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 as he likes, to eat it. An American always knows what he wants, asks for it, and keeps on asking until he gets it. Quite a number of Britons of both sexes wanted all the conveniences of the grill-rooms long before the modern grill-room came into existence. (Hard-working men of business who had not time to go home to the suburbs to change their clothes, men of the theatre, authors and managers who work late in the evening, actors and actresses who like a very light meal before going to the theatre, and to sup after their work without wearing gorgeous raiment, and a host of other people who get their living by their brains.) But they had not the pertinacity of the American in demanding what they wanted.
Quite the beginning of the modern grill-room was that silver grill which Messrs Spiers and Pond established some time in the sixties under the arch at Ludgate Hill; but I look to the little grill-room in the old Savoy Hotel in the days before the new building had pushed through to the Strand as being the ideal of a modern grill-room, and I always measure any grill-room of to-day by the standard of that little place of good eating. It was small, and its windows looked up an unlovely cul-de-sac of which it formed the end. The people who controlled the Savoy Hotel and the Savoy Theatre all used it as their own dining-room; the general public scarcely knew of its existence; the food there was excellent. Besides the chops and steaks and other real grill-room fare, there were always one or two savoury entrées kept hot in metal pots and pans on a miniature hot plate in the middle of the room, and when the maître d’hôtel brought over one of these and took off the cover under one’s nose, the savour of its contents alone gave one an appetite.
The present Café Parisien at the Savoy, which the russet-bearded Gustave steered to a great success, is the legitimate successor to that other grill-room which was hidden away in the midst of the building, but it has not the charm of discovery felt by those who used the old grill-room. The Café Parisien, which has its entrance in the Savoy forecourt, where gorgeous servitors in French-grey uniforms of State take one’s coat and hat just as they do if one is going to spend one’s money in the restaurant, is a great Adams room painted a very light grey, with portières of light pink, and with chairs and carpets of a deeper rose. It has a little space outside, a terrasse, as the French would call it, which is railed off from the courtyard by a white trellis, over which roses are trained. This is a very pleasant spot in hot weather, if so be that no motor sighing out deep breaths of petrol is standing in the vicinity. This Café Parisien is a place of pleasant, clean-shirted Bohemianism, much patronised by the aristocracy of the theatre. There is an elaborate à la carte menu with stars against those dishes which are ready. A man in a hurry can eat a four-course dinner here in half-an-hour without risking indigestion, but a couple who wish to talk over their meal can make a cutlet and an ice an excuse for sitting out an hour.
The grill-room of the Princes’ Restaurant, to which one descends from an entrance in Piccadilly, is a comfortable white room, with white pillars and mirrors in the panelled walls, where quite good food is served, and where there are always the dishes of the day ready as well as the chops and steaks, kidneys and sausages, and other legitimate grill fare. The Brussels carpets and the dark leather of the chairs are restful to the eye, and the lights in the crystal bouquets which hang from the ceiling are not too glaring.
Almost across the way, in the great building of the Piccadilly Hotel, quite an unpretentious entrance and a small staircase with marble walls lead down to the grill-room. There is a lift by the stairs which is much used by the people coming up from the grill-room, though only lazy folk use it to go down there. This unpretentious entrance and staircase are the portals to a suite of very high, very spacious rooms, running the full length of the building. There are pilasters with gilt capitols; and casemented mirrors in the walls. The electroliers holding imitation candles give abundant light. The grill is behind a great glass screen; carvers in white wheel about big joint waggons and a Turk in gorgeous raiment is ready to make Oriental coffee. The deep rose of the carpet contrasts with the white of the walls. At a multitude of tables are hundreds of people of every comfortable class in life, from the bank clerk to the field-marshal, and from the typist to the duchess, eating meals simple or elaborate, just as they will. This grill-room, like most of the others, caters for every taste; for there is an elaborate carte du jour, two table d’hôte luncheons at half-a-crown and three-and-six, and a table d’hôte dinner at five-and-six. Electric fans keep the atmosphere pure. This grill-room is all day long a very busy place, and as many as five hundred dinners are served nightly.
Of the Criterion grill-room, the great airy hall on the ground floor of the building, I have already written in another article.
On the other side of Piccadilly Circus the Monaco has a grill-room with light buff walls and light buff marble pilasters. Its entrance gives on to Shaftesbury Avenue. Near by is the Trocadero grill-room, down to which a staircase of green and grey marble descends, and which, with its walls of grey marble and gold and buff, its mirrors, its hammered copper-work, its great grill and its orchestra, is handsome almost to the point of gorgeousness. A table d’hôte dinner is served here, as it is now in most modern grill-rooms.
In Regent Street the Café Royal possesses a heavily gilded grill-room, with entrances through the café and from Air Street, a grill-room in which the best entrecôte and the best pint of Burgundy in London are obtainable; and on the other side of Regent Street, its entrance hidden away in that dead little road, Haddon Street, is the grill-room restaurant of the New Gallery Cinema Theatre, in the basement of that establishment. It consists of two rooms, panelled with oak and hung with copies of old tapestries. From these it takes its name Les Gobelins. Mr Goetz, of the Vienna Café, opened this little place of refreshment, and there were always Austrian and German dishes on its bill of fare, but it has now changed hands, and M. Victor, late of the Imperial and Les Lauriers, is in command. Its cookery remains very good.
The Carlton grill, which has its own entrance in the Haymarket, is as good a specimen of the grill-room of to-day as one could select to show to anyone who wished to understand the differences between the chop-houses of yesterday and the grill-rooms of to-day. The staircase which leads down to it is oak-panelled. In the little ante-chamber where hats and coats are given up there is a newspaper stall, and in another ante-room are easy-chairs, dark green in colour, and small tables with tops of burnished copper. The grill-room itself is all white, little pilasters breaking the smooth sides of the walls. Blue china stands on the shelves, a Cromwell clock ticks on a bracket, and at one side of the room are arched recesses with stained glass windows at the back of them. The lights in the electroliers burn here day and night, but the atmosphere is never stuffy. A glass screen keeps the heat of the grill from the room, and in front of this screen are piles of crimson tomatoes, and chops and steaks of deeper red, and mushrooms yellow, grey and warm brown, a harmony in reds and greys. Its carte du jour is all-embracing, and some of the dishes are always ready. M. Ventura is the presiding spirit in this grill-room. He knows the tastes of his clientele and which tables they prefer, and when there are no unoccupied tables and people have to be turned away, as sometimes happens, or asked to wait in the ante-room until tables are free, his grief is really heartfelt.
At the very gateway of the Strand the Grand Hotel has a popular grill-room, walled with shining tiles of white and buff; the Cecil has a great Indian room of blue and yellow tiles; and, indeed, every big hotel from the great pile of the Kensington Palace, in the west, to the hotel of the Great Eastern Railway in Liverpool Street in the east, has its grill-room, the simplicity of the fare and the fact that the raw material is always on view to the diner before it is placed on the grill being a guarantee of the quality of the meat.
Most of the restaurants also have their grills.
Romano’s turned its old kitchen into a reproduction of a room in a Russian farmhouse with horns on the walls and an icon up in a corner, and even at one time carried realism to the point of putting the waiters in this part of the establishment into white blouses with red sashes at the waist, the dress the Tartar waiters in Moscow wear. You get the restaurant food in this grill-room at about half the restaurant prices. A new electric grill has been installed in this Russian room which grills just as well and far more quickly than a charcoal or a coal grill.
The Frascati, in Oxford Street, has a grill-room on the ground floor with walls of white marble veined with grey, and with mirrors in Oriental frames; and at the entrance to Tottenham Court Road the Horseshoe has an excellent grill above its oyster saloon.
The Holborn shows originality in devoting a grill-room to ladies, and in the old Freemasons’ Tavern in Great Queen Street, which now calls itself the Connaught Rooms, there is in the basement a large grill-room, with a choice of three joints at luncheon time as well as an extensive carte du jour, a grill which is much patronised by the lawyers from Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In the evening a dinner is served in a smaller room, and I have dined there before going across the way to the Kingsway Theatre. Those who dine are, I think, mostly connected in some way or another with Freemasonry, and the talk that goes on at the tables has reference to high offices in the Craft and Mark, to “raising” and “passing,” and to that ancient and sacred ritual which ladies still believe to be in some way connected with a red-hot poker.