The Gourmet's Guide To London - free ebook by Lieut.-Col. (Nathaniel) Newnham-Davis

Author of "The Gourmet's Guide to Europe" NEW YORK BRENTANO'S 1914 PRINTED BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND

The pleasures of the table are common to all ages and ranks, to all countries and times; they not only harmonise with all the other pleasures, but remain to console us for their loss.— Brillat Savarin....

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PREFACE

In describing in this book some of the restaurants and taverns in and near London, I have selected those that seem to me to be typical of the various classes, giving preference to those of each kind which have some picturesque incident in their history, or are situated amidst beautiful surroundings, or possess amongst their personnel a celebrated chef or maître d'hôtel . The English language has not enough nicely graduated terms of praise to enable me to give to a fraction its value to each rest

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I OLD ENGLISH FARE

When a foreigner or one of our American cousins, or a man from one of the Colonies, comes to England, the first question he generally asks is: "Where can I get a typical good old English dinner?" Good old English fare is by no means too abundant in London—and old English fare I would define as being the very best native material, cooked in the plainest possible manner. We talk of English cookery, though it should really be termed British cookery, for Irish stew and Welsh lamb, Scotch beef and co

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II SIMPSON'S IN THE STRAND

A wide entrance glowing with light, with Simpson's plain to see, on a wrought-iron sign above it, is in the great block of the Savoy Hotel building in the Strand, for the new Simpson's, though it retains all its old associations and its old manager and its old head cook—Mr Davey, the polite, white-haired little ruler of the roast, who wears a velvet cap, and who for forty-six years has seen the joints turn before the vast open fire in the kitchen—is now under the rule of the great organisation t

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THE CHESHIRE CHEESE

Doctor Samuel Johnson stands in bronze before St Clement Danes and faces his beloved Fleet Street. If the great dictionary maker took his eyes off the book he holds in his hands, got down from his pedestal without knocking over the inkpot which is perilously near his clumsy old feet, and started for a walk down the street he loved so well, his remarks on the changes that have been made by time and the architects would be instructive. What would he say to Street's Law Courts? And with what sesqui

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IV THE CARLTON

If all the great French chefs all the world over were canvassed for an opinion as to which amongst them is the greatest cook of the day, I am sure that the majority of votes would be in favour of M. Auguste Escoffier, the Maître-Chef of the Carlton Restaurant in London. When any restaurant is exceeding successful, whether it appeals to popular taste, or to the taste of the most cultured classes, there is sure to be amongst those men who have brought it fame or brought it popularity, some strongl

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AU PETIT RICHE. MOULIN D'OR

There is a little restaurant in Old Compton Street, the Au Petit Riche, with the outside of which I was acquainted for some years before I put foot inside it. It so evidently kept itself to itself that I felt that my presence might be resented. It has little casemented windows in white frames, and inside the windows are muslin curtains, on a rail, hung sufficiently high to prevent anyone from looking over them. Below the windows are green tiles, and above it a stretch of little panes of bottle-g

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AT THE IMPERIAL RESTAURANT

My little French cousin who has married the Comte de St Solidor (if that is not his exact title it is, literally, next door to it) has brought her Breton husband across the Channel to make the acquaintance of his English relatives, and is desperately anxious that he shall not be depressed by London. He is a jolly, round-faced Frenchman, with a rather straggly light beard and a great head of intractable light hair, and, were it not that he cannot speak a word of our language, might pass for a you

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VII THE CAFÉ ROYAL

One of the questions people are fond of asking and, like "jesting Pilate," do not stay to have answered, is, "Which is the best place in London at which to dine?" This is generally only a prologue to their opinion on the subject, but when it is an inquiry, and not an overture, I always reply by another question, "Whom are you going to take out to dine?" for there are so many "best places" that the selection of the right one depends entirely on what are the tastes of the person, or persons, you w

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VIII OYSTER-HOUSES

The great catastrophe of my life, I think, was that the first oyster I ate was a bad one. I was at school for a year or two at Dedham, as a preparation for Harrow, and Dedham is in Essex, and not far from Colchester. An old man used to wheel a barrow of oysters to the playing field, and dispensed his shell-fish at a penny an oyster. One day when I was in funds I thought that I would begin to enjoy the luxuries of life, and bought an oyster. That oyster was a bad one. Not just an ordinary bad oys

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IX WHITEBAIT AT GREENWICH

Gone are the great days of the whitebait dinners at Blackwall and Greenwich. No longer does The Morning Post ever publish such a paragraph as this, "Yesterday the Cabinet Ministers went down the river in the ordnance barges to Lovegrove's West India Dock Tavern, Blackwall, to partake of their annual fish dinner. Covers were laid for thirty-five gentlemen," which appeared on 10th September 1835. No longer is there a great rivalry between the two Greenwich taverns, the Trafalgar and the Ship. The

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X THE CECIL

I wonder whether Jabez Balfour, the genius who jumped at Park Lane and landed on Broadmoor, ever comes to London from his country retreat, where, under another name, he earns his daily bread, and looks at the great palaces which were one of his money-spinning schemes and notes the changes that are made in them. He certainly would scarcely recognise to-day in the modern Hotel Cecil the great red-brick and stone block of chambers and flats which first grew up, some seventeen or eighteen years ago,

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XI CLARIDGE'S

I reach back in memory farther in touch with Claridge's than with any other hostelry in London, One of the stories of her early life that my mother often told me when I was a small boy was how my grandfather, as crotchety an elderly widower as ever ruled an Indian district, when he finally retired from the service of John Company, arrived in London with his bullock trunks and sandalwood boxes lined with tin, his bedding rolled up in bundles, his guns, his fly-whisks, and palm-fans, and all the s

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XII THE EUSTACE MILES RESTAURANT

Old "Rats," which is the disrespectful title by which most of his friends call Major-General Sir Ulysses Ratbourne, late of the Bundlekund Fusiliers, was holding forth to his crony, Colonel Bunthunder, late of the same distinguished regiment, in the hall of the Cutlass and Cross-bow Club as I passed through it, and the General paused for a second in his denunciation of Radicals and Socialists to say that he wanted to have a word with me, and then finished his peroration. Colonel Bunthunder mutte

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XIII THE PRINCES' RESTAURANT

When the house for the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours—that classic stone building with busts of great painters in the ovals that ornament its façade, busts on which the sparrows perch and watch the traffic in Piccadilly—was put up in the early eighties, there was space below the galleries for some shops and for a large hall. It occurred to somebody, probably M. Benoist, whose great charcutier's shop was just over the way, that Princes' Hall was eminently suitable to be a dining-roo

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XIV THE CRITERION

The East Room at the Criterion is a trophy of one of woman's victories over man, for it was one of the first, if not the very first, restaurant-rooms designed and decorated to harmonise with feminine frocks and frills, and made beautiful that mankind should bring beautiful womankind there to eat things delicate. In the sixties, restaurants were few and far between, and were mostly places where men dined without their feminine belongings. But all this was changed in the seventies, and the East Ro

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XV SOME CHOP-HOUSES

Many of the City chop-houses nestle together in the alleys and courts between Cornhill and Lombard Street. There, on either side of one of the narrow little passages, you will find Simpson's Chop-houses, with pleasant grey-green walls to their rooms and a window in which simple food, cooked and uncooked, is shown as bait to draw in the hungry passer-by; and there in Castle Court is the George and Vulture, which is also Thomas' Chop-rooms, which dates back to 1660, is proud of its Dickens' tradit

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XVI SOME GRILL-ROOMS

The modern grill-room we owe, I think, to the Americans, for the travelling American, who has his own very sensible ideas as to what comfort is, does not wish every night of his life to attire himself in a "claw-hammer" evening coat, but he feels that without that garment he would be out of place in the restaurant of any of the fashionable hotels. The grill-room gives him an excellent dinner, just as long or just as short as he likes, served quickly, in luxurious surroundings, and he can dress a

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XVII ROMANO'S

Alfonso Nicolino Romano, a head waiter at the Café Royal, in 1874 bought with his savings a small fried fish shop in the Strand, converted it into a bar and restaurant, and in addition to his own name on its front added Café Vaudeville, for it was, and is, almost next door to the Vaudeville Theatre. Romano's in those days possessed a central window flanked by two doors, one leading into the bar and the other to the rooms above. In the window as an ornament was a small aquarium which contained go

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XVIII IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

One of our legislators had very kindly asked me to dine with him at the House of Commons, at eight-fifteen p.m. , and had told me that he would meet me at the public entrance. When I mentioned his name to the civil young policeman at the outer door he touched his helmet and said that my host had just gone through, so I followed on his tracks. I went past Westminster Hall, which was in splints, for the ceiling was under repair, and along that other great hall where statesmen of the past stand loo

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AT THE TROCADERO

The Commissionaire at the centre entrance to the Trocadero greets me with "Regimental dinner, sir? First floor, leave your coat and hat to the right." A very intelligent man this commissionaire, an old soldier who knows another old soldier when he sees him. I leave my coat and hat as directed, ascend in the lift, and am disgorged into a corridor, the walls of which are covered with an inlay of gold Venetian glass tesseræ, pay the very small sum that subscribers to the Regimental Dinner Club are

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A HALF-GUINEA DINNER AT THE TROCADERO

No account of the Trocadero would be complete without an allusion to the table d'hôte dinners which are served in the great hall of the restaurant, and I do not think that I can do better than reprint the account of a half-guinea dinner I gave there some ten years ago to a small Harrow boy. The Mr Lyons of the article is now Sir Joseph, and I fancy that the Messrs Salmon, who are now County Councillors and members of many other important bodies, are too busy to show even such an important person

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KETTNER'S LE DINER FRANÇAIS

I know as a result of my early training in Miss Woodman's school for the "sons of the nobility and gentry" in Somerset Street, off Orchard Street, that a piece of land almost entirely surrounded by water is called a peninsula. But I was never instructed in any school as to there being a special name for a theatre almost entirely surrounded by restaurants. If there is such a name it should be applied to the Palace Theatre, for restaurants have sprouted up about it just as grass grows round the fo

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XXII THE WELCOME CLUB

In the days when I was still an enthusiastic amateur actor, I was once "cast" for the insignificant part of an aged peasant—the organiser of the performance assured me that though there were only a dozen lines in the part, it nevertheless "stood out"—and in a smock-frock, a pair of second-best trousers tied up with hay-bands, fishing boots, a bandana handkerchief round my neck, a long, straggly white beard, a red nose and an old tall silk hat, brushed the wrong way to give it the appearance of b

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XXIII GOLDSTEIN'S

Hors d'œuvre. Smoked Salmon. Solomon Gundy. Olives. Soups. Frimsell. Matsoklese. Pease and beans. Fish. Brown stewed carp. White stewed gurnet. Fried soles. Fried plaice. Entrées. Roast veal (white stew). Filleted steak (brown stew). Poultry. Roast capon. Roast chicken. Smoked beef. Tongue. Vegetables. Spinach. Sauerkraut. Potatoes. Cucumbers. Green salad. Sweets. Kugel. Stewed prunes. Almond pudding. Apple staffen. When I looked at the above I groaned aloud. Was it possible, I thought, that any

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AT HAMPTON COURT

We all know that in the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, but it is not such common knowledge that in the early summer the thoughts of a man of mature age turn with equal agility to duckling and green peas. And with duckling and green peas I always associate the Mitre at Hampton Court. So it came to pass that I asked a crony of like tastes to myself to meet me on a spring Sunday at Hampton Court in the late afternoon, and suggested that we should walk in the gardens o

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THE CONNAUGHT ROOMS

When it was decided by the contributors to Printer's Pie to entertain their editor, "The Pieman," a little committee of artists and writers, with the editor of The Tatler as secretary, considered various plans for giving Mr Hugh Spottiswoode a dinner with unusual surroundings. A decision was arrived at that the contributors to the Pie should become Pi(e)rates, for one night only, and in that guise should entertain the Pieman in a pirate haunt, and then the next question was the choice of a dinin

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XXVI APPENRODT'S

I had been, like every other Londoner, aware of the coming of Appenrodt's shops into the panorama of the London streets; but I had never gone into one of the Appenrodt establishments until a year ago, and it was the dread of the armour-plate sandwich of the buffets that sent me there. I often, when I am going to an early first night at the theatre, cut matters so fine as to dinner that I have only time to eat a couple of sandwiches at a buffet, and as often as not the barmaid, knowing that I am

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XXVII THE BURFORD BRIDGE HOTEL

One of the pleasantest short runs out of London by motor car is to Box Hill and the little hotel which lies just below it. In summer the most picturesque way of getting to the hotel is either by one of the Brighton coaches, which make it their lunching place, or by the coach which goes to Box Hill and back in a day. And by no means an uncomfortable, and certainly the cheapest, way of going down to the hotel is to do as I did one Sunday—journey by the L.B. &amp; S.C. Railway, getting glimpses

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XXVIII THE RITZ

The Ritz Hotel and Restaurant will keep in the remembrance of Londoners the name of the foremost hôtelier of our days, M. Ritz, a man whose genius is written across Europe and America, from Paris to Frankfort, from Biarritz to Salsomaggiore, from Lucerne to Madrid, from Budapest to New York. Too much quick brain work unfortunately has broken down M. Ritz's health, and he is never likely to take any share again in the control of the hotels which bear his name. He was the man who first taught the

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XXIX SOME OUTLYING RESTAURANTS

In calling the restaurants about which I write in this chapter "outlying" ones, I do not mean that they are in the far suburbs, but only that they are some little distance from Nelson's Column, which I take to be the centre of restaurant land, and that each of them is in a part of London having its own entity—Knightsbridge, Belgravia, Sloane Square and Bloomsbury. Rinaldo, in the days when he was at the Savoy, used to stand at the desk by the door and tell us all as we came in what tables had be

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ST JAMES'S PALACE

"The best dinner in London, sir!" was what our fathers always added when, with a touch of gratification, they used to tell of having been asked to dine on the Guard at St James's; and nowadays, when the art of dinner-giving has come to be very generally understood, the man who likes good cooking and good company still feels very pleased to be asked to dinner by one of the officers of the guard, for the old renown is still justified, and there is a fascination in the surroundings that is not to b

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XXXI THE OLD BULL AND BUSH

There is no side of London life that has died out more completely, so far as the upper classes are concerned, than the visits to the old tea-gardens which used to be the resort of the well-to-do classes from the days of King Charles II. up to the beginning of the last century. Bagginnage Wells, to which Nell Gwynne first brought the bucks, is only a name now, but Coleman, in his comedy, Bon-ton , defined good tone as to "Drink tea on summer afternoons At Bagginnage Wells with china and gilt spoo

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XXXII THE BERKELEY

The pleasant, white-faced hotel, with its restaurant on the ground floor, which faces the Ritz across Piccadilly, stands on classic ground, for it was at the corner of Piccadilly and Berkeley Street that Francatelli, the great cook and maître d'hôtel , pupil of the even greater Carême, was in command of the St James's Restaurant and the hotel of that name which in the middle of the last century stood first, with no proxime accessit , amongst the restaurants of the capital. Nowadays we take our g

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THE RESTAURANT GUSTAVE

There are one or two tales of wonderful discoveries of excellent little restaurants in unexpected places abroad that, with variations, I hear over and over again from travelled folk. One of these stories is a motoring one. The scene is usually the south of France, and a long day's journey, an early déjeuner , a breakdown in some desolate spot and a long delay before the damage could be repaired are the preliminaries, all told at considerable length. Then comes a harrowing description of the onco

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XXXIV A SUPPER TRAIN

One day last year I ate two meals under roofs owned by the Great Eastern Railway Company. I lunched in the dining-room of the Great Eastern Hotel, Liverpool Street, a splendid, airy room, light grey and gold, with brown Scagliola marble columns. The tables in this dining-room are set a good distance apart, rather a rare luxury in the City, where space is very limited; one is not forced to overhear the conversation of the people dining at other tables, and waiters do not kick one's chair every ti

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XXXV THE ADELAIDE GALLERY

There is no story of the success of a London restaurant more interesting than that of the Adelaide Gallery, which is more generally known as Gatti's. The first Gatti to come to this country from the Val Blegno in the Ticino Canton of Switzerland, on the Italian side of the Alps, was the pioneer of penny ices in England, and his shop in Villiers Street by the steps leading down to the steamboat pier below Hungerford Market was for the sale of these ices and gaufres , the thin batter cakes pressed

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XXXVI THE COMPLEAT ANGLER

I deserted, shamelessly and openly deserted, but I had an excuse. When we started, a boatload of men in a launch from above Boulter's Lock on a still, hot summer Sunday afternoon, the sky was grey above and the river and Cliveden Woods were all in pleasant shadow; but when we were come to Odney Weir and Cookham Ferry the sun broke through the clouds and sucked them up, and at Bourne End the river sparkled and the sails of the sailing-boats tacking up the long stretch below Winter Hill gleamed in

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DIEUDONNÉ'S. PAGANI'S

There used to be two little rooms in London restaurants with walls made interesting by the signatures of great artists of song and colour and sculpture and music, who, some of them, had sketched little scenes above their names, and others had dotted down a few notes of music. One of these little chambers was the sitting-room of Madame Dieudonné, in Ryder Street. Madame Dieudonné was an old French lady who kept a boarding-house much patronised by the great artists who came over to London from Fra

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XXXVIII THE PICCADILLY RESTAURANT

It was a chance remark made by "The Princess," as three of us sat at lunch one Saturday in the open air at the Ranelagh Club, that nowhere in Central London was there an open-air dining place, that led me to ask her and "Daddy," her husband, both of them my very great friends (which is the reason that I permit myself to call them, as the Irish would say, "out of their names"), to dine with me one night in July, weather always permitting, in the open air within fifty yards of Piccadilly Circus. W

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XXXIX THE RENDEZVOUS

Behind every successful restaurant there is some personality—a clever proprietor, a great cook, a managing director with a talent for organisation, or a popular maître d'hôtel . The Rendezvous, in Dean Street, has been brought to prosperity and popularity by the work of one man, its proprietor, M. Peter Gallina. He is a dapper little Italian, with a small moustache, a man of good family who ran away from home as a boy and has made his way by his native cleverness and perseverance, and by the pos

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XL THE PALL MALL RESTAURANT

Every Londoner knows the Pall Mall by sight, the restaurant one door above the Haymarket Theatre, and is familiar with the lace-curtained window of its buffet, its entrance and the line of five French windows with flowers before them on its first floor, and there are few playgoers who have not, before spending an evening at the Haymarket or His Majesty's over the way, dined at one time or another at the Pall Mall Restaurant. It is a restaurant which has prospered exceedingly, and has done so bec

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MAISON JULES. BELLOMO'S. LES LAURIERS

Jermyn Street used to be sacred to small private hotels, shops and bachelors' chambers, but the restaurants have now invaded it and there are half-a-dozen places of good cheer which have their front doors in the street, while some of the Piccadilly restaurants have a back entrance there. M. Jules had the happy idea of taking two houses, one of them at one time the home of Mrs Fitzherbert, as a medallion of the head of King George IV., found under the drawing-room floor proves, and converting the

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XLII THE MEN WHO MADE THE SAVOY

If I were to attempt to give you all the early history of the ground on 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 Count

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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

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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

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XLV THE RESTAURANT DES GOURMETS

Dining one wet night in September at the Restaurant des Gourmets in Lisle Street I told the young manager, with whom I chatted, that it must be ten years since I dined there, and that at that time M. Brice was the proprietor. The manager's reply was that fourteen years ago M. Brice sold the restaurant to its present proprietors. I looked up the date of my last visit to the Gourmets when I got home, and found that it was in 1898. It was a queer little place of very eatable food at extraordinarily

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XLVI THE MAXIM RESTAURANT

There may not appear at first blush to be any close connection between Wardour Street, that length of it which lies between Shaftesbury Avenue and Coventry Street, and the pleasant Austrian watering-place of Marienbad; but whenever I traverse the thoroughfare where the wax figures simper in Clarkson's, the wig-maker's, windows, and where the French library at one of the corners always keeps some passers-by in front of it looking at the illustrated papers and post cards, the china figures and the

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XLVII BIRCH'S

No. 15 Cornhill, which dates back to about 1700, is a little slip of a building, old-fashioned in appearance and tall in comparison to its breadth, its ground area being just fifteen feet by thirty. This is Birch's, the famous little pastry-cook's shop, which for years almost unnumbered has supplied the Lord Mayor's Mansion House banquets and the great feasts at the Guildhall. Its ground floor has an old-fashioned carved front with three windows with little panes, one of ground glass in the cent

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THE MERCERS' HALL

I do not think that of all the dinners I have eaten with various hospitable City Companies in their halls I could select a more representative one than one I ate with the Mercers. That we drank 1884 Pommery at the banquet shows that it did not take place yesterday. If there was one City Company that I was anxious to dine with it was the Mercers, for most of my forebears had been of the guild. My great-great-uncle, who was Lord Mayor and an M.P., and who fell into unpopularity because he advocate

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A GREAT BRITISH WOMAN COOK

Often enough during the past quarter of a century I have heard some hostess say reassuringly to someone whom she had asked to a dinner-party to meet someone else of the first importance: "Mrs Lewis is coming to cook the dinner." That short sentence has meant a great deal, for Mrs Lewis is the most celebrated woman cook that this or probably any other age has produced. I do not even except the great Mrs Glasse. If in England there was a cordon-bleu for women cooks Mrs Lewis would be a Grand Offic

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L THE RÉUNION DES GASTRONOMES

Of clubs formed for the noble purpose of eating good dinners—clubs that have no club-houses—there are very many. Sometimes there is a literary tinge as an excuse for the dinners, sometimes a Bohemian, sometimes a Masonic. But there are two dining clubs that deserve especial recognition in a Gourmet's Guide, for they are clubs of professional gourmets whose business concerns the organisation of good feeding. One of these clubs, which held its annual dinner this year in the new banqueting-room of

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LI THE LIGUE DES GOURMANDS

Saint Fortunat has deposed Saint Laurent from his position as Patron Saint of Cooks. Saint Laurent was an impostor in the matter of gourmandise for he owed the proud position he occupied for so many centuries as the Patron of the Chefs to the exceedingly uncomfortable position in which he met his martyrdom. He was broiled on a gridiron. Saint Fortunat not only thoroughly enjoyed good things to eat and drink, but wrote excellent Latin verses in praise of gastronomy, some of which M. Th. Gringoire

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FOR AULD LANG SYNE

I head this chapter "For Auld Lang Syne," for the future of the Cavour Restaurant has been, since the death of Philippe, who brought the restaurant into celebrity, uncertain. The Cavour has been put up of late years once to public auction and bought in, and there have been rumours without number that this, that and the other actor-manager was going to purchase the building. In spite of all these rumours, the Cavour still continues in the hands of Mrs Dale, who was manageress under Philippe in ol

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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,

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LIV THE CATHAY RESTAURANT

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,

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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

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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 whe

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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 day

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LVIII THE HYDE PARK HOTEL

Newly engaged couples are rather kittle cattle to entertain at any meal. There was once a pretty young widow who was about to marry a charming young man, and I asked the pair to lunch with me one day at the Savoy and was very particular to secure a table in the balcony, for I thought that the view over the Gardens and up the Thames to the House of Lords and Westminster Abbey would harmonise very well with love's young dream. And it did harmonise only too well with it, for the pretty widow sat wi

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LIX YE OLDE GAMBRINUS

The one thing in the world that the friends of Germany do not tell us poor Englishmen is to be obtained better in the Fatherland than on this side of the Channel is things to eat, though of course Munich beer has been held up to our brewers for generations as an example of what they should brew. Perhaps it is for this reason that there are fewer German restaurants in London in comparison with the size of the German colony than there are French and Italian restaurants in comparison with the colon

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LX MY SINS OF OMISSION

No one can be more aware than I am of the things I have left undone in writing of the restaurants of London, of the many interesting dining-places of which I have made no mention, of the eating-houses with historical associations that I have overlooked. I have done no more than touch the hem of the garment of the City. As I write I recall that the Ship and Turtle, the Palmerston and other notable restaurants I have passed by without even a word, and that I have given only a line to Pim's and Sim

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