in another chapter of this book the change that has come over london feeding has already been indicated. the times when respectability edicted that one should eat only within the family circle, when all that could be obtained abroad was a stodgy meal of bread and cheese at a coffee-house, or the lightest refreshment at vauxhall or cremorne, are long gone by; to-day, almost as many meals are consumed at restaurants as under homely roofs. it was a long battle the restaurants waged under the early banners of hatchett’s or the café royal and, strange to say, the grand hotel. yes, once upon a time the grand hotel, that ancestor, was the latest thing; in the eighties it was ‘the thing’ to lunch or stay at the grand hotel. but, in those days, ‘the thing’ was rather a scandalous thing, and if one lunched or dined away from home one felt dissipated; one had to choose one’s company when taking a meal thus, for the worst was easily thought of one in 1880, while to-day, the best is hoped for. (there is, perhaps, no great difference between the two attitudes.)
in those days the home was a british institution; it figured in the solemn list which numbered suet pudding, the royal family, bustles, tennyson, the evangelical attitude, and chenille decoration of mantelpieces. the home had its rights; indeed, it had all rights; it was the place where you ought to want to be, and far from which you would naturally feel remorse; it was the thing you had to ‘keep together,’ the thing you had to ‘make,’ to ‘save’; your self-abnegation should have told you that you had no rights except to add the pillar of your person to those of the porch. it has gone, this victorian rectitude; it has gone the way of dundreary whiskers and of weepers round the hat; i suspect that the restaurant habit, as it is called, has turned some of the sods for its grave. there is something relaxing in a restaurant, at least to a people such as ours, afflicted with a considerable sense of private licence and of public dignity. restaurant dining64 outrages in us a sort of modesty, and, like most puritans, we rather enjoy having our modesty outraged; it is the revenge of the flesh, and it pleases us godly men to discover in ourselves a streak of the devil. we feel this rather more in the foreign restaurants than in the british; in the british eating-houses, where there is no menu, but only a bill of fare, where understandable things, such as mock-turtle soup, boiled mutton with caper sauce, and roly-poly are offered us, we know too well where we are; we eat, instead of giving way to greediness; by avoiding that temptation we avoid one of the cardinal sins, and more’s the pity. in foreign restaurants, however, where neither the name of the dish nor the form it assumes is understandable, we can develop a sense of sin; we can do this because our feet are set on foreign ways, all of which lead to babylon. foreign waiters address us, and there is no virtue in their eyes; they look like assassins, and it is thrilling to think that they may be assassins, or nihilists, or grand-dukes. foreigners dine at the tables; their women are too smart to be good; the yellow-backed novels they bring in must surely be undesirable; they are poorly clad, which proves that they lead sinful lives; they are richly dressed, which points to evil courses. they are foreign. is not the drury lane villain foreign?
soho market
from this sense of sin arose in the beginning the popularity of the soho restaurants. i do not know when they began to be popular. some, such as the restaurant d’italie, the monico, the villa villa, are old stagers, but when i first came to town their customers were mostly men; if couples came they generally included a man who did not care to take his womenkind to such places, but did not mind taking other people’s womenkind. (thus it worked out just the same in the end.) the growth of london, which compelled men to live farther and farther out, favoured the restaurants, for distant dormitories drive men to proximate refectories. the soho restaurant grew in numbers, together with the cabins, the lyons’s, the j.p.’s, and others, but at the same time, because they provided pleasant fare at low prices, they gained advertisement from the men who first frequented65 them. thus the women heard of them, and they liked them immensely, for the soho restaurant provides exactly the sort of meal that many women want: next to nothing, pleasantly served. so, in the last dozen years, they have prospered enormously; the early ones, such as brice’s, le diner fran?ais, au petit riche, found many rivals such as the moulin d’or, the mont blanc, chantecler, maxim’s, the rendezvous, etc. their career has been curiously uniform. nearly all have been started by a chef, a waiter who had saved up a small working capital or married well. being foreigners, the proprietors liked good cooking, and in the beginning every soho restaurant offered a good meal. to-day there are still a few where the proprietor circulates among the tables, asking you whether you are satisfied, and na?vely begs congratulation, but that state of mind is rare. so long as the customers were mainly foreign, the standard was kept up: small, important, subtle things were done, such as steaming vegetables instead of boiling them, such as putting in salt while the meat cooked. but the englishmen who came to lunch, having advertised their wonderful find, grew very proud of it, began to bring their friends, their sisters, and, nowadays, even their aunts. they came in increasing numbers, and the proprietors discovered three things: that there were in london more londoners than foreigners; that the londoners were willing to pay more than the foreigners; that they either didn’t know what they ate, or that they didn’t care. as very few of the proprietors were in business as artists; as, moreover, they grew discouraged when they went round the tables and asked people whether they had enjoyed the stuffed mushrooms and were asked: ‘were they stuffed?’ they ceased to take pains. they found out what the english customer wanted: paper flowers on the tables, japanese fans, and dishes with incomprehensible names. so, one after the other, they began to cater for a purely english clientèle; a good many have discovered that the english customers expect made-up meats instead of, say, roast beef, and are willing to take those meats on trust; so the wise proprietor, in many cases, makes up his menu from the dishes left over from the night before at the66 carlton or the ritz. after all, he gives them what they want: a dissipated atmosphere. not long ago, i watched four school mistresses in a state of considerable dissipation. they sat in the little restaurant, laughing rather more shrilly than they would have at simpson’s, as if excited by the rather excessive effect of prettiness, the mauve walls, the blue and yellow curtains, the pretty fringed shades. oh, how one understood sally bishop! how the mellow spirit of mr temple thurston brooded with folded wings over the little place! the school mistresses listened hungrily for french, which was being spoken by the attendants, and they kept a wary eye upon their fellow lunchers: sober couples drinking claret; young men and women, the latter unpowdered, the former oppressed by sartorial self-righteousness. there was nothing against the lunch; it was a nice, ordinary little lunch; the sort of well-cooked little lunch that could be turned out by the gross, out of a machine, all the year round, every little lunch alike, for ever and ever. but my school mistresses were tasting dissipation while avoiding vice.
in true cooking one does not avoid vice. one courts vice. one says: ‘eating is a sensuality, and we shall satisfy our senses as much as we can. we shall sing hymns to it; people have sung hymns to drinking, why not to eating? we are not ashamed of “feasting” our eyes and our ears; why not our palates?’ some people understand this. mr anatole france sums it up well when analysing a castelnaudary stew:—
‘the castelnaudary stew contains the preserved thighs of geese, whitened beans, bacon, and a little sausage. to be good it must have been cooked lengthily upon a gentle fire. clemence’s stew has been cooking for twenty years. she puts into the stew sometimes goose or bacon, sometimes sausage or beans, but it is always the same stew. the foundation endures; this ancient and precious foundation gives the stew the quality that in the picture of old venetian masters you find in the women’s amber flesh.’
if you are a proper person you will call this disgusting; you will feel that this is an indecent subject, and that an author who67 dares to head his chapter ‘soups and stews’ ought in another world to be chained for a thousand years to the ghost of colonel newnham davis. that is a legacy of the past; not more than twenty years ago it was indeed indecent to discuss food, and if a vulgarian did so, the only thing the lady of the house could reply was: ‘oh, really!’ the war has altered that, and i am inclined to hope that people who endlessly discussed the difference between butter and margarine, the advantages to be found in neck of mutton, will maintain these not ignoble preoccupations. i believe they will, for they were moving that way; they had already left far behind the victorian lady with a wasp waist who ‘daintily pecked at her dinner like a little bird.’ they may one day adopt brillat-savarin’s dictum: ‘let me cook your ministers’ dishes, and they will give you good laws.’
but, leaving aside soho, which is, after all, only the culinary frontier, we find that the restaurant has spread over the whole of london, carrying everywhere its gospel of satisfaction. this gospel takes various forms, for restaurants fall into different classes according to their locality and their prices. there are the pompous, like the carlton, the savoy, the popular café; there are the distinguished, such as claridge’s, jules’s, dieudonné’s; there are the fanciful, such as pagani, verrey’s, old gambrinus, bellomo’s, gustave, the savoyard, the chinese, the japanese, the greek; there is the slab-of-meat class, such as gatti’s, simpson’s, to say nothing of the shepherd’s bush restaurant, and the tulse hill hotel; above all there is the restaurant of the joseph lyons civilisation, the strand palace hotel, the regent palace, the strand corner house.
they all deserve their little word, and it is difficult to say of each of them just what should be said, because they have so much in common, yet are so far apart, like brothers and sisters. there is a flavour of joseph lyons at the savoy, while gatti has reggiori for a little relative. yet, when one comes to know them well, they are all so different. no one, for instance, could mistake the carlton for the savoy; both have a broad spaciousness born of their size, of the comparative expensiveness of their meats;68 both are lofty and white and clean; their glass is pretty good, and their plate so-so. but while the carlton maintains a certain air of having selected from among the not very select, the savoy shows little sign of having tried that much. to lunch at the savoy makes one feel not so much that one is among the rich as among the well-to-do on short leave. the savoy is sober; its luxury is quieter than that of the joseph lyons restaurant; in a way, with its top lights, its flowers, it recalls the joseph lyons civilisation; the flowers are real, but not much more so; the band is more discreet, but it plays the same tunes. its population, too, is different; at the savoy, you do not see the young clerk, but you do see what some of the young clerks will become if they are lucky; many foreigners in a state of gormandise and bejewelment; rather dowdy people, too, the well-off dowdy, whose sideboards must be taken to pieces before they can be got into country cottages. the business element is strong. somehow, one tells a business man fairly easily; he wears good clothes that nearly fit him; his hair is well cut, his cheek is well shaved, but a consciousness of the barber’s art hangs about his head; his elegance is not a natural product, it is one of the goods which he produces; he misses ‘the line’ which some sediment of aristocracy or musical-comedy upstart achieves better than will ever the business man’s solidities. there is too much meat upon his cheeks; you feel that he is a little too rich, just as his eyes are a little too bright; he is like a very new knife that has not yet learned to cut.
the savoy
others, too, americans, who are happier in those big hotels than any of the english, because hotel-life is, in many of them, an acquired characteristic. they are interesting, those savoy americans, abundant women, exquisite girls made of beautifully tinted steel-plate, those men with the square shoulders, square chins, square heads, cubic cheeks; you know, without being told, that they are connected with the cinema trade, or that they are producing a play by mr montague glass or mr bayard veiller, or that they are selling many motor-cars, or something like that. (the american who comes to europe for the purpose of exporting69 art to pittsburg is not found at the savoy; he goes to chelsea and fitzroy square.) and yet it is not a disagreeable place; its breadth, the airy width of plate-glass that looks out upon the thames, the cheapness and the adequacy of its food, all these are part of the new restaurant of the new civilisation, which has replaced the little taverns in the little corners of the town. it is no use being sentimental over the little restaurant, or, indeed, over anything little: there are too many of us for anything little to be much more than a survival. if restaurants did not feed us a thousand at a time, they would never manage to feed us all.
one thinks of that in the small restaurants that have survived, such as verrey’s. to many people it seems a queer thing to lunch at verrey’s; it seems rather out of date, and, indeed, when one approaches that frontage, painted a sort of faded 1850 blue and provided with coloured glass, one has a sense of antiquity. inside antiquity is still more striking, for the big, square room under the skylight manages at the same time to be drab in colour and moorish gothic in architecture. it still has the many mirrors of the ’fifties, an air of being comfortably off enough to afford to be dowdy. rakish and dowdy! can anything better translate the amusements of two generations ago? to-day, verrey’s gives you a fair lunch, and at its café tables, which are somehow more substantial than the café tables of paris, you understand what england thought the continent must be like in the days of the grand tour.
there are other places, fanciful as verrey’s. there is bellomo’s, in jermyn street, a modest, pleasant little place, a long, narrow back room filled with agreeable young couples. bellomo’s is rather like a young-old man, with its panelled wainscoting, its wallpaper of faded gold, and its moulded, early victorian frieze. there is something solid about its dumb waiters; bellomo’s is somehow benevolent.
but then verrey’s and bellomo’s are within limited flights of fancy. the curious gastronome will, in london, easily find queerer places and foods. at pagani’s he can come to understand that risotto may well be eaten in valhalla; at gambrinus’s, the regent70 street one, of course, he could, before the war, when it was german, find unexpected delight in liver-sausage sandwiches, with perfectly sour gherkins, and, heaven of heavens, really cold beer. in those days it was decorated with antlers, enormous fanciful jugs, out of which you enormously drank the frozen gold of that beer. i think it has become belgian since the war; i am not quite sure, for i went there only once after the transfer.
but the truly curious go not to foreigners like pagani or gambrinus, or even to gustave, where the foods are truly french, or to the savoyard, where they are french and eatable under the eye of strange pictures; the truly curious go not to the foreigner, but to the professional foreigner, to restaurants such as the greek, the chinese, or the japanese. of these the chinese is the most attractive. i mean the cathay, next door to the monico, not the chinese restaurants in limehouse, where nothing is eatable, and nothing is tragic, and nothing is coloured, let mr thomas burke say what he likes. a lunch at the chinese restaurant is really an adventure, for nearly all the dishes are made of the same things, and yet they all taste different. there is an admirable dish, hang-yang-kai-ting, made of fried chicken with almonds and bamboo shoots. that is a simple one, and the curious will find more profit in a dish the name of which i have forgotten, which contains fried sliced pork, celery, beans, sprouts, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and green chutney. eat that, and it is a very large, overflowing, savoury portion; flavour it well with chop-suey (which you can call liquid salt if you are a foreign devil). eat it immediately after chicken liver soup, and if you do not forget before swallowing the bamboo shoots to chew, and chew, and chew, then a true mellowness will be known to you. also, do not forget the great bowl of boiled rice, pure, white rice, perfectly dried, not sticky rice à la a.b.c., but rice where every grain remembers that it has a personality. don’t ask for chopsticks: the best people in china do not use chopsticks; they use forks. (there used to be a chinese restaurant where they provided chopsticks for the english; it was great fun watching them pour their food down their sleeves with that conscious air of duty that71 seems to overwhelm the englishman experiencing pleasure.) and don’t forget dessert, ginger in syrup, fire in the midst of sweetness, like a red-haired girl; and ly-chee, large, sweet, white nuts in an opalescent syrup, extraordinarily good.
but, in a way, all those places, the very rich and the very odd, are running on their own ticket, and do not express the times in which we live. our modern times are the strand corner house. i should not wonder if many of my readers had never been into the strand corner house; that is, if they are incurious of life. if they repent their acceptance of things as they are, they will find an unexpectedly large building decorated with heavily flowered stucco mouldings, with plate-glass, with stained glass, with panels of crimson satin. they will find light, co-operative luxury; superposed tiers, bearing crowds of people lunching on the top of one another’s heads, and at the bottom of a deep well, a band that can be heard above the clatter of twelve hundred pairs of jaws. a thousand people at a time really eat all together at the strand corner house, and, in a way, no wonder. the place is quite clean, not offensive in its appurtenances, and can supply three courses for less than two shillings; the music is the ordinary dance or sentimental music, the sort that makes you feel friendly or affectionate as required. the public of the strand corner house is, therefore, the world. its variety is much greater than that of any other place. one might think that this public would consist exclusively of flappers and their escorts, and, indeed, the flapper is prevalent, though she comes in threes and fours quite as much as more ostentatiously with a ‘boy.’ also the suburbs, middle-aged couples, when the wife has been shopping in st paul’s churchyard and has strayed down the strand; unexpectedly you see people with an air of modish vanity, dashing people who smoke cigarettes and drink claret, damning both the expense and the consequences. though very few of the frequenters could be mistaken for members of the classes, none are members of the masses; they seem to be in a state of social suspension; they are, especially the girls, of a rather crystalline type. i mean that you realise their good looks at once instead72 of by degrees. if you look about you, you will not fail to find half a dozen faces that can give you the knock ... only, if you look round the other way, you will probably see another half a dozen faces that can give you exactly the same knock, and when one is an old londoner and has been getting the knock all one’s life, well, one unfortunately comes to stand it rather well.
these great crowds of young people with a little money in their pocket and much zest in their hearts tend to fall into uniform types. the men nearly all buy their collars at the regent street branches of city hosiers; the girls seem to skim the lighter froth of the big west end stores, except that marshall’s knows them not. this produces a uniform quality: they have to overtake the fashions, and so become a little outrées.
women, more readily than men, respond to the stratifications of restaurants, because they are more adaptable. their very clothes show it; women are like cats, they have no bones, and easily suit themselves to bell-mouthed skirt or hobble. the female form is infinitely squashable and extensible; any fashion can transform it, and if a woman has the wit to shun the becoming, she can always be in the fashion if she dares. if she fails, it is because she does not dare to underline her deficiency. if i were a woman and extraordinarily tall, i should dress myself in vertical stripes; if i were very short and very stout, i should insert the hoops of barrels under my skirt; i should be hideous, but i should be it, for the essence of true fashion is extremism. i said fashion, not elegance; that is quite another story, but then, to be elegant you must be born as the greyhound, and if you strive to elegance you are more likely to resemble the mouse. fashion is much easier.
shopping
not only in her clothes, but in herself, does the metropolitan girl define her city. she is always the creature of the day, who heavily overlays the creature of all time. in soups and stews she has little part, for a woman is a poor partner at the table. she eats and drinks, as a rule, without much science or much intentness; she eats too little, she bolts; she does not realise that she is doing something important and artistic. oh, it is not that she73 is lifted high above material desires, for, indeed, certain articles of food, such as chocolates, certain drinks, such as liqueurs, make her accept the society of the dullest and the most dreary, but such trifles are merely the preludes and the coronals of the true soup and the true stew. still, she is the decoration and the charm of the table; when mr lauzerte said that where there are no women there is no true elegance, he was speaking the truth. in matters of food they care very little what it is and very much what it looks. also, because few of them neglect an advantage and prove the old adage that what woman most desires is mastery over man, they never ignore what they look upon as a gross means of seduction. it was a woman, i think, who told another to ‘feed the brute.’ what an illusion! if you have to deal with a brute, indeed, you can keep him quiet by feeding him, just as you mollify cerberus with a sop, but to keep a man quiet ... how unnecessary in the early days of marriage! and how disastrous after! it is unconsciously, i think, that women strive to please the palate of men, that is they are unconscious of the effects of such a course. unless they are very unhappy they do not want to soothe the sullen creature; they wish to produce in him a light and airy grace, a not very promising ambition. for some men, who are in possession of all their senses, will feel true gratitude, which is akin to love, to the one who knows how so to flatter them. one of them said to me not long ago: ‘it makes the day easier to feel that i shall go back to-night to a perfectly cooked meal, and a perfectly dressed wife.’ i am not quite sure whether he said that, or whether it was ‘a perfectly dressed wife, and a perfectly cooked meal,’ but anyhow, it does not matter, for in that man’s mind the two delights had grown mixed. that is what every woman knows, and perhaps she is wise as well as humble in hoping to mingle with the potage velouté some of the old philtres of love.
