne
peut passer inaperçu, ou inapprécié si le maître d'hôtel, qui devient
alors metteur en scène, ne sait pas présenter l'œuvre, de façon à le
faire désirer, de sorte que si ce mets est servi par un maître d'hôtel
qui n'en comprend pas le caractère, il lui sera impossible de lui
donner tout son relief, et alors l'œuvre de cuisinier sera anéanti et
passera inaperçu.
Ce maître d'hôtel doit être aussi un observateur et un juge et doit
transmettre son appréciation au chef de cuisine, mais pour apprécier
il faut savoir, pour savoir il faut aimer son art, le maître d'hôtel
doit être un apôtre.
Il doit transmettre les observations qu'il a pu entendre pendant le
cours d'un dîner de la part des convives, observations favorables ou
défavorables, il doit les transmettre au chef et aviser avec lui. Il
doit aussi être en observation, car il arrive le plus souvent que les
convives ne disent rien à cause de leur amphitryon mais ne mangent pas
avec plaisir et entrain le mets présenté: là encore le maître d'hôtel
doit chercher le pourquoi. Il y a aussi dans un déjeuner ou un dîner
un rôle très important réservé au maître d'hôtel. La variété agréable
des hors-d'œuvre, la salade qui accompagne le rôti, le façon de
découper ce rôti avec élégance, de bien disposer ce rôti sur son plat
une fois découpé, découper bien et vite, afin d'éviter le réchaud qui
sèche. Savoir mettre à point une selle de mouton, avec juste ce qu'il
faut de sel sur la partie grasse, qui lui donnera un goût agréable.
Pour découper le maître d'hôtel doit se placer ni trop près ni trop
loin des convives, afin que ceux-ci soient intéressés, et voient
que tous les détails sont observés avec goût et élégance, de façon
à tenter encore les appétits qui n'en peuvent presque plus mais qui
renaissent encore un peu aiguillonnés par le désir qu'a su faire
naître l'artiste préposé au repas, et qui a su donner encore envie à
l'imagination, quand l'estomac commençait à capituler.
Le maître d'hôtel a de plus cette partie de la fin du dîner, le choix
d'un bon fromage, les fruits, les soins de température à donner aux
vins, la façon de décanter ceux-ci pour leur donner le maximum de
bouquet; le maître d'hôtel ne peut-il encore être un tentateur avec
la fraise frappée à la Marivaux? ou avec la pêche à la cardinal,
qu'accompagne si bien le doux parfum de la framboise, légèrement
acidulé d'une cuillerée de jus de groseille. Notre grand Carême
qualifiait certains plats le "manger des Dieux." Combien l'expression
est heureuse!
Depuis que je suis à Londres j'ai trouvé un nombre incalculable
d'inventeurs de ma "pêche à la Cardinal." Il me faudra leur donner la
recette un jour que j'en aurai l'occasion.
N'est-ce pas de l'art chez le maître d'hôtel qui tente et charme
les convives par ces raffinements, et qui comme un cavalier sur une
moture essoufflée sait encore relever son courage et lui faire faire
la dernière foulée qui décide de la victoire? Après un bon repas
le maître d'hôtel a la grande satisfaction d'avoir donné un peu de
bonheur à de pauvres gens riches, qui ne sont pas toujours des heureux.
Et comme l'a dit Brillat Savarin "Le plaisir de la table ne nuit pas
aux autres plaisirs." Au contraire, qui sait si _indirectement_ je ne
suis pas le papa de bien des Bébés rieurs, ou la cause au moins de
certaines aventures que mes jolies clientes n'évoquent qu'en souriant
derrière leur éventail?
JOSEPH
_Directeur du Savoy Restaurant, Londres,
et du Restaurant de Marivaux, Paris._
XLIV
THE SAVOY TO-DAY
After the Houses of Parliament, the Law Courts, the National Gallery,
St Paul's and Westminster Abbey, the Savoy Hotel is probably the
building that the well-to-do Londoner knows best. He cannot walk or
drive down the Strand without his eye being caught by its milk-white
frontage on that tumultuous street, and by the stern-faced gilded
warrior above the courtyard entrance who leans on a shield that bears
an heraldic bird, which I have no doubt is a very noble eagle, but
which looks as though it had been plucked. When he comes home from
abroad he, if he is looking to the right as he crosses the railway
bridge to Charing Cross, sees the garden front of the hotel, with its
balconies and many windows, and its flag aflutter, and recalling many
good dinners in the past, looks forward to many others in the immediate
future.
All the preliminaries to a dinner at the Savoy are pleasantly
dignified. The drive into the courtyard, the cessation of noise as the
wheels of car or carriage come upon the india-rubber paving under the
glazed roof, the cream and dark green marbles of the entrance front,
the trellis and flowers outside the Café, all contribute to pleasant
anticipation; and once inside the doors, the hall panelled with
dark woods, the glimpse through a long window of the light-coloured
reading-room, and the progress down a flight of crimson-carpeted
stairs, with walls of buff and brown marble on either side, form the
first stage of the diner's progress to the restaurant.
Servants in the handsome state livery they wear in the evening--French
grey and dark blue--take one's coat and hat, and it always gives me a
moment of gratification that I am such an old habitué that it is not
considered necessary to give me a ticket. Then if one is a host there
is nothing to do except to sit in one of the comfortable chairs in
this ante-chamber and to look alternately up the crimson stairs to see
whether one's guests are arriving and down another flight of stairs
across the great lounge to the crystal screen of great panes framed in
gilt metal which is the transparent barrier between the restaurant and
its approaches.
The lounge--crimson under foot, with walls light cream in colour, good
copies of portraits by British old masters in panels alternating with
looking-glass doorways; with pillars of buff marble, veined with brown
and having gilt capitals, and bronze amorini and sculptured groups
of the Graces as supports for electroliers--is a delightful room,
as one realises after dinner when the hour of coffee has come. The
band, wearing in the evening their uniform of dark blue, the leader
distinguished by a silver sash--in the daytime they are in crimson--are
in a corner of the lounge close against the crystal screen that
their music may be heard in the restaurant. Arched entrances in the
eastern wall lead into the Winter Garden, another great hall with a
glazed ceiling, with roses climbing up trellis-work, and with a great
recess, up a broad flight of stairs, with pillars of green marble and
a gilded fountain against its wall. The _salon de verdure_, as it
is grandiloquently called, is above the new ballroom, the two great
apartments occupying the space where the courtyard used to be.
My guests of the particular night I am describing were my friend and
old comrade, Pitcher, the editor of _Town Topics_, and his wife and his
pretty daughter. I had determined that they should eat a typical Savoy
dinner, and had been at some pains to obtain a really representative
feast. Before I went away on my travels in the summer I had interviewed
M. Blond, the general manager (who was brought back when he was
half-way to Rome two years ago to take up the management of the Savoy),
in his sanctum, telling him that when in the autumn I intended to
write a couple of chapters concerning the Savoy, I should like to give
a dinner including some of the specialities of the cuisine, and that
I should like to have something descriptive to say as to such of the
dishes of which the Savoy is proud that were not included in my little
feast. We took into our conference M. Rouget, the Maître-Chef of the
Savoy, who looks the genial, burly, contented person that the head of
a great kitchen should be, and we chatted over new dishes and dishes
with new names (which are not the same thing), and he gave me some
particulars of his kitchens and of the great army of cooks employed in
the Savoy, there being as many as two hundred and ten in the brigade.
When, being back again in London, I carried out my intention of asking
my editor to dinner, M. Soi, the manager of the restaurant, came into
counsel. When I had made up my mind on the important matter whether
my dinner should cost twelve-and-six or fifteen-and-six a head, and
had stated that I should like the more expensive feast, I added that I
hoped that no beef would be included in the menu, for Pitcher had been
complaining of preliminary symptoms of gout. M. Soi on the day we were
to dine--a Sunday--submitted to me a menu which I duly initialled as
approved.
My guest and his wife, looking as young as her pretty daughter, duly
arrived to the moment. M. Soi, young and good-looking, with a light
moustache--he was under Ritz in various restaurants, and has been at
the Grand Hotel in Rome as restaurant manager, going in the summer to
the Palace Hotel at St Moritz, before three years ago he came to the
Savoy--received us at the entrance, and we were piloted to a table a
comfortable distance away from the band, from which the ladies had a
full view of the room, full, as it always is, with good-looking people,
the softer sex all being in frocks that gave my lady guests plenty
to talk about. I gave my guests the menu, which, of course, I had
previously seen, to look at, as soon as they had settled down, and I
used my eyes to take in my surroundings.
Though I regret the disappearance of the mahogany panelling, which is
stowed away somewhere in the hotel, as one regrets the loss of an old
friend, the pleasant buff colouring of the present restaurant, with its
frieze of raised decoration and the electric light thrown up on to the
ceiling and reflected down, which is most comfortable to the eye, make
for lightness; and light as distinguished from glare is an aid to good
spirits in a restaurant. The balcony of to-day, twice the width of the
old balcony, and fitted with a long awning for use on sunshiny days--an
awning which cost an almost incredible sum of money--is in request both
at lunch and dinner and supper-time; and at lunch it has the supreme
advantage of commanding the one great view in Central London, the river
and the gardens and the Houses of Parliament grouping into a splendid
picture, only spoiled by the blot of the unlovely railway bridge.
This was the menu of the Savoy dinner that M. Soi considered typical:
Délices de Sterlet.
Blinis de Sarrasin.
Consommé de Terrapine en Tasse. Kapusniack.
Suprême de Sole Divine.
Diablotin Cancalaise.
Filet de Perdreau Bonne Bouche.
Croquettes de Marrons.
Noisette d'Agneau de Galles Eldorado.
Fond d'Artichaut Clamart.
Poularde soufflée Savoy.
Salade Cornelia.
Poire de Paris Tosca.
Frivolités.
Canapé Esperanza.
--and as the accompanying wine I had ordered some sherry with the
_caviar_, a magnum of Pommery and some Mattoni water.