LII The Cavour Restaurant for Auld Lang Syne
I head this chapter “For Auld Lang Syne,” for the future of the Cavour Restaurant has been, since the death of Philippe, who brought the restaurant into celebrity, uncertain. The Cavour has been put up of late years once to public auction and bought in, and there have been rumours without number that this, that and the other actor-manager was going to purchase the building.
In spite of all these rumours, the Cavour still continues in the hands of Mrs Dale, who was manageress under Philippe in old days, and to whom he left the property, just as it used to be in Philippe’s time, which is to say that it is one of the best bourgeois French restaurants to be found in London.
Every Londoner knows the white-faced restaurant almost next door to the Alhambra in Leicester Square. It is one of the few restaurants that still retains a bar, though it is nowadays called a buffet, and the three-and-six dinner which is served in the restaurant is still as it used to be, a most excellent meal, unstinted, well cooked, and all its material of excellent quality.
The bar of the buffet has always been a favourite resort of actors, and it was there that I first heard Arthur Roberts tell the story of “The Old Iron Pot,” a tale the success of which led to the invention of the game of “Spoof,” that masterly feat of bamboozling the guileless which gave amusement in the eighties to all Bohemia and added a new word to the English language. The Old Iron Pot figured largely in a tale which Arthur Roberts never wearied of telling to “Long Jack” Jarvis, another actor. No one ever heard the beginning of the tale, for it was always well in progress when the victim of the harmless pleasantry came on the scene. Arthur was so intent on the story, the other conspirator so immensely interested, that the new-comer was at once interested also, dispensed with all greetings, and tried vainly to understand all the ramifications of the story into which new characters seemed constantly to come, and which all revolved round an old iron pot. Jack Jarvis apparently thoroughly understood the story, occasionally asked questions, and now and then corrected Arthur Roberts as to the relationship of the various characters, and the other listener very soon found himself pretending that he too comprehended all the twists and turns.
Somehow or another, in those days the spirit of harmless practical joking seemed to be in the atmosphere of the Cavour bar. Perhaps it was, because in the days when Leicester Square was a waste ground with the damaged equestrian statue of George the Third in its midst some practical jokers sallied out one night from the little restaurant which occupied the site of the bar, to play the best practical joke of the last century. They painted the statue’s horse with red spots, put a fool’s cap on the statue’s head, and a long birch broom in the hand which should have held a field-marshal’s baton.
Philippe was the one and only waiter in those days at the little restaurant which was kept by a Frenchman and his wife. Next door, and extending behind the restaurant, was a tin shanty, where judge and jury entertainment was held and poses plastiques were exhibited. It was a disreputable place, for Brookes, who was its proprietor, and who had been associated with “Baron” Nicholson at the Coal Hole, had not the Baron’s wit, though he had the same flow of doubtful oratory.
When the old couple died, and Philippe succeeded to the business, he soon bought up the tin shanty and the ground belonging to it, built the Cavour as it now is, the bar occupying the site of the original restaurant, and made a little garden on the space now occupied by a cinema show.
Of this little garden Philippe was very proud. He liked to be able to go out of his restaurant and pick a bunch of mignonette to give to any lady, and he grew some vegetables and oranges there as well as flowers. He had an eye also to the main chance, for when anyone pointed out to him that he was wasting a valuable site by making a garden of it, he nodded his head, and replied: “The earth he grow more valuable every day.”
Philippe, short, grey-haired, with a little close-clipped moustache, always wearing a turned-down collar and a black tie, had a very distinct personality of his own. He was a first-class man of business, was up every morning at five o’clock to go the rounds of the market, riding in one four-wheeled cab, with another one following behind, into which he put his purchases and brought them home with him. He had no love for teetotalers, and he budgeted for the very liberal dinner of the house on the understanding that his customers should drink wine therewith. When he found that some of the guests were drinking only water, he used at once to send a waiter to them or to talk to them himself, and to tell them that he would charge them sixpence extra. After a time he found it entailed less loss of temper to notify this on the bill of fare, and the Cavour menu still bears the legend: “No beers served with this dinner. Dinner without wine, sixpence extra.”
The restaurant of the Cavour is a large white room, with a smaller room, also white, running back from it. Access to the big room is obtained from Leicester Square by a narrow corridor decorated with allegorical figures of the various months of the year—awful daubs, whoever it was who painted them. The big room is lighted from above by a sky-light, and there are large globes of electric light in the ceiling. There are many large mirrors let into the walls, and down each side of the room run brass rails for hats and coats. There is oilcloth on the floor, with strips of carpet over it in the gangways. The waiters go to a bar near the entrance door for the wine and other drinkables, which are served out there by Mrs Dale, or by her deputy. Some of the waiters, mostly French, were in the restaurant for many years under Philippe, but there is a new manager now with a curled-up black moustache.
If any of the habitués wish to entertain guests to an elaborate dinner at the Cavour, the custom is to pay five shillings instead of three-and-six, and certain extra dishes are put into the dinner of the day for this price. The ordinary dinner, however, is so good that these additions are hardly needed. This is the menu of a three-and-six dinner I ate at the Cavour this winter. It is served from five to nine, so as to meet the convenience of all the patrons of the restaurant, from the actor who makes a hurried meal before going to the theatre, to the City man who comes in very late after a day of hard work and goes home after his dinner:
Hors d’œuvre variés.
Soup.
Consommé de Volaille à la Royal.
Crème à l’Indienne.
Fish.
Boiled Turbot au Sauterne.
Fried Fillet of Plaice.
Grilled Herring.
Entrée.
Filet Mignon aux Haricots panachés.
Calf’s Head à la Reine.
Roast.
Chicken.
Quails on Toast
Salad. Cheese. Dessert.
There was a fine selection of hors d’œuvre to choose from, and plenty of each, not the one sardine looking lonely in a little dish, the two radishes and the potato salad that so often are the sole representatives of the first course at cheap dining-places. I was given a big plateful of good thick mulligatawny soup, and when I had eaten the very liberal helping of boiled turbot, excellently firm, I felt that I had finished quite a good dinner. However, I summoned up enough appetite to dispose of the little vol au vent put before me, the pastry of which was noticeably excellent, and then attacked a quail, which was quite a good bird, even if it had not those layers of fat which distinguish a “special” quail on a club dinner list from the ordinary one. A scoop from an excellent Stilton cheese ended my repast.
It may be selfish to hope that Mrs Dale may not sell her property to be converted into a theatre, but the Cavour dinner is such a good meal of its kind that I should be sorry if it disappeared from the map of London That Dines.