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 mass of the rich English how to dine in cultured comfort in their own capital; yet to the great majority of those who benefited by his perfect taste and his genius for giving unostentatious luxury to the gourmets of the world he was an unknown personality. Duchesses and actresses, legislators and actors, explorers and curates, all are known to the public by their photographs in shop windows and in the newspapers, but I never saw a photograph of Ritz in a Regent Street shop or in a journal.
It was by chance that he first came to England. When the Savoy Hotel was opened M. Ritz was manager of the Hotel National at Lucerne and of the Grand Hotel at Monte Carlo: Mr D’Oyly Carte found him at the Grand Hotel, and asked him if he would come to the Savoy for six months to put the restaurant in order. He came, bringing with him M. Escoffier, who had been chef at the Grand. Ritz at the Savoy made the supper after the theatre the popular meal it still continues to be, though it is, thanks to the Early Closing Act, a scramble to eat five-shillings’ worth of food in half-an-hour, and he also discovered, while at the Savoy, that if a restaurant wishes a large number of its guests to be of the softer sex a band is a necessity. He saw that an Austrian band, engaged at the suggestion of Mr Hwfa Williams, kept the diners half-an-hour longer at their tables over their cigars and coffee, and that ladies soon came to consider a dinner unaccompanied by music a tame feast. For the music, often over-loud, to the accompaniment of which I eat my meals in most restaurants, I am not in the least thankful to M. Ritz; but the majority of diners, especially those in petticoats, if such things exist nowadays, think differently.
The fight to obtain music at restaurants on Sundays was one of M. Ritz’s great battles. I remember the days, not so very long ago, when a band could not play on Sunday in a restaurant unless some individual dinner-giver engaged it to play for his guests, and had no objection to the other diners listening to it. Another advance made by Ritz was the obtaining of newly baked bread for those who lunched and dined at the Savoy restaurant on a Sunday. The baker who at first supplied this bread broke some law or some regulation in doing this, and was summoned; but M. Ritz, not to be beaten, established a bakery in the hotel to supply the bread. Other restaurants followed suit. He had an enormous facility for quick work, no detail was too small for him, and when he had made up his mind that a thing should be done he took unlimited trouble to have it carried out. At one time, when he managed the Carlton, he could not understand why the coffee made there should not be quite up to the level of the coffee at his hotels on the Continent. He tried every experiment possible, brought water from all parts of England, took every precaution against the dampness of our climate, and finally asked one of the Rümpelmayers, the great pastrycook family of the south of France, to come to London to advise him in this matter.
I used to see M. Ritz at this period of his life very often, and used to chat with him on matters of gourmandise. Very slim, very quiet, with nervous hands clasped tightly together, he would move through the big restaurant seeing everything, saying a word under his breath to a head waiter, bowing to some of the diners, staying by a table to speak to others, possessing a marvellous knowledge of faces and of what the interests were of all the important people of his clientele. There was a maxim, he said, which should be carved in golden letters above the door of every maître d’hôtel, and that maxim was, in English, “A customer is always right,” and he always bore this in mind. Whenever at that period M. Escoffier invented a new dish a little jury of three, M. Escoffier, Madame Ritz and M. Ritz, used to sit in judgment on it in solemn conclave before it was allowed to appear on a menu in the restaurant. I once asked Madame Ritz, who has been M. Ritz’s real helpmate and counsellor throughout his married life, to what quality she attributed her husband’s success in life, and she answered, “sensibility,” giving the word its French meaning.
M. Ritz had a talent for doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. I once saw him in the early morning on the platform of the station in Rome. He looked, as he always looked, as though he had come out of a band-box, well-shaved and well-brushed, the ends of his moustache pointed upwards, his whiskers brought down to the level of his mouth, wearing those dark garments of extreme neatness which one always associates with the manager of hotels. He was the one male person on the platform that morning who was not dishevelled, nor tired, nor unshaven; but he had raced across the Continent as fast as trains could carry him to be there to receive a duke and duchess who were going to stay at the hotel in which he had an interest.
A coup du maître d’hôtel, of which he told me afterwards with a smile, was the method by which he put a large luncheon-party of ladies on easy terms with each other. It was a luncheon given at the Carlton and attended by the ladies who were sending the hospital-ship out to South Africa during the Boer War. Many of the ladies did not know each other well, and M. Ritz, exceedingly anxious that the luncheon should be a success, feared that they might not be easily conversational, so at the commencement of the feast he took round a bottle of Château Yquem and suggested to each lady that a little glass of white wine made a good beginning to lunch. In two minutes every lady was chatting most pleasantly to her neighbours whether she had ever seen them before or not. Of the determination of M. Ritz in his early days to learn everything that was to be learned in the restaurant world, I remember one instance, told me by his wife. He held a well-paid post in one of the smart Parisian restaurants, but left it to go to Voisin’s at a smaller salary, because he thought there was more to be learned in the good old restaurant in the Rue St Honoré than in the other place of good cheer.
But it is of the Ritz Restaurant, not of Ritz himself, that I am writing in this chapter. I have read that the Ritz has swallowed up the site of the old “White Horse” cellars, from which so many of the coaches used to start, but the White Horse cellars had crossed the road a century and a half before I began to know my London. The Isthmian Club-house at one time occupied the portion of the site overlooking the Green Park, and when the Club moved on to other quarters it became the Walsingham, part chambers, part restaurant, one of the group of houses and hotels which stretched from the Green Park to Arlington Street. When M. Gehlardi managed the Walsingham, and M. Dutru was its chef, there was no better dining place in London.
The great white stone building of the Ritz, with its arcaded front and its entrance to the restaurant and ballrooms right in the middle of the arcade, is a comparative new-comer to London, in that it was opened in 1906. It is a building, inside and out, of the Louis XVI. period, with every modern luxury added. The Winter Garden, where one awaits one’s guests, is a delightful place of creamy marble pillars and gilt trellis-work, casemented mirrors, carved amorini and a fountain with a gilt lead figure of “La Source” looking up at the golden cupids poised above her. The little orchestra of the hotel plays in this Winter Garden, and its music in no way interferes with the conversation in the restaurant.
The restaurant itself may be said to be dedicated to Marie Antoinette, for the gilt bronze garlands which hang from electrolier to electrolier, forming an oval below the painted sky, were designed to represent the flower decorations at one of Marie Antoinette’s feasts, and though the garlands have been much lightened, for at first they were too heavy in design, they are still reminiscent of the poor little queen who lived such a merry life and met so sad an end. It is a restaurant of soft colours, of marbles, cream and rose and soft green, of tapestried recesses and of handsome consoles in the niches. Towards the Green Park long arched windows look on to one of the pleasantest prospects in London, and below these windows and between them and the Park is a little forecourt, in which a green tent is pitched when a great ball is to be held in the suite of rooms below the restaurant, and where on hot summer evenings dinner is served in the open air. At one end of the restaurant is a gilt group of Father Thames contemplating an exceedingly attractive lady who represents the Ocean. Everything in the restaurant is of the Louis XVI. period, and the Aubusson carpets and the chairs and all the silver and the china and the glass used in the restaurant and the banqueting rooms harmonise with that period.
The restaurant is not a very large one, and sometimes tables for its guests are set in the Marie Antoinette room with which it connects, and in that portion of the corridor which forms an ante-room. But though it is not of a very great size, the Ritz has a most aristocratic clientele. Royal personages often lunch and dine there, and diplomacy regards it as its own particular dining place, for tables are retained by the secretaries and attachés of two of the Embassies, the German and the Austrian, and, I fancy, by a third one also.
Lady Amalthea had very graciously said she would dine with me at the Ritz, so I went in the afternoon of a hot day to interview M. Kroell, the manager, who stepped across Piccadilly from the Berkeley to succeed M. Elles, who, for a time, managed both the Ritz in Paris and the Ritz in London. With M. Kroell was M. Charles, the manager in charge of the restaurant, and I asked that I might be given that evening a little dinner for two, not of necessity an expensive dinner, but one suitable for a warm evening, and I sent my compliments to M. Malley, the chef de cuisine, and said that I hoped that I should find some of the specialities of his kitchen amongst the dishes.
M. Malley came from the Ritz at Paris when the London Ritz was first opened, having acquired his art at the Grand Véfour and the Café Anglais. He presides over a very spacious range of white-tiled kitchens, in which all the rooms which should be hot are divided by a wide corridor from the rooms which should be cold, and he has a talent for the invention of new dishes, amongst these being a very splendid dish of salmon with a mousse of crayfish, which he has named after the Marquise de Sévigné, a reminiscence of his days at Vichy, and his pêches Belle Dijonnaise, of which more anon. Russian soups are one of the specialities of the Ritz kitchen, and there is a Viennese pastrycook amongst the members of M. Malley’s brigade, who makes exquisite pastry. The late King Edward had a special fancy for the cakes made at the Ritz, and a supply used to be sent to Buckingham Palace, but M. Elles told me that this was a State secret, for M. Ménager, the King’s chef, might not have liked it to be known that anything from another kitchen entered Buckingham Palace.
As I had left my dinner in the safe hands of the experts, so I also left the question of the champagne we should drink, only asking that it should be one recommended by the house.
Before going on my way I reminded M. Kroell that on the last occasion that I had word with him he was presented with a miniature in brilliants of the order bestowed on him by the King of Spain, and I asked him if he had been awarded any other decorations. M. Kroell laughed, and then modestly owned to the German military medal, and as he told me this he involuntarily squared his shoulders as an old soldier.
Lady Amalthea arrived with military punctuality (she is a soldier’s wife) in the best of spirits, wearing a dream of a dress, and her diamonds and turquoises. A table had been kept for us at the upper end of the room, where Lady Amalthea could both see all the guests and be seen by them. She ran through a little selection from Debrett as she took her seat, having scanned most of the diners as she came in, and I was enabled to add to this by identifying a group at one of the tables as some of the Peace Delegates from the Balkans.
Then we settled down to the infinitely important matter of seeing what the dinner was that M. Malley and M. Charles in counsel had arranged for us.
This is the menu, and though at first sight it seems a long one for two people it is an exceedingly light dinner, and we neither of us ate the tiny cutlets which were the gros pièce of the feast. The wine to go with it was a bottle of Roederer 1906:
Melon.
Consommé Glacé Madrilène.
Filet de Sole Romanoff.
Cailles des Gourmets.
Côtes de Pauillac Montpensir.
Petits Pois.
Velouté Palestine.
Poulet en Chaudfroid.
Salade à la Ritz.
Pêche Belle Dijonnaise.
The melon, delightfully cold, struck the right note in a dinner for a hot evening; the Madrilène soup, beautiful in colour and flavoured with tomato and capsicum, carried on the summer symphony; the Romanoff sole was quite admirable, served with small slices of apple and artichokes and with mussels, the apple giving a suspicion of bitter sweetness as a contrast to the flesh of the fish. M. Charles happened to be near our table at this period, not, I think, quite by chance. I assured him that if there was such a thing as a gastronomic nerve M. Malley’s creation had found it. The quails formed part of a little pie brought to table in a pie-dish of old blue willow pattern, and with them were coxcombs and truffles and other good things. The poulet en chaudfroid was a noble bird, all white, and in it and with it was a pink mousse delicately perfumed with curry powder, a quite admirable combination. The Ritz salad is of cœurs de romaine, with almonds and portions of tiny oranges with it. Last of the dishes in the dinner came the pêche Belle Dijonnaise, which is one of the creations which have made the fame of M. Malley, and which will become historical. It is a delightful combination of peaches and black currant ice with some cassis, a liqueur of black currants, added to it, and it is called Belle Dijonnaise because of the old Burgundian proverb: A Dijon, il y a du bon vin et des jolies filles.
I do not doubt that many people dined well in London on that hot June evening, but this I will warrant, that no two people, however important they might be, or whatever they paid for their dinner (my bill came to £2, 10s.), dined better than did Lady Amalthea and I at the Ritz, and I make all my compliments to M. Malley.
I should not do the Ritz full justice if I did not refer to the banquets which are served in the Marie Antoinette room and in the great white suite below the restaurant. As typical of the Ritz banquets I give you the menu of one that Lord Haldane gave to the foreign officers visiting London in June 1912, and I also give the accompanying wines:
Caviar d’Esturgeon.
Kroupnick Polonaise.
Consommé Viveur Glacé en Tasse.
Timbale de Homards à l’Américaine.
Suprême de Truite Saumonée à la Gelée de Chambertin.
Aiguillette de Jeune Caneton à l’Ambassade.
Courgettes à la Serbe.
Selle de Veau Braisée à l’Orloff.
Petits Pois. Carottes à la Crème.
Pommes Mignonette Persillées.
Soufflé de Jambon Norvégienne.
Ortolans Doubles au Bacon.
Cœurs de Laitues.
Asperges Géantes de Paris, Sauce Hollandaise.
Pêches des Gourmets.
Friandises.
Mousse Romaine.
Tartelettes Florentine.
Corbeille de Fruits.
Vins.
Gonzalez Coronation Sherry.
Berncastler Doctor, 1893.
Château Duhart Milon, 1875.
Heidsieck Dry Monopole, 1898.
G. H. Mumm, 1899.
Croft’s Port, 1890.
La Grande Marque Fine, 1848.
The dinner looks at first glance to be an exceedingly long one, but it is also an exceedingly light one, the saddle of veal being the only substantial dish of the feast. The aiguillettes of duckling from one of the special dishes at the Ritz, and the soufflés and the mousses that come from the Ritz kitchens are always ethereal. This banquet is an excellent example of a feast which is important without being heavy.