soon bought up the tin shanty and the ground belonging to it, built
the Cavour as it now is, the bar occupying the site of the original
restaurant, and made a little garden on the space now occupied by a
cinema show.
Of this little garden Philippe was very proud. He liked to be able to
go out of his restaurant and pick a bunch of mignonette to give to any
lady, and he grew some vegetables and oranges there as well as flowers.
He had an eye also to the main chance, for when anyone pointed out to
him that he was wasting a valuable site by making a garden of it, he
nodded his head, and replied: "The earth he grow more valuable every
day."
Philippe, short, grey-haired, with a little close-clipped moustache,
always wearing a turned-down collar and a black tie, had a very
distinct personality of his own. He was a first-class man of business,
was up every morning at five o'clock to go the rounds of the market,
riding in one four-wheeled cab, with another one following behind, into
which he put his purchases and brought them home with him. He had no
love for teetotalers, and he budgeted for the very liberal dinner of
the house on the understanding that his customers should drink wine
therewith. When he found that some of the guests were drinking only
water, he used at once to send a waiter to them or to talk to them
himself, and to tell them that he would charge them sixpence extra.
After a time he found it entailed less loss of temper to notify this on
the bill of fare, and the Cavour menu still bears the legend: "No beers
served with this dinner. Dinner without wine, sixpence extra."
The restaurant of the Cavour is a large white room, with a smaller
room, also white, running back from it. Access to the big room is
obtained from Leicester Square by a narrow corridor decorated with
allegorical figures of the various months of the year--awful daubs,
whoever it was who painted them. The big room is lighted from above
by a sky-light, and there are large globes of electric light in the
ceiling. There are many large mirrors let into the walls, and down
each side of the room run brass rails for hats and coats. There is
oilcloth on the floor, with strips of carpet over it in the gangways.
The waiters go to a bar near the entrance door for the wine and other
drinkables, which are served out there by Mrs Dale, or by her deputy.
Some of the waiters, mostly French, were in the restaurant for many
years under Philippe, but there is a new manager now with a curled-up
black moustache.
If any of the habitués wish to entertain guests to an elaborate
dinner at the Cavour, the custom is to pay five shillings instead of
three-and-six, and certain extra dishes are put into the dinner of the
day for this price. The ordinary dinner, however, is so good that these
additions are hardly needed. This is the menu of a three-and-six dinner
I ate at the Cavour this winter. It is served from five to nine, so as
to meet the convenience of all the patrons of the restaurant, from the
actor who makes a hurried meal before going to the theatre, to the City
man who comes in very late after a day of hard work and goes home after
his dinner:
Hors d'œuvre variés.
_Soup._
Consommé de Volaille à la Royal.
Crème à l'Indienne.
_Fish._
Boiled Turbot au Sauterne.
Fried Fillet of Plaice.
Grilled Herring.
_Entrée._
Filet Mignon aux Haricots panachés.
Calf's Head à la Reine.
_Roast._
Chicken.
Quails on Toast
Salad. Cheese. Dessert.
There was a fine selection of _hors d'œuvre_ to choose from, and
plenty of each, not the one sardine looking lonely in a little dish,
the two radishes and the potato salad that so often are the sole
representatives of the first course at cheap dining-places. I was given
a big plateful of good thick mulligatawny soup, and when I had eaten
the very liberal helping of boiled turbot, excellently firm, I felt
that I had finished quite a good dinner. However, I summoned up enough
appetite to dispose of the little _vol au vent_ put before me, the
pastry of which was noticeably excellent, and then attacked a quail,
which was quite a good bird, even if it had not those layers of fat
which distinguish a "special" quail on a club dinner list from the
ordinary one. A scoop from an excellent Stilton cheese ended my repast.
It may be selfish to hope that Mrs Dale may not sell her property to
be converted into a theatre, but the Cavour dinner is such a good meal
of its kind that I should be sorry if it disappeared from the map of
London That Dines.
LIII
VERREY'S
If I compare Verrey's in Regent Street to Borchardt's in the
Französischerstrasse of Berlin, I am paying Verrey's a high compliment,
for Borchardt's is the classic restaurant of the German capital, run on
good French lines by a German proprietor.
Mr George Krehl the First, founder of Verrey's as a restaurant, was
born near Stuttgart, and came over from Germany in 1850; and the recent
manager of the restaurant, Mr Stadelmaier, is also German born, for
he, like Mr Krehl, came from near Stuttgart, and he, before he went to
Egypt, to Paris, to Düsseldorf and elsewhere, to become a cosmopolitan,
served his apprenticeship in gastronomy under old Mr George Krehl at
Verrey's.
But French--French of the second empire--Verrey's is, particularly
at dinner-time. At lunch-time the restaurant is always quite full of
ladies who shop in Regent Street, and of their escorts, and the rooms
on the first floor are also given over to lunchers--and even then,
sometimes, would-be customers have to wait a little while to obtain
tables. Therefore the luncheon menu is adapted to the wants of ladies
who are probably in a hurry, for though there is a very full list at
lunch-time of delicacies that can be ordered, there are also several
entrées and several joints always ready.
It is, however, at dinner-time that Verrey's enjoys the peaceful,
unhurrying atmosphere that always should surround a classic restaurant,
and which is so thoroughly in keeping with the old bow-windows with
small panes of the café, which look out on to Regent Street. A little
corridor leads from the street to a tiny waiting-room--a comparatively
recent addition, for it used to be the old still-room, a room which
is so small that the round table of ormolu with a china plaque in its
centre, on which is a portrait of Louis XV., and smaller oval plaques
all about it, almost fills all the available space.
The restaurant, lighted from above, used in old Mr Krehl's days
to be known as the Cameo Room, for on the centre of each of its
panels was a medallion in the style of Wedgwood. I rather wish that
this old decoration had been retained, but I remember the pride
with which Mr George Krehl the Second showed me the new Oriental
decorations--decorations which still remain--the silvered roof with
mirrors reflecting it, the electric lights on the cornice with great
shells to act as reflectors, an electric clock shaped like a star,
and the panels of old gold Oriental silk. Time has mellowed the
gorgeousness of this Eastern setting, which in its first bloom I
thought a little too _voyant_, and the dark carpet and the dark wood
and upholstery of the chairs, all keep the scheme of colouring a
restful one. The napery at Verrey's is the good thick napery of the
classic restaurant. Its glass is thin; its silver is heavy--all trifles
which are important as adding to the delight of a good dinner. The
lights at the tables are wax candles, with pink shades, in old silver
candlesticks, and there is a Japanese simplicity in the two great
bunches of flowers in glass vases, one of which is on a dark wooden
stand in the centre of the room, and the other on the sideboard. There
are flowers also, in glasses, on all the tables.
It adds to the pleasure of dining at Verrey's to be known and to be
recognised by the old servants who have been in the restaurant as long
as I can remember it. There is an old head waiter, a fine specimen of
a Briton--portly, with little side whiskers, dignified and unhurrying,
who might have stood as a model for that Robert whose wit and wisdom
used to enliven the pages of _Punch_, who always remembers my name and
all my gastronomic history. And the head waiter in the café, who now
has a full head of grey hair, I remember when he first came to Verrey's
a youth with the blackest of black hair. Mr Stadelmaier, though he
looks on the right side of forty, remembers how young Mr George Krehl,
in the days of his father's rule, one day took me out into the yard
at the back of the house to show me his dogs and the kitchen which
looks out on to this open space, and the last time I dined at Verrey's
brought me in from the yard, to look at a delightful little Samoyede
puppy, looking like one of the woolly toy dogs in the shops, for he
too, like Mr George Krehl the younger, is a breeder of prize dogs, and
has established a club for the owners of sleigh dogs.
Mr Stadelmaier has now left Verrey's and is manager of Kettner's.
The patrons of Verrey's at dinner-time are some of them grey-headed,
for I am sure that all its old patrons always return to their first
love; but there are young couples as well, and the restaurant, though
it is quiet, is by no means dull. It has this distinction, rare amongst
modern restaurants, that it has never surrendered to the modern craze
for music during meals, and it is possible to talk to a neighbour at
the dinner-table without raising one's voice to a shout. I fancy that
Mr Albert Krehl, the survivor of the two sons of old Mr George Krehl,
would as soon think of introducing gipsy music into the restaurant as
they would of engaging Tango dancers to do "the Scissors" in and out of
the tables.
Verrey's has so far acknowledged the tendencies of to-day towards a
_table d'hôte_ dinner that it offers its patrons, if they wish it, a
dinner at seven-and-six. But it is true to its old traditions in that
although it offers this dinner, no dish of the dinner is cooked until
the order has been given, and it is practically a dinner _à la carte_
selected for the diner at a settled price. This is the menu of one of
these dinners:
Hors d'œuvre Variés.
Consommé Duchesse.
Crème de Volaille.
Suprême de Sole Regina.
Filet de Bœuf Jussieuse.
Pommes Château.
Faisan rôti.
Salade d'Endive.
Celeri braisé au jus.
Parfait de Vanille.
Friandises.
Croûte Baron.
But to eat a dinner ordered by somebody else, because I am too lazy to
order it myself, is to me just as unsporting as it is to land a fish
that somebody else has hooked, so that when I dine at Verrey's I pay M.
Schellenberg, the _chef de cuisine_, who is an Alsatian, the compliment
of giving careful consideration as to which of his _plats_ I shall
order, and I generally like to include in my dinner some of Verrey's
specialities, of which there are quite a number. The last time I dined
there I was given an excellent _bortsch_ soup, one-and-three--it is the
custom at Verrey's to charge for a half-portion, which is ample for one
person, a little more than half what is charged for a whole portion,
which suffices for two; _sole à la Verrey_, a filleted sole with an
admirable sauce, which is one of the secrets of the house, but in which
the taste of ketchup is discernible, two shillings; and a _soufflé
Palmyre_, two shillings. This with a pint of good claret was a dinner
not to be despised.
I asked Mr Stadelmaier whether the Queen's Hall and the Palladium,
two neighbouring places of music and entertainment, had brought the
restaurant many customers. The concerts at the Queen's Hall, he told
me, had done so, and he said that people going to the Palladium, when
it gave a one-house variety entertainment, used often to dine at
Verrey's, but that its present "two houses a night" policy did not send
diners to the restaurant.
There is an abundance of history behind Verrey's, and if a careful
record had been kept of the great dinners given in the rooms on the
first floor, such a record as the Café Anglais in Paris kept, it would
make very interesting reading. One of the merriest dinners probably
ever given in those upper rooms was the one at the time of the late
Victorian revival of road coaching, at which most of the guests were
well-known whips. Every man at this dinner was presented with a pink
waistcoat, and as after dinner most of the men went on either to
music halls or theatres, the appearance in the boxes of the young
bloods wearing pink waistcoats astonished the audiences, who thought
that a new fashion was being set. A quieter dinner, but an even more
distinguished one, was that at which King Edward, when he was Prince of
Wales, was present. This was its menu:
Œufs à la Ravigote.
(Vodkhi.)
Bisque d'écrevisses. Consommé Okra.
Rougets à la Muscovite.
Selle de mouton de Galles.
Haricots panachés. Tomates au gratin.
Pommes soufflées.
Timbale Lucullus.
Fonds d'artichauts. Crème pistache.
Grouse.
Salad Rachel.
Biscuit glacé à la Verrey.
Soufflé de laitances.
Dessert.
Many distinguished men have dined in the Cameo Room--Tennyson, the
Poet Laureate, was a great crony of Mr George Krehl the elder, and
he kept all kinds of mementoes of the poet. Mr Gladstone was another
frequenter of the Cameo Room, and he liked to talk to Mr Krehl of the
revolutionary days of '48 in Germany.
The tragedy which is associated with the name of the house was the fate
of the beautiful Miss Fanny Verrey. Verrey, from whom the restaurant
takes its name, was a Swiss confectioner, who came over from Lausanne
in the second decade of the last century and established his shop
in Regent Street. To add to the attractions of his establishment he
brought over from Lausanne his pretty young daughter, who was engaged
to a Swiss pastor. She was young and lively and beautiful; she chatted
with her father's customers, and learnt English by talking with them;
the bucks of those days made her a toast; and Lord Petersham wrote some
verses in honour of "The Pretty Confectioner," in which he dubbed her
"Wild Switzerland's Queen," and ended one of the verses with these
lines:
"Thy mind--brightest gem--is the Temple of Love;
But bright as thou'rt fair--thou'rt pure as a dove";
which shows that his lordship, though his sentiments were praiseworthy,
was not a great poet. The fame of Miss Verrey's beauty drew crowds
not only into the shop, but outside it, and spiteful and jealous
rivals spread rumours concerning Miss Verrey's lightness of behaviour,
which were entirely untrue. The crowds outside the shop became such
a nuisance that the authorities interfered in the matter. Mr Verrey
removed his daughter from the shop, and she kept to her room to avoid
public notice. The turmoil, the unmerited scandal, and the lampoons
in the papers so affected the girl's health that she pined away and
died. But even then her memory was not respected, and as a good example
of the want of taste of the time--the year was 1828--this riddle was
published in one of the papers: "Why was Miss Verrey's death like a
window front?" _Answer:_ "Because it is a paneful case."
At one period Verrey's was known as the Café François; but I can find
no particulars concerning it under this title. I also think that Verrey
must at some time or another have occupied another shop in Regent
Street, for some of his advertisements, notably one of Howqua's teas,
"as patronised by their Majesties," were issued from 218 Regent Street,
whereas Verrey's to-day occupies 229 Regent Street.
LIV
THE CATHAY RESTAURANT
[Illustration]
In full view of all who pass to and fro through Piccadilly Circus,
there shines on one of the tall houses which encircle it the
announcement that the upper part of the building is occupied by the
Cathay Restaurant, which modestly on its menu describes itself as a
"pioneer, first-class, Chinese restaurant."
As I take into my descriptive net every manner of eating-house, so
long as the food and drink to be obtained there is good of its kind, I
experimented in the first days of this year of grace, at lunch-time,
on the Cathay Restaurant, and found that it has selected in its very
long _carte du jour_ those Chinese dishes which are palatable to the
European, as well as to the Chinese taste.
Chinese food is no novelty to me, for during the five years that I was
quartered in the Far East--at Penang, Singapore and Hong-Kong--I was
frequently one of the guests at feasts given by Chinese merchants, and
learned by experience which were the dishes that one could safely eat
and which were the Chinese delicacies that it was wise to drop under
the table. A Chinaman, when he wishes to be very polite at table, takes
up with his chop-sticks some especially dainty morsel from his own
plate and pops it into the mouth of his European neighbour at table. A
kindly young Chinaman once thus put into my mouth a slip of cold pig's
liver wrapped round a prune, and I do not think that I ever tasted any
nastier combination.
Two Chinese banquets at which I was a guest remain very clearly marked
in my memory. One was given by a rich Chinaman at Penang, on the
occasion of the marriage of his son, to all the European officials and
the officers of the garrison and the leading British merchants. It
was a feast at which the dishes were alternately Chinese and European
ones, and by each man's and by each lady's dish, for the ladies were
also invited, were chop-sticks, and knives and forks and spoons. One
Chinese dish I remember at this feast as being quite excellent--a salad
of vegetables and of small fish of all kinds. All the guests ate quite
heartily both of the European dishes and the Chinese dishes, but that
night nearly all the Europeans who had been to the banquet believed
that they had suddenly been stricken with Asiatic cholera. I was one of
the happy exceptions, and I suppose that I must have skipped whatever
was the dish that worked such havoc amongst my fellow-guests.
Messengers from half the bungalows in the leafy lanes of Penang were
sent off post-haste to the civil surgeon, begging him to come at once
to the bedside of unhappy sufferers, and each messenger as he arrived
at the civil surgeon's house received the news that the doctor believed
himself to be in the throes of the same dread Asiatic disease, and did
not think that he would survive the dawn. Nobody, however, did die,
and two or three days later all the aristocracy of Penang, looking
even paler than Europeans always are in that land of lily-white
complexions, and very shaky about the knees, gathered together at a
cricket match and discussed the matter. Somebody had already gone to
the Chinese merchant and had told him of the havoc that his banquet had
made. He was profoundly grieved, pointed out that none of his Chinese
guests had suffered the slightest inconvenience, and laid the blame
on the European dishes, which he had procured as a compliment to his
white guests, saying that he "always mistrusted the cookery of the
barbarians."
The other unforgettable feast was given by the head Shroff, the native
cashier, of one of the banks in Hong-Kong. I had been talking at the
house of one of the bankers as to my experiences of Chinese dishes,
and had rather decried the cookery of the Flowery Land. I had (I
was afterwards told) been especially sarcastic as to the Chinaman's
partiality for puppy-dog, and more or less ranked all Chinese dishes
with the detestable rat soup which a Chinaman sold in the early
mornings just outside the barrack gates to the coolies on their way to
their work. The orderly officer going to inspect rations always had to
pass the unsavoury cauldron from which the soup was ladled out, and,
in the hot weather, the only thing to do was to put a handkerchief to
one's nose and run past it.
Some little time after these conversational flourishes of mine the
banker asked me if I would like to eat a real, well-cooked Chinese
dinner, for the head Shroff of his bank had asked him to honour him
with his company at his villa in Kowlun--which is where the "Mr Wu's"
come from--and had told him that he would be delighted if he would
bring some of his European friends. The dinner, which consisted chiefly
of fish, was an excellent one, the all-pervading taste of soy not being
too persistent, and I was especially delighted with a white stew of
what my host said was Cantonese rabbit, which I thought quite the
most tender and the fattest rabbit I had ever tasted. When the dinner
was over, the banker told me that the "Cantonese rabbit" to which I
had given such unlimited praise was really a Cantonese edible puppy,
fattened on milk and rice. After that incident I found that whenever
I dined out in Hong-Kong, conversation always seemed to turn on to
Cantonese puppies, and I was gently chaffed for at least six months as
to my sudden conversion to the delights of baby chow as a _pièce de
résistance_.
I found, however, neither puppy-dog nor rat on the _carte du jour_ of
the Cathay Restaurant.
The restaurant is on the first floor above a bank. A commissionaire
stands at the outer portals, and there is a lift for the benefit of
anyone who is too lazy to walk up a single flight of stairs. The
restaurant itself is hardly sufficiently Oriental in appearance to
be a Cockney's beau ideal of a Chinese restaurant. It is just what a
progressive restaurant for Chinamen in Peking would be, for though
the food is Chinese food, cooked by a Chinese cook, the appearance of
the restaurant is almost European, an exaggerated copy of a French
restaurant, with here and there Chinese touches which redeem the place
from tawdriness. There is on the wall a paper with a pattern of gold
fleurs-de-lis, the carpet is crimson, the chairs and tables are of
European make, the waiters are of European nationalities and wear dress
clothes. But a strip of good Chinese embroidery is hung along that side
of the restaurant where the serving-room is behind a glassed screen;
there are porcelain vases on the two mantelshelves; a great Chinese
ornament of carved wood, gold and crimson and black, hangs by a ribbon
just inside one of the windows; the big curtains to the windows are
of old gold Chinese silk, and the little curtains, also of Oriental
silk, are lilac in tint. The manager of the restaurant is a Chinaman
with short-cut hair, and he wears the same neat, dark garments that all
European managers assume. I sat down at one of the tables, asked the
young Italian who came to wait on me to show me a _carte du jour_ and
the menu of the set lunch, if there was one, and then looked round at
the people who were taking their meal there.
The Chinese in London certainly patronise their own restaurant, for
quite half the people who were eating luncheon were Celestials. There
were two young Chinese boys in the charge of a grey-haired English
lady. There were several young Chinamen whom I mentally put down as
students. An older Chinese gentleman had brought his wife out to lunch;
and before I left, a party of Chinese gentlemen came in, whom, from the
respect shown to them by the manager, I judged to be secretaries of the
Chinese Embassy--the Chinese Ambassador, whom I know by sight, was not
amongst them.
Nowadays when Chinese gentlemen and ladies wear European clothes, and
the men have their hair short, one has to look at their faces to detect
the difference between them and Europeans.
There were some Londoners lunching in the restaurant. A party of
ladies in furs were enjoying the novelty of the Chinese dishes; two
youngsters, whom I took to be medical students, were ordering various
dishes from the _carte du jour_, and were cross-examining the waiter
keenly as to the cooking arrangements and how the delicacies were
imported from China; and two schoolgirls, one of the flapper age and
one younger, came into the restaurant giggling and looking round as
though they expected a pantomime Chinaman to spring up before them or
to jump round a corner.
The menu of the day at the Cathay is on a large folding mauve card,
and the dishes are both in Chinese characters and in English letters
with an explanation in English below each name. The first division is
for chop sueys and noodles. A chop suey is to the Chinese what Irish
stew is to the English and a _ragoût_ is to the French. Pork is its
foundation, and chicken livers and chicken gizzards, celery, mushrooms,
peas, onion, garlic, peppers, oil and salt all go into it. Noodle is
any paste dish, and macaroni or vermicelli would be described on a
Chinese menu as a noodle.