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 Room did its full share in persuading man that it added pleasure to a good dinner in a restaurant to be faced by a pretty woman. The East Room of to-day is twice the size of the one that Messrs Spiers and Pond first built, and its decoration of white and gold, and panels painted with Watteau subjects, its harmony of greys and pink in carpets and furniture and curtains, its ante-room with old French furniture, and the satisfactory arrangement by which the music of the orchestra, perched in a gilded cage above the big entrance hall, comes softened by distance to the diners in the East Room, are all happy second thoughts. But the East Room was, in 1873, when it was first opened, the dining place to which every lady asked her husband to take her, and it has held its own against ever-increasing competition through the years. Its windows look down on the rush and swirl of Piccadilly Circus, a wonderful scene either by day or night, and it adds to the pleasure of an unhurried meal to watch the hurry of thousands of one’s fellow-creatures.
At one period, after the extension of the building, there were two East Rooms, a dividing wall being where the arches and curtains now are. The one of these nearest the grand staircase was a strictly à la carte restaurant, while in the other, approached through a corridor, a table d’hôte meal was served. The East Room of to-day smiles on both classes of diners. When a man sits down at his table there at dinner-time, M. Kugi, the maître d’hôtel, puts before him the carte du jour, an ample one, with any special delicacies in larger print than the others, and also lays on the table the menus of the half-sovereign and seven-and-six table d’hôte dinners, and it is his experience that the greater number of diners look at the carte du jour and then, mistrusting their own judgment, order one or the other of the table d’hôte meals.
This was the menu of the seven-and-six dinner one night when I dined at the East Room at a tiny dinner-party, before going to the theatre down in the cellars of the big building to see the play running there:
Hors d’œuvre.
Consommé Rossolnick.
Crème aux huîtres.
Truite de rivière Dona Louise.
Selle d’Agneau Mascotte.
Pommes nouvelles.
Poularde du Surrey à la broche.
Salade.
Parfait au moka.
Friandises.
Dessert.
It was a very well-selected, well-served dinner. Had we chosen the half-guinea dinner we should have had an addition to this menu of cailles à la Grecque and chou de mer, sauce vierge. The Rossolnick, with its flavour of cucumber, was excellent, the trout were fresh and firm, and the Surrey fowl as plump as any foreigner from Mans. M. Auguste Pannier, the chef of to-day, is worthy of the great men who have preceded him in the kitchen of the East Room. And not only have there been great cooks, but great managers as well at the Criterion, with the East Room as the particular object of their care. Oddenino, Mantell, Gerard, who all moved on to other posts, were predecessors of M. Emile Campenhaut, the manager of to-day, as was also M. Lefèvre, whose health broke down, but whom I remember as being an enthusiast on the subject of the art of cookery, a man who brought plenty of brain power to bear on the subject of delicate food. I think that the best of the many dinners I have eaten à deux in the East Room was one ordered in consultation with him, and I subjoin it as a good specimen of an East Room à la carte feast:
Caviar.
Consommé à la Diane.
Filets de sole aux délices.
Suprêmes de volaille grillés.
Carottes nouvelles à la crème.
Laitues braisées en cocotte.
Cailles à la Sainte-Alliance.
Salade de chicorée frisée.
Croûtes à la Caume.
Soufflé glacé à la mandarine.
The caille à la Sainte-Alliance, in imitation of Brillat Savarin’s faisan à la Sainte-Alliance, consisted of a truffle in an ortolan, the ortolan being in the quail. The Croûte Caume is an admirable banana dish in which the tastes of the banana and pine-apple and apricot and kirsch all mingle.
The East Room is, of course, only one of the many restaurant-rooms in the great stone building. Immediately under the East Room are the Marble Restaurant and the grill-room. The Marble Restaurant, in old days, when men of position did not think it undignified to stand at a bar and drink brandy and soda, was the Long Bar, and a wonderful sight this bar, running the whole length of the building, used to be at midnight, crowded with Londoners of all the leisured classes and with a score or more of good-looking barmaids in black behind the bar. When the habits of the men of London began to change, and the Long Bar did not draw so many devotees, the firm of Spiers and Pond was not quite convinced for some time that the “palmy” days of the bars were gone, and they made the Long Bar one of the most beautiful saloons in London, decorating it with marbles and inlay of Venetian glass. That beautiful saloon is now the Marble Restaurant, in which a five-shilling table d’hôte meal is served, and where singers on Sundays discourse music to the diners.
The American Bar had its period of great success, and in the grill-room, which formed part of the bar’s surroundings, chops and steaks, unsurpassed anywhere in London, used to be grilled. But the character of some of the habitués of the American Bar was too pronouncedly sporting to be altogether satisfactory, and the American Bar passed away from the front part of the building as the Long Bar did. There is a buffet now at the Jermyn Street side, but it is no longer the haunt of the gentlemen who were so overwhelmingly devoted to sport. The grill-room, without the American Bar, is a very flourishing section of the Criterion. It differs from most other grill-rooms in having plenty of sunlight and fresh air, and has this distinctive feature, that there is an American cook in its kitchen and that American dishes can always be obtained there even when they are not on the bill of fare. I have eaten clam broth, terrapin, dry hash, scalloped sweet potatoes, and Graham pudding, when dining there with Americans.
The Criterion contains a score of banqueting-rooms, including a huge one at the top of the house, where a statue of Shakespeare looks down upon the diners. The West Room, which is now one of the banqueting-rooms, has been used by the management for many experiments. For a long time a Dîner Parisien was served there, and as its cost was only five shillings, and as one got a great deal of very good food to eat for that sum, I used to patronise it very regularly in my subaltern days, when a dinner in the East Room could not be budgeted for. At one time it was given over to the vegetarians, and good-looking damsels in art clothing brought the diners dishes of nut cutlets and vegetable steaks; but the nut-eaters did not hold possession of the room for long.
It is not easy to-day to associate the great stone building in Piccadilly Circus with the revels of miners in an Australian township. But it was in Melbourne, during the gold fever, that the seed was sown which blossomed into the big stone house in the centre of London. Felix Spiers and Christopher Pond were both young Englishmen. Felix was born in one of the old houses on Tower Hill, which was then the office of the General Steam Navigation Company, whose agent his father then was. The family of the Spiers moved to Paris, and young Felix was put into a banking house, where he remained until he was eighteen. Then he went to Melbourne, with the gold fever upon him, to make his fortune. In Melbourne, he met young Christopher Pond, also an Englishman, and also determined to make his pile. Spiers had become, for the time being, a wine merchant, an experience which later was to serve him to excellent purpose at the Criterion, for he laid down some admirable wine there, amongst it some hock which as long as it lasted I used to drink in preference to any other wine on the Criterion list. The miners were spending money in Melbourne as though it were water, and the Theatre Royal, Melbourne, received much of the golden shower. It occurred to young Spiers and young Pond that it would be a profitable undertaking to start a restaurant next door to a theatre, and they established, in Collins Street, the Café de Paris. Their next enterprise was to become caterers for the Melbourne and Ballarat Railway. They were full of ideas in those days, and one of these was to bring out to Australia a team of English cricketers and to tour them as a speculation. This was the thought of which the test matches were born. Spiers and Pond came to England intending to persuade Charles Dickens to make a great reading tour in Australia, and then it was that they espied the nakedness of the land in regard to railway catering. Dickens came to their aid with his attack on Mugby Junction, and he wrote an article in All the World entitled “The Genii of the Cave,” in which he described the then novelty of the “Silver Grill” under the arch at Ludgate Circus, which Spiers and Pond established. The Criterion was the pet child of the two great caterers. It rose on historic ground, for it occupied the site of the old “White Bear,” which had been a celebrated coaching-house, one of those fine old inns of many galleries. The theatre was opened four months later than the restaurant; but it was not until 1879 that Sir Charles Wyndham, with whom so many of its successes are associated, took over sole management, though he had been a partner for the previous three years with Mr Alexander Henderson in its control.