XXXVII Artists’ Rooms
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 France. In her kitchen was an admirable chef, and the fame of the table d’hôte—a real table d’hôte in its original sense, for Madame always sat at the head of her own table—was so great that people who loved good cooking used to ask permission to be allowed to dine at it. But Madame Dieudonné did not give this permission to all comers, and it was necessary that the would-be guest should be presented to Madame and should obtain from her an invitation to her circle before a place was laid for him. Any special favourites amongst the guests were asked by Madame to come after dinner into her sitting-room, there to drink coffee and to chat, and amongst these favourites were the great musicians, and the great actors and great painters of her own land, who stayed at the boarding-house. When any man, or any lady, was asked for the first time into this holy of holies, he or she placed a signature upon the wall and any further embellishment that came to mind. Gradually the middle portion of the walls became a perfect treasure-house of autographs.
Madame Dieudonné died, and her circle was broken up, the old lodging-house became a hotel, and when M. Guffanti, its present owner, brought his great energy to bear upon it, it soon became prosperous. Alterations were made, the white room on the first floor, with its panel pictures of gallants and ladies in silks and brocades, which is now used for banquets, was constructed, and when Madame Dieudonné’s little room was thrown into what is now the entrance hall, the workmen destroyed the signatures on the walls, evidently regarding them as mere dirt, in spite of all the precautions M. Guffanti had made to preserve them, and the only remembrances left of the stately old lady who used to sit at the head of her own table is in the name of the hotel and restaurant.
Dieudonné’s has flourished exceedingly, and M. Guffanti, his hair a little thinner on the top of his head than when first I made his acquaintance, but with the same majestic curve to his moustache ends, and possessing the same invincible energy, has increased the size of his hotel by taking in several other houses.
The Dieudonné’s of the present day is a large building of white stone and red brick, always very spick and span, and decked out with flower boxes. The restaurant on the ground floor is a fine room in the Adams style, a very light grey in colour, with some of the ornamentation just touched with gold. At one end are three large bow-windows, and at the other end there is a musicians’ gallery for the orchestra. On the side walls the ornamentation suggests doorways with mirrored panels, pink shades on the electroliers have subdued the light, which, when the room was first built, I found too white and too brilliant, and the lamps on the tables are also pink-shaded. The carpet is of a deep rose, and the white chairs are also upholstered in that colour. It is a very pleasant dining-room, and the people who dine there are all pleasant to look at, and do good food the compliment of going dressed in becoming garments. I very rarely dine at Dieudonné’s without seeing a ladies’ dinner-party in progress, for Dieudonné’s has always been a favourite dining place of the gentler sex since the early days when Giovanini, the old maître d’hôtel, with bushy eyebrows and Piccadilly weepers, used to consider any ladies without an escort as being put under his special and fatherly protection.
Dieudonné’s chiefly relies on two table d’hôte dinners, one the opera dinner, at six-and-six, and the other the Dieudonné dinner, at eight shillings. On the last occasion that I dined at Dieudonné’s before going on to the Russian Opera at Drury Lane I ate the opera dinner, the menu of which I give below. It was the day of President Poincaré’s state entry into London, and that event is celebrated by two of the dishes in the dinner:
Menu.
Hors d’œuvre Variés.
Consommé à la Française.
Crème de Laitues aux Perles.
Saumon d’Ecosse Poché.
Sauce Mousseline.
Pommes Nature Concombres.
Côtes de Pré-Salé Poincaré.
Canetons d’Aylesbury à l’Anglaise.
Petits Pois Nouveaux.
Coupe Entente Cordiale.
Friandises.
The Dieudonné dinner on this day only differed from the shorter one by the inclusion in it of escaloppes de ris de veau George V.
The other restaurant which created and retains an artists’ room is Pagani’s, in Great Portland Street, in the immediate neighbourhood of the Queen’s Hall and St George’s Hall. When, in 1871, Mario Pagani opened a little shop, which became a restaurant, in a house in Great Portland Street, the German Reeds were in possession of St George’s Hall, with, I think, Corney Grain, as a newly risen star, in their company. The Queen’s Hall had not been built and St James’s Hall, the site of which is now occupied by the Piccadilly Hotel, was the musical centre of London. M. Pagani, being an Italian, gave his customers Italian cookery, and very good Italian cookery too, and the journalists and the painters and the singers soon heard of the new little restaurant where there were always Italian dishes on the bill of fare. Pellegrini, the Vanity Fair cartoonist, and Signor Tosti were two of the first patrons of the restaurant. Mr George R. Sims, doyen to-day of literary gourmets, loved the restaurant as it was in its early state, and wrote of the good Italian food to be obtained there, and his portrait, on a china plaque, occupies, rightly enough, the centre of one of the walls up in the artists’ room. In 1887 M. Mario Pagani retired, and for a time his brother and his cousin carried on the restaurant; the latter, M. Giuseppe Pagani—left, in 1895, in sole control—taking as partner M. Meschini, the latter of whom eventually became the sole proprietor, bequeathing, when he died, the restaurant to his widow and to his son.
Pagani’s in the forty odd years of its existence, has increased in size to an extraordinary extent, and the building, with its elaborately ornamented front of glazed tiles with complicated figures in the pattern and ornaments of Della Robbia ware, its squat pillars of blue and its arches, luminous at night with electric light, differs immensely from the little, stuffy Italian restaurant that it originally was. It has a second entrance now in a side street, and a Masonic banqueting-room, and a lift, and its restaurant on the ground floor is a very large one and always reminds me of those great establishments that I see in the German cities. It is a very comfortable restaurant, and its brown walls, its mirrors with trellis-work and creepers painted on them set in brown wooden frames, and its ceiling painted in quiet colours, all give a sense of cosiness. There is in this downstairs restaurant a dispense bar, which looks very picturesque seen through a glazed screen, and just by this screen is the entrance from which the waiters stream out from the kitchen carrying the dishes ordered by the patrons of the restaurant, which they show as they pass to a clerk. To dine habitually at Pagani’s at a table facing the kitchen entrance is to obtain a complete knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of the Italian waiter. He is not run into a mould as a French waiter is, but retains many individualities. He always wears a moustache, and is pleasantly conversational with his fellows and with the customers.
In its early days, the cookery at Pagani’s was Italian and nothing but Italian, but with ever-increasing prosperity the scope of the kitchen has broadened, and now most of the dishes on the carte du jour have French names. The head cook, however, is a good Italian, M. Faustin Notari, who has climbed the ladder of promotion to the top during the twenty years he has been in the kitchens of Pagani’s, and there are always some Italian dishes on the bill of fare. The following are the dishes that I most frequently see on the card:—Minestrone, minestrone alla Genovese, zuppa alla Pavese, filetti di sole alla Livornesse, spaghetti, and Macaroni done in every way possible, ravioli al sugo or alla Bolognese, gnocchi alla Romana, fritto misto alla Tosti, ossi buchi, arrostino annegato, and I generally finish my dinner at Pagani’s with a zambaglione. Pagani’s has its specialities of the house apart from Italian dishes, and when I have dined, as I often do, as one of the committee of an amateur dramatic club, in the Artists’ Room, I generally find poulet à la Pagani—a very toothsome way of cooking the domestic fowl—on the menu of our little feasts. Filet de sole Pagani is another excellent dish, an invention of the house. Poule au pot and cassôlet à la Provençale and the bisque, and the bortsch at Pagani’s are always excellent. The diners whom I see at the other tables downstairs at Pagani’s all seem to me to belong to that very pleasant world, artistic Bohemia. The great singers of the opera and the great musicians who play at the Queen’s Hall go there to lunch and dine and sup, and their artistic perception is not confined entirely to music, for I notice that they generally bring very pretty ladies with them to eat the good dishes of the restaurant. A little touch of Bohemia that always pleases me at Pagani’s is the boy who comes round with a tray selling cigars and cigarettes. The restaurant-rooms on the first floor used, in the early days when Pagani’s was quite a small place, to be the rooms to which the sterner sex used to take ladies to dine, and there was a particular corner by a window with a tiny conservatory in it which was the favourite spot in the room. The gentler sex now dines everywhere in the restaurant, but in the first-floor rooms, with pleasant red walls, glazed screens put between the tables give a sense of privacy.
The Artists’ Room is on the second floor, just on the top of the staircase. There is not room for many people in it, and the dinner-parties held there must of necessity be small ones. But there is no room in any restaurant in London which is in itself so interesting as this one. The walls are almost entirely covered with signatures and sketches and caricatures; there is a large photograph, framed and autographed, of Sir Henry Irving as Becket; there are drawings by Dudley Hardy and three or four caricatures, including one of himself, drawn by Caruso. There is a photo of poor Phil May in riding kit on a horse; there is the menu of the dinner given by the artists of the Royal Opera at Covent Garden to Mr Thomas Beecham. On the mantelpiece stand some good bronzes of English and French Volunteers, and the menu of a banquet given by Pélissier, the head of the Follies, to his friends, and his invitation to this feast, which commences in royal style: “I, Gabriel,” etc., and ends with the earnest request, “Please arrive sober,” have been honoured with frames. Mademoiselle Felice Lyne’s autograph records one of the latest successes in opera. There are two smoked plates with landscapes drawn on them with a needle, and there is the medallion in red of Dagonet I have already mentioned. The name of Julia Neilson, written in bold characters, catches the eye as soon as any other inscription on one of the sections of the wall covered with glass; but it is well worth while to take the panels one by one, and to go over these sections of brown plaster inch by inch. Mascagni has written the first bars of one of the airs from Cavalleria Rusticana, Denza has scribbled the opening bars of “Funiculi, Funicula,” Lamoureux has written a tiny hymn of praise to the cook, Ysaye has lamented that he is always tied to “notes,” which, with a waiter and a bill at his elbow, might have a double meaning. Phil May has dashed some caricatures upon the wall, a well-meant attempt on the part of a German waiter to wash one of these out having resulted in the sacking of the said waiter and the glazing of the wall, Mario has drawn a picture of a fashionable lady, and Val Prinsep and a dozen artists of like calibre have, in pencil, or sepia or pastel noted brilliant trifles on the wall. Paderewski, Puccini, Chaminade, Calvé, Piatti, Plançon, De Lucia, Melba, Mempes, Tosti, Kubelik, Tschaikovsky, are some of the signatures.