LIV The Cathay Restaurant
In full view of all who pass to and fro through Piccadilly Circus, there shines on one of the tall houses which encircle it the announcement that the upper part of the building is occupied by the Cathay Restaurant, which modestly on its menu describes itself as a “pioneer, first-class, Chinese restaurant.”
As I take into my descriptive net every manner of eating-house, so long as the food and drink to be obtained there is good of its kind, I experimented in the first days of this year of grace, at lunch-time, on the Cathay Restaurant, and found that it has selected in its very long carte du jour those Chinese dishes which are palatable to the European, as well as to the Chinese taste.
Chinese food is no novelty to me, for during the five years that I was quartered in the Far East—at Penang, Singapore and Hong-Kong—I was frequently one of the guests at feasts given by Chinese merchants, and learned by experience which were the dishes that one could safely eat and which were the Chinese delicacies that it was wise to drop under the table. A Chinaman, when he wishes to be very polite at table, takes up with his chop-sticks some especially dainty morsel from his own plate and pops it into the mouth of his European neighbour at table. A kindly young Chinaman once thus put into my mouth a slip of cold pig’s liver wrapped round a prune, and I do not think that I ever tasted any nastier combination.
Two Chinese banquets at which I was a guest remain very clearly marked in my memory. One was given by a rich Chinaman at Penang, on the occasion of the marriage of his son, to all the European officials and the officers of the garrison and the leading British merchants. It was a feast at which the dishes were alternately Chinese and European ones, and by each man’s and by each lady’s dish, for the ladies were also invited, were chop-sticks, and knives and forks and spoons. One Chinese dish I remember at this feast as being quite excellent—a salad of vegetables and of small fish of all kinds. All the guests ate quite heartily both of the European dishes and the Chinese dishes, but that night nearly all the Europeans who had been to the banquet believed that they had suddenly been stricken with Asiatic cholera. I was one of the happy exceptions, and I suppose that I must have skipped whatever was the dish that worked such havoc amongst my fellow-guests.
Messengers from half the bungalows in the leafy lanes of Penang were sent off post-haste to the civil surgeon, begging him to come at once to the bedside of unhappy sufferers, and each messenger as he arrived at the civil surgeon’s house received the news that the doctor believed himself to be in the throes of the same dread Asiatic disease, and did not think that he would survive the dawn. Nobody, however, did die, and two or three days later all the aristocracy of Penang, looking even paler than Europeans always are in that land of lily-white complexions, and very shaky about the knees, gathered together at a cricket match and discussed the matter. Somebody had already gone to the Chinese merchant and had told him of the havoc that his banquet had made. He was profoundly grieved, pointed out that none of his Chinese guests had suffered the slightest inconvenience, and laid the blame on the European dishes, which he had procured as a compliment to his white guests, saying that he “always mistrusted the cookery of the barbarians.”
The other unforgettable feast was given by the head Shroff, the native cashier, of one of the banks in Hong-Kong. I had been talking at the house of one of the bankers as to my experiences of Chinese dishes, and had rather decried the cookery of the Flowery Land. I had (I was afterwards told) been especially sarcastic as to the Chinaman’s partiality for puppy-dog, and more or less ranked all Chinese dishes with the detestable rat soup which a Chinaman sold in the early mornings just outside the barrack gates to the coolies on their way to their work. The orderly officer going to inspect rations always had to pass the unsavoury cauldron from which the soup was ladled out, and, in the hot weather, the only thing to do was to put a handkerchief to one’s nose and run past it.
Some little time after these conversational flourishes of mine the banker asked me if I would like to eat a real, well-cooked Chinese dinner, for the head Shroff of his bank had asked him to honour him with his company at his villa in Kowlun—which is where the “Mr Wu’s” come from—and had told him that he would be delighted if he would bring some of his European friends. The dinner, which consisted chiefly of fish, was an excellent one, the all-pervading taste of soy not being too persistent, and I was especially delighted with a white stew of what my host said was Cantonese rabbit, which I thought quite the most tender and the fattest rabbit I had ever tasted. When the dinner was over, the banker told me that the “Cantonese rabbit” to which I had given such unlimited praise was really a Cantonese edible puppy, fattened on milk and rice. After that incident I found that whenever I dined out in Hong-Kong, conversation always seemed to turn on to Cantonese puppies, and I was gently chaffed for at least six months as to my sudden conversion to the delights of baby chow as a pièce de résistance.
I found, however, neither puppy-dog nor rat on the carte du jour of the Cathay Restaurant.
The restaurant is on the first floor above a bank. A commissionaire stands at the outer portals, and there is a lift for the benefit of anyone who is too lazy to walk up a single flight of stairs. The restaurant itself is hardly sufficiently Oriental in appearance to be a Cockney’s beau ideal of a Chinese restaurant. It is just what a progressive restaurant for Chinamen in Peking would be, for though the food is Chinese food, cooked by a Chinese cook, the appearance of the restaurant is almost European, an exaggerated copy of a French restaurant, with here and there Chinese touches which redeem the place from tawdriness. There is on the wall a paper with a pattern of gold fleurs-de-lis, the carpet is crimson, the chairs and tables are of European make, the waiters are of European nationalities and wear dress clothes. But a strip of good Chinese embroidery is hung along that side of the restaurant where the serving-room is behind a glassed screen; there are porcelain vases on the two mantelshelves; a great Chinese ornament of carved wood, gold and crimson and black, hangs by a ribbon just inside one of the windows; the big curtains to the windows are of old gold Chinese silk, and the little curtains, also of Oriental silk, are lilac in tint. The manager of the restaurant is a Chinaman with short-cut hair, and he wears the same neat, dark garments that all European managers assume. I sat down at one of the tables, asked the young Italian who came to wait on me to show me a carte du jour and the menu of the set lunch, if there was one, and then looked round at the people who were taking their meal there.
The Chinese in London certainly patronise their own restaurant, for quite half the people who were eating luncheon were Celestials. There were two young Chinese boys in the charge of a grey-haired English lady. There were several young Chinamen whom I mentally put down as students. An older Chinese gentleman had brought his wife out to lunch; and before I left, a party of Chinese gentlemen came in, whom, from the respect shown to them by the manager, I judged to be secretaries of the Chinese Embassy—the Chinese Ambassador, whom I know by sight, was not amongst them.
Nowadays when Chinese gentlemen and ladies wear European clothes, and the men have their hair short, one has to look at their faces to detect the difference between them and Europeans.
There were some Londoners lunching in the restaurant. A party of ladies in furs were enjoying the novelty of the Chinese dishes; two youngsters, whom I took to be medical students, were ordering various dishes from the carte du jour, and were cross-examining the waiter keenly as to the cooking arrangements and how the delicacies were imported from China; and two schoolgirls, one of the flapper age and one younger, came into the restaurant giggling and looking round as though they expected a pantomime Chinaman to spring up before them or to jump round a corner.
The menu of the day at the Cathay is on a large folding mauve card, and the dishes are both in Chinese characters and in English letters with an explanation in English below each name. The first division is for chop sueys and noodles. A chop suey is to the Chinese what Irish stew is to the English and a ragoût is to the French. Pork is its foundation, and chicken livers and chicken gizzards, celery, mushrooms, peas, onion, garlic, peppers, oil and salt all go into it. Noodle is any paste dish, and macaroni or vermicelli would be described on a Chinese menu as a noodle.
Of the dishes on the card, Loo min is noodle in Pekinese style. Lat chew chop suey is chop suey with green chutney. Chop suey min is chop suey with noodle, and so on. There is a little list of dishes which are ready, and a longer list of dishes which will take some minutes to prepare, such as fried crab and Chinese omelet; fried rice, with meat, mushroom, egg and vegetables; sliced jelly-fish with pickle; and soyed pork. Some especial dishes are on the menu for which a day’s notice must be given, one of these being birds’-nests with minced chicken and another shark’s fin with sliced chicken, ham, bamboo shoots, etc. At the end of the list comes the catalogue of teas, pastries and sweets, pickled onions being included in this category.
After looking down the carte du jour, I turned my attention to the set luncheon, and first of all took up the card on which it was written in Chinese. In case you may be able to read Chinese fluently I reproduce this card on the next page.
The first word on this only means menu. The first dish is a soup of chicken, ham, bamboo shoots and mushrooms. The second dish is fried chicken liver and vegetables, and the last dish is simply roast pork.
I opted for this half-crown meal, and as a preliminary, the waiter put a tiny cup of soy and a Chinese porcelain spoon by the side of the European knives and forks and spoons which were already on the table. A wine list was offered me, but I preferred, as I was going to eat Chinese meats, to drink Chinese tea with them, and ordered a cup of Loong Cheng. The plates used at the Chinese restaurant are, like the cutlery, of European pattern, but the dishes in which the soups and the meats are brought to table are Chinese ones of all kinds of shapes and ornamented with Chinese paintings. My soup, with tiny strips of bamboo in it and morsels of chicken flesh, tasted very much like the chicken broth that one is given when one is ill and on a low diet. The fried chicken and vegetables were quite good eating, and the taste of the bamboo shoots in it was particularly pleasant to the palate. The roast pork I shied at, and asked instead to be given a plate of chow chow, an admirable sweet which I have known ever since boyhood, for one of my uncles, who was Consul at Foo Chow, used to send home to all his small nephews presents of this delicacy. The tea was excellent, and doing as the Chinese do, I did not spoil its taste by adding either sugar or milk to it.
Altogether my luncheon at the Chinese Restaurant was quite a pleasant experiment, and I can advise any gourmets who would like to test the cookery of the Far East in comfortable surroundings to follow my lead.