chew chop suey is chop suey with green chutney. Chop suey min is chop
suey with noodle, and so on. There is a little list of dishes which
are ready, and a longer list of dishes which will take some minutes to
prepare, such as fried crab and Chinese omelet; fried rice, with meat,
mushroom, egg and vegetables; sliced jelly-fish with pickle; and soyed
pork. Some especial dishes are on the menu for which a day's notice
must be given, one of these being birds'-nests with minced chicken and
another shark's fin with sliced chicken, ham, bamboo shoots, etc. At
the end of the list comes the catalogue of teas, pastries and sweets,
pickled onions being included in this category.
After looking down the _carte du jour_, I turned my attention to
the set luncheon, and first of all took up the card on which it was
written in Chinese. In case you may be able to read Chinese fluently I
reproduce this card on the next page.
The first word on this only means menu. The first dish is a soup of
chicken, ham, bamboo shoots and mushrooms. The second dish is fried
chicken liver and vegetables, and the last dish is simply roast pork.
I opted for this half-crown meal, and as a preliminary, the waiter
put a tiny cup of soy and a Chinese porcelain spoon by the side of the
European knives and forks and spoons which were already on the table.
A wine list was offered me, but I preferred, as I was going to eat
Chinese meats, to drink Chinese tea with them, and ordered a cup of
Loong Cheng. The plates used at the Chinese restaurant are, like the
cutlery, of European pattern, but the dishes in which the soups and the
meats are brought to table are Chinese ones of all kinds of shapes and
ornamented with Chinese paintings. My soup, with tiny strips of bamboo
in it and morsels of chicken flesh, tasted very much like the chicken
broth that one is given when one is ill and on a low diet. The fried
chicken and vegetables were quite good eating, and the taste of the
bamboo shoots in it was particularly pleasant to the palate. The roast
pork I shied at, and asked instead to be given a plate of chow chow, an
admirable sweet which I have known ever since boyhood, for one of my
uncles, who was Consul at Foo Chow, used to send home to all his small
nephews presents of this delicacy. The tea was excellent, and doing as
the Chinese do, I did not spoil its taste by adding either sugar or
milk to it.
[Illustration]
Altogether my luncheon at the Chinese Restaurant was quite a pleasant
experiment, and I can advise any gourmets who would like to test the
cookery of the Far East in comfortable surroundings to follow my lead.
LV
THE WHITE HORSE CELLARS
A little glass canopy with a clock above it juts out into Piccadilly,
and a tall commissionaire stands at an entrance where some stairs
dive down, apparently into the bowels of the earth. Where the stairs
make their first plunge there is above them on the wall the device of
a white horse--a fine prancing animal, somewhat resembling the White
Horse of Kent.
The stairs, with oak panelling on either side of them, give a twist
before they reach the bottom, where is the modern restaurant that
occupies the site of what were originally known as the New White Horse
Cellars, but which are now called the Old White Horse Cellars, probably
on the _lucus a non lucendo_ principle, for they have been modernised
out of all recognition since the days when Charles Dickens recorded the
departure of Mr Pickwick from these Cellars on his coach journey down
to Bath.
The Old White Horse Cellars were originally on the Green Park side of
Piccadilly, and their number was 156, as some way-bills to be seen at
the present White Horse Cellars testify. This ground is now occupied
by the Ritz Hotel. Strype mentions the original cellar as being in
existence in 1720.
On the staircase walls of the New White Horse Cellars is a little
collection of prints and way-bills, caricatures, etchings, old bills of
Hatchett's Hotel, posters and advertisements from _The Times_ and other
papers of the hours at which the coaches for the west started. In this
curious little gallery of odds and ends are some documents relating
to the old cellar on the other side of the road. But the White Horse
Cellars were under Hatchett's in the great coaching days, from the year
of the battle of Waterloo to 1840. It was from Hatchett's that Jerry,
in Pierce Egan's book, took his departure when going back to Hawthorn
Hall, and said farewell to Tom and Logic, and it was in the travellers'
room of the White Horse Cellars, a title that was used alternatively
with "Hatchett's," that Mr Pickwick and his friends sheltered from the
rain, waiting for the Bath coach.
Hatchett's in Dickens's time was not the comfortable house that I
knew in the eighties, when the revival of stage-coaching was at its
height. Indeed, there could not be a picture of greater discomfort than
Dickens sketched in a few words when he wrote: "The travellers' room
at 'The White Horse Cellar' is, of course, uncomfortable; it would be
no travellers' room if it were not. It is the right-hand parlour, into
which an aspiring kitchen fireplace appears to have walked, accompanied
by a rebellious poker, tongs, and shovel. It is divided into boxes for
the solitary confinement of travellers, and is furnished with a clock,
a looking-glass, and a live waiter, which latter article is kept in
a small kennel for washing glasses, in a corner of the apartment."
Dickens's word picture of the scene at the start of the coach at
half-past seven on a damp, muggy and drizzly day is a fine pen-and-ink
sketch, and Cruikshank, in one of his caricatures, "The Piccadilly
Nuisance," shows very much the scene as Dickens described it, with the
orange-women and the sellers of all kinds of useless trifles on the
kerb; the coaches jostling each other, passengers falling off from
them, and the pavement an absolute hustle of humanity.
Cruikshank's various drawings and caricatures preserve the appearance
of Hatchett's of the old days in the memory better than any word
pictures could do. The bow-windows of the old hotel with many panes
of glass in them; the stiff pillared portico, with on it the name
"Hatchett's," and a little lamp before it, and above it the board with
the inscription, "The New White Horse Cellar. Coaches and waggons to
all parts of the kingdom." Above this board again was a painting of an
old white horse. I fancy that the title of the Cellars, when they were
on the other side of the way, must have been taken from some celebrated
old horse--though Williams, who was the first landlord of the original
cellars, is said to have given them their name as a compliment to the
House of Hanover, and that it was the white horse, not the cellar, that
was old.
There are various other legends with respect to the horse that gave
Hatchett's its title, one of them being that Abraham Hatchett, a
proprietor of the tavern, had an old white horse with a turn of speed
which had won him many a wager against more showy animals.
The entrance to the Cellars below Hatchett's, in the old days, was down
some very steep stairs just in front of one of the bow-windows, and an
oval notice, hanging from a little arch of iron, directed people down
into the depths to the booking-office.
My reminiscences of Hatchett's are of the later revivals of road
coaches; the days of old "Jim" Selby, the famous coachman who, though
everybody called him "old," died a comparatively young man. His grey
hair and his jolly, fat, rosy face gave him an appearance of being
older than he really was. Those were the days when the late Lord
Londesborough and Captain Hargreaves, Mr Walter Shoolbred, Captain
Beckett, Baron Oppenheim and Mr Edwin Fownes were well-known whips,
and when "Hughie" Drummond, and the host of other good fellows and
lively customers in whose veins the red blood flowed in a lively
current, who drank old port and despised early hours, were the men
about town. "Hughie" Drummond taking old "Jim" Selby out to dinner
after the arrival of the "Old Times" from Brighton and changing hats
with him, which generally took place early in the evening, is one of my
remembrances of Hatchett's. And many a time have I split a pint with
"Dickie-the-Driver," the oldest in standing amongst my friends, then
not the least lively of the young fellows, before climbing up on to the
coach at Hatchett's to go down to the Derby. For many years eight of
us, always the same men, went down by coach from Hatchett's on Derby
Day, always with "Dickie" driving out of London and the last stage on
to the downs, and our gallop down and up the hill on the course was a
really breakneck performance.
It was from Hatchett's that "Jim" Selby started on his celebrated
drive with the Brighton coach, "Old Times," to Brighton and back, for
a wager of a thousand pounds to five hundred against his accomplishing
the journey in eight hours. On the coach were: Selby himself, driving;
Captain Beckett, whom we all called "Partner"; Mr Carleton Blyth,
who still sends yearly from Bude his greeting of "Cheero" to his old
friends; Mr "Swish" Broadwood, Mr "Bob" Cosier, Mr A. F. M'Adam, and
the guard. Harrington Bird's picture of the coach during the galloping
stage, with the horses going at racing pace, gives an idea of how Selby
drove on that day when he had a clear road. The coach reached the "Old
Sip" at Brighton, having done the first half of the journey in just
under four hours; stayed there only long enough to turn the coach
round and to read a telegram from the old Duke of Beaufort, who was
most keenly interested in the revival of coaching, and who was a very
good man himself on the box seat--and then started again for London,
reaching the White Horse Cellars ten minutes under the stipulated time
and forty minutes within the record. I was one of the men amongst the
crowd that gathered to see the return of the coach and to cheer old
"Jim" Selby, who brought his last team in no more distressed than they
would have been doing their journey under ordinary circumstances. How
highly respected Selby was by all coaching men was shown by the long
string of stage-coaches, every coach on the road having suspended its
usual journey, which followed his body to the grave.
In those days the bill of fare at Hatchett's was roast beef or boiled
mutton and trimmings; duck and green peas, or fowl and bath-chap. There
was an inner sanctuary then called "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which was the
bar parlour, into which only the most favoured patrons of the house
were admitted, and Miss Wills, the manageress, used to keep any unruly
spirits very much in order.
When Hatchett's was rebuilt and changed its name it changed hands
very frequently, though the White Horse Cellars always remained a
restaurant. The Cercle de Luxe, a dining club, at one time occupied the
upper floors of the building, and then it became the Avondale Hotel,
with M. Garin as manager and M. Dutruz as chef. Since then the rooms
have been put to many uses, and are now, I see, once again in the
market.
It is the memory of what Hatchett's and the White Horse Cellars have
been in their old days--memories that haunt me like the sound of a horn
afar off on one of the great roads--that makes me disinclined nowadays
to eat a French dinner in what was a home of good English fare; and
whenever I lunch or dine in the White Horse Cellars to-day I always,
for the sake of old times, order a plate of soup, a mixed grill and a
scoop from the cheese. The three-and-sixpenny dinner of to-day is, I
have no doubt, a good one, and Mr Stump, the present manager, is most
courteous and anxious to oblige. I look at the menu when I am in the
restaurant, but for the old sake's sake I keep as close to the meals of
old days as the resources of the establishment allow me to do.
The White Horse Cellars of to-day is a modern, up-to-date restaurant,
below the level of the ground, though the ventilation is so excellent
and the lighting arrangements so good that one never has the sensation
of being in a cellar. Half-way down the staircase, just where the
little picture gallery commences, a door leads into a buffet. One's
great-coat and hat are taken at the bottom of the stairs, and then one
enters quite a lofty room with a groined roof, and with cosy nooks and
various extensions of the bigger room, which, I fancy, have been thrown
out under the side-walk above. The walls of the restaurant are of cream
colour; the ornamentation is in the style of Adams, and there is deep
rose colour in the arches of the roof. Many mirrors reflect the vistas
and give the rooms the appearance of being more extensive than they
really are: a string band is perched up in a little gallery; there are
palms here and there, and a bronze galloping horse in a recess does
something to recall the old horsy days of Hatchett's.
There are many little tables, each with its pink-shaded lamp, in
this restaurant, and it has a chic clientele, the "Nuts" of to-day
appearing to patronise it just as much as the bucks and the bloods,
the swells, and the "whips" of the last two generations used to. I
see pretty actresses sometimes dining at Hatchett's, and it is a very
cheerful restaurant in which to take a meal. It is, I believe, always
crowded at supper-time, and the Glorias, the two excellent dancers who
appear earlier in the evening on the Empire stage, dance the Tango, at
midnight, in and out of the little tables.
But to me the charm of the White Horse Cellars is that I can live again
in memory, when lunching or dining there, those joyous days of youth
and fresh air, when a jolly coach-load used to start from before its
door for a day of delight in sitting behind good horses driven by a
good whip, listening to the music of the shod hooves and the guard's
horn, receiving a greeting from everyone along the road, and feeling
that no king on a throne is happier than a man riding behind a picked
team on a good coach. Motor cars have their uses and their pleasures,
but they seem to have killed the fuller-blooded joys that came with
coaching.
LVI
THE MONICO
The Monico, in Piccadilly Circus, which is both café and restaurant, is
an establishment which has been brought to its present prosperity by
Swiss industry and Swiss thrift. The original M. Monico, the father of
the present proprietors of the restaurant, came from the same village
in the Val Blegno, in the Italian provinces of Switzerland, as did the
Gattis. M. Monico was with that Gatti, the great-uncle of the present
Messrs Gatti, who sold _gaufres_ and penny ices in Villiers Street, and
who when Hungerford Market was swept away and Charing Cross Station
built established the Gatti's restaurant under the arches.
About fifty years ago, just at the time that MM. A. and S. Gatti were
establishing themselves in the Adelaide Gallery, young M. Monico, who
died only three years ago, was also making an independent start on the
road to fortune. Looking about for a site on which to build a café he
had found, off Tichborne Street, a large yard where coaches and waggons
stood, and round which was stabling for horses. This yard he leased,
and built on its site the Grand Café with the present International
Hall above it. M. Monico had intended to put up a tall building, but
the neighbours objected to this; he was obliged to alter his plans, and
in consequence, whereas the café is a very high room, the International
Hall above it is rather squat in its proportions. Those were the days
in which billiards was a game much in favour, and in the International
Hall above the café M. Monico established a number of billiard-tables.
When the craze for billiards died away the long upper room, with its
arched ceiling, became a banqueting hall. Fifty years ago the licensing
magistrates looked with just as much suspicion on any new enterprises
in restaurants as they do at the present day, and the Monico could not
at first obtain a licence to sell wines and spirits. This, however, was
later on granted to M. Monico.
I fancy that there must have been a good deal of the Italian combative
spirit in old M. Monico, for he seems to have been at loggerheads with
more than one of his neighbours. To-day, when you have gone in under
the glass canopy with two gables which protects the Piccadilly Circus
entrance, when you have passed the little stall for the sale of foreign
newspapers and have come into the café which acts as an ante-room to
the great gilded saloon, you will notice that part of this café has a
solid ceiling and that the other half is glazed over. The glazed-over
portion was, in old M. Monico's time, an open space, and into this open
space a neighbour, a perfumer, had the right to bring carts and horses
in the course of his business. This right the perfumer exercised on
occasion, to the great annoyance of M. Monico, and the present Messrs
Monico recall with a smile how the perfumer would often bring in a
great van with two horses to deliver a couple of small packages that
any messenger boy could have carried.
The clearing away of a block of houses when Piccadilly Circus was given
its present proportions gave the Monico its entrance on to that centre,
and when Shaftesbury Avenue was driven through the network of small
streets in Soho, M. Monico and his sons obtained a second frontage for
their restaurant and built the block which contains the grill-room,
the buffet and banqueting-rooms, now topped by the new masonic temple,
the latest addition to the Monico.
The Monico of to-day is one of those great bee-hives of dining-rooms
that cater for every class of diner. It has its little café and its
big _à la carte_ dining-saloon, its grill-room, its banqueting-rooms
and its German beer cellar down in the basement. It has two marble
staircases, one leading down to Piccadilly Circus and one to
Shaftesbury Avenue, and its big saloon, the original café, is as
gorgeous a hall as gilding can make it. Its walls are of gold and
mirrors and raised ornamentation, with the windows high up, and with
a golden balcony for the musicians. It has a gilded ceiling and its
pilasters are also golden. An orchestra plays in this room, whereas
in the grill-room those who like their meals without orchestral
accompaniment can eat them in peace. Up and down the great gilded
room walk four _maîtres d'hôtel_ in frock-coats and black ties, and
a battalion of waiters are busy running from tables to kitchen. The
bill of fare in the gilded chamber is a most comprehensive one, and
any man of any nationality can find some of the dishes of his country
on it. It is a beer restaurant as well as a wine restaurant, and the
simplest possible meal, very well cooked, can be eaten there as well as
elaborate feasts.
The grill-room is less gorgeous in its decorations, though its buff
marble pillars and walls are handsome enough. It is in this room
that the _table d'hôte_ dinners at half-a-crown and three-and-six
are served, and it is here that many men of business feed, and feed
excellently well. Not many days ago I lunched in the grill-room, my
host being a gourmet who knew all the resources of the establishment,
and I enjoyed the _sole Monico_, a sole with an excellent white sauce;
a woodcock _flambé_ and a salad of tender lettuce which, like the
beautiful peaches with which we finished our repast, must have been
grown in some Southern, sunshiny clime. I also enjoyed the cheese
_fondue_, made, I think, from the _recette_ that Brillat Savarin set
down in his "Physiologie du Goût."
The Monico has gained special celebrity for its banquets, and the
requests for dates for such feasts made to the Messrs Monico have been
so overwhelming that they have turned the Renaissance Saloon, which
used to be devoted to a _table d'hôte_ dinner, into a banqueting-room,
and have redecorated it for its new uses.
It remains in my memory that men who were present at the banquet
given to Lord Milner in the International Hall of the Monico before
he left England to take up his duties as Pro-Consul in South Africa,
and who talked to me afterwards of the feast, told me that it was
the best public dinner, best served and best cooked, that they had
ever eaten, and last year, when I dined at the Poincaré dinner of
the Ligue des Gourmands, which was held in the Renaissance Room (the
occasion on which M. Escoffier's "creation" of the _poulet Poincaré_
was first disclosed to a discriminating gathering), I thought then
that M. Sieffert's (the _chef_) handiwork was worthy of all the praise
lavished on it, and that M. G. Ramoni, the manager, had arranged most
admirably all the details of the banquet. The Renaissance Room now
quite justifies its title, for its decoration of peacock blue panels
and frames of gilded briar, with strange birds perched on the sprays,
somewhat suggests Burne-Jones and the colouring of his school.
As a specimen of a Monico banquet I cannot do better than give you one
eaten by that famous Kentish cricketing club, the Band of Brothers, the
menu of whose dinner bears their badge in dark and light blue, and has
also a bow of their ribbon:
Huîtres de Whitstable
Fantaisie Epicurienne.
Tortue verte en Tasse.
Turbotin poché, Sauce Mousseline.
Julienne de Sole Parisienne.
Mousse de Volaille Régence.
Côtelettes d'Agneau Rothschild.
Pommes Anna.
Punch Romaine.
Bécassine sur Canapé.
Salade de Laitue.
Escalope de Homard Pompadour.
Pêche Flambé au Kirsch.
Paillettes au Parmesan.
Fruits.
Corbeille de Friandises
Café.
VINS.
Amontillado.
Marcobrunner, 1904.
Bollinger and Co., 1904.
Lanson, 1906.
Martinez Port, 1896.
Grand Fine Champagne, 1875.
Many of the banquets given at the Monico are masonic ones, and the new
temple at the top of the house on the Shaftesbury Avenue side is a very
splendid shrine, with walls of marble and a dome round which the signs
of the zodiac circle, and with doors and furniture of great beauty.
LVII
THE ITALIAN INVASION
The plains of Lombardy, the pleasant mountain land of Emilia and the
champaign that surrounds Turin, are studded with comfortable villas,
the property of successful Italian restaurateurs who have made a
comfortable little fortune in London and who go to their own much-loved
country to spend the autumn of their days. Every young North Italian
waiter who comes to England believes that in the folds of his napkin
he holds one of these pleasant villas, just as every French conscript
in Napoleonic days thought that he, amongst all his fellows, alone
felt the extra weight of the field-marshal's baton in his knapsack. No
race in the world is more thrifty and more industrious than are these
North Italians, and they rival the Swiss in their aptitude for making
considerable sums of money by charging very small prices.
Spain and Great Britain are usually classed together as the two
countries in which the natives know least of economy in housekeeping
and cookery, and the Italians, spying the wastefulness of the land,
have descended on England as a friendly invading force, whereas the
Swiss have taken Spain in hand. There is no Spanish town in which
there is not a café Suizio, and there are very few English towns in
which an Italian name is not found over a restaurant, which is often a
pastry-cook's shop as well.
I have in preceding chapters written of some of the restaurants owned
by Italians in London, but were I to deal at length with all the
well-managed restaurants, large and small, controlled by Italians in
London, I should have to extend the size of my book to very swollen
proportions, so I propose to mention briefly those Italian restaurants
at which at one time or another I have lunched or dined with
satisfaction.