XXXIII The Joys of Foreign Travel
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 oncoming of darkness, of the discovery that the town at which the travellers intend to spend the night is still many, many kilometres away, of a shortage of petrol, of the faint feeling that comes through lack of food. A shower of cold rain, or mud up to the axles, a broken-down bridge or a swollen stream generally come into the story at this period to lead up to the sense of relief, described with rapture, which the travellers experience when, at a turning of the road, a light is seen at a distance. This is found to be the window of a little inn, quite unpretentious outside, with a sanded floor inside, everything quite clean, the host a retired maître d’hôtel who had in his time been a waiter in Soho, and talks a little English, the hostess an excellent cook. And then the story ambles along to its happy ending with the description of the soupe à l’oignon which is put on table, over which a clean napkin is spread, of the delicious savour it emits and how beautifully hot and strong it is, of the grilled wings of a chicken which follow; of an omelette au confiture, which the cook herself brings to table; of country wine and country butter; a long stick of bread and some cheese made on a neighbouring farm. And the “tag,” in a dozen words, tells how the chauffeur, who has also been well fed, finds a fresh supply of petrol, and how the contented travellers reach at midnight the town where they intend to sleep.
The scene of another story is a minor cathedral town in Italy or Spain, and the tale commences with a vigorous denunciation of the principal hotel in the place: stuffy rooms, vile food cooked in rancid oil; an impudent head waiter and an unhelpful hall-porter. The central division of the story deals with a long day of sight-seeing; a midday meal of sandwiches, “horrid things made of the ham of the country and coarse bread”; and a terrifying adventure when, having lost their way in a network of streets, the ladies of the party are stared at by some horrible unshaven men who say un-understandable things in patois, and then laugh. The tale concludes thus:—“Just as we thought that we should have to pay one of the impudent little boys to show us the way back to that disgusting hotel we turned a corner, and there we saw a clean little restaurant with little trees in front of the window and a bill of fare, with lots of nice things on it quite cheap, hanging on the door-post.”
There are unlimited variations on the above, and the tale can take from two minutes to three-quarters of an hour in the telling, according to the volume of guide-book gush and the amount of lip-smacking over the food that is introduced into it.
But why go to France, Italy or Spain to obtain these materials for a story? The circumstances can be exactly reproduced in London. The preliminaries are to eat nothing between breakfast and dinner-time and to tire yourself out with exercise. Then, if you wish to indulge in the motoring adventure, engage the most rickety taxi-cab to be found on any stand and drive round and round the inner circle of Regent’s Park until the inevitable breakdown occurs. When, after a quarter of an hour’s delay, the chauffeur says that he is ready to go on again, tell him to drive to Soho Square, then to go down Greek Street, and to stop when he comes to the Restaurant Gustave.
Or if it is the cathedral city incidents you would like to live through once more, start in a worn-out condition from Golden Square, and make your way in a zigzag through the narrowest streets and alleys you can find to St Anne’s, Soho, which is big enough to be a second-class cathedral, and go on, still zigzagging, till you reach Greek Street and Gustave’s.
And this is what you will find when you get there. A little restaurant with a chocolate face and with a plate-glass window, on which the fact is announced that it is an à la carte establishment. Two little trees are in front of the window—little evergreen trees are fashionable just now in Soho—and the name “Gustave” is well in evidence above, with an electric lamp to throw light upon it. Inside the window a long lawn curtain gives privacy to the restaurant. The card of the day, with half-a-hundred names of dishes written in black ink, hangs in a brass frame by the door.
Go inside, and you find yourself in a little room—a French gentleman who went on my recommendation to Gustave’s described it to me afterwards as a boîte—with cream-coloured walls and a chocolate skirting. A counter, to which the waiters go to fetch the dishes, with a girl behind it very busily engaged, is at one side of the room. Oilcloth is on the floor, and a little staircase leads to the first floor. Eleven tables are in this room, all of them generally occupied, mostly by French people; but there is a second smaller room on beyond, which holds four tables, and on the two occasions lately that I have dined at Gustave’s I have found one of these tables vacant.
Everything is very clean at Gustave’s, and if the napery is thin and the glass is thick, that is quite in keeping with the travel story. The people at the other tables are probably French. They belong to the respectable classes, and they behave just as well as though they carried innumerable quarterings on their escutcheons. A young waiter puts the carte du jour, with an ornamental blue border, on the table in front of you, and Monsieur Gustave, who, napkin on arm, bustles about his little restaurant, comes to give advice, if needed, as to a choice of dishes.
Gustave—who must not, of course, be confused with that other Gustave who was manager of the Savoy, and who is now at the Lotus Club—is a little Frenchman, with a moustache, who is very wide awake. He has a sense of humour, and he talks excellent English. He was for a time at an hotel in Hatton Garden, and at the Restaurant des Gourmets before he came to Greek Street.
The first item on a bill of fare that I took away, with me reads: “½ doz. Escargots, 8d.,” but long ago, at Prunier’s in Paris, I tried to attune my palate to snails, and failed, so on this particular night I did not even consider their inclusion in my dinner. Nor did I dally with hors d’œuvre, though I might have had sardines, or filets de hareng, or anchois, or salmis for twopence. But I ordered soup, and I think I went up in Gustave’s opinion when I preferred three-pennyworth of soupe à l’oignon to pot au feu at the same price. There were three fish dishes on the card, moules Marinières, 6d.; merlan frit, 6d.; sole frit, 10d.; and Gustave recommended the moules as being a dish of the house, and having come in that morning.
Looking down the list of entrées to find something sufficiently bizarre in taste to match the commencement of my dinner, I hesitated over a pilaff, which would have cost me 8d., almost plumped for a râble de lièvre, which meant an outlay of 1s., and then, remembering that it was Christmas-time, as near as possible ordered a boudin, which is the sausage that all good Frenchmen eat once a year at the réveillon suppers on Christmas Eve. But I remembered the nightmare that followed the last réveillon supper to which I went in Paris, and, passing over all the entrées, ordered nothing more exciting than a wing of chicken, 1s., and a salade chicorée. A crème chocolat, 4d., was my entremet.
The onion soup proved to be excellent—quite strong and quite oniony, which, as I was not going into polite society that evening, could offend no one. The mussels quite justified M. Gustave’s eulogium, but as I did not eat the whole bowlful, and left some of the savoury liquid, M. Gustave, with an expression of concern on his face, came to my table to ask whether I had found any fault with the dish. I assured him that my appetite, not the mussels or the cook, was alone to blame. The wing of the chicken was plump and tender, and had I paid half-a-crown it could not have been better. The crème chocolat certainly tasted of chocolate, if the cream was not a very pronounced feature in it.
It was a very excellent meal—at the price—and had I carried out the starvation and strong exercise and vivid imagination preparation that I have so strongly recommended to you, instead of lounging out to tea in the afternoon with a pretty lady and eating tea cake and sugary things at five o’clock, I should have recorded all the beautiful things about the little restaurant that I hear in the travel stories.