Interest
London Reitaurants
B.y LESLIE ADRIAN
INTEND, later in the year, to revise and bring I up to date the list of London restaurants which I compiled earlier in the year, and dispatched to anybody who wrote in and asked for it. The response was surprising—worrying, in a way, as what I had intended as a modest aid to the visitor began to take on the air of a challenge to resident gourmets, many of whom sent in letters applaud- ing or criticising individual choices. Most of them were well disposed, which was a relief.
The chief criticisms arose as a result of the method I used, which was to list restaurants with- out comment. This meant a certain balancing of virtues and vices : restaurant A got in because, though the cooking is erratic, the service is pleasant and the atmosphere congenial : restaur- ant B was excluded because the cooking, though good, was not good enough to compensate for some fault in service or surroundings. As I did not intend to cater primarily for the gourmet, I included one or two places by virtue of their atmosphere which, I suppose, ought not to have got in; but this seemed to be venial.
What a chancy business this restaurant- recommending can be ! I Was not, so far as I know, so unlucky as one writer of one of the many booklets on the subject, who praised a restaurant that had been demolished, for re- building, even before his work was published. But I was hoist with my own shashlik skewer more than once.
The other evening, for example, I went to one of the most highly recommended (and priced) restaurants on my list; and it happened to be the manager's night off. The result was farcical : the soup was by Knorr (excellent stuff, too, but not at 5s. a cupful) and the cheese had obviously lain in the open over the weekend. I would have found it hard to meet anybody who had gone there on my recommendation, face to face, afterwards. But what can one do? When the manager is present the food is, I am assured, uniformly excellent.
May I ask those of you who are interested, who have the time, and who have sampled Lon- don restaurants in the last six months, to send me your recommendations, or criticisms, in the next few weeks? All I can promise you in return is the revised list—this time, I hope, with a brief commentary. But in making it, I any going to lay down certain principles : (a) No hotels. Some are excellent, particularly at the lunch hour : but I want as far as possible to stick to the restaurant proper.
(b) No expense-account clip' joints. In some of the more expensive London restaurants today the food can be, and normally is, reasonable; but not good enough to justify the cost, because it is based on an expense-account clientele who are more interested in impressing their guests than in getting good value.
To one such restaurant a few months ago a friend of mine brought his wife for a farewell party before they returned to their native country. The proprietor remarked that he had not seen them for some time. My friend explained that the restaurant had become too popular and too dear. 'But of course you have an expense account!' the proprietor' expostulated. My' friend said he had no expense account. `Then why didn't you tell me?' the proprietor asked. 'Naturally I would not have charged you the full amount on the bill.'
(c) No restaurants of the kind where dear Mario, or Luigi, or Benno, or whoever it may be, knows everybody, and everybody knows every- body else. This list is designed for the benefit of people who are not known to the head waiter, or maitre d'hotel, and who tend to get squeezed into a corner beside the Jakes. I know this cuts out two or three restaurants dear to the heart of their regulars, but it must be so.
(d) Finally, no restaurants of the kind that appear to be springing up in considerable num- bers west of Knightsbridge, where excellent food, well cooked, is served up by strange young men in fancy dress. The reason is that they appear, almost invariably, to be extremely uncomfortable. Some have narrow benches, which offer support to only a small section of one's base; others have hard chairs; and nearly all of them squeeze diners together in gay but intolerable propinquity.
I had the remarkable experience in one of them the other day of being compelled to eavesdrop on a proposal of marriage. So far from feeling embar- rassed at having to overhear it, my only regret soon was that I had no tape recorder with me. The man—a languid character in, I would judge, the dress-designing professionL-spent most of the meal trying to find out whether the girl—a model 7-would marry him, without actually being asked : what he wanted her to do was to commit herself to him in principle without him having to commit himself to her in practice. This required an intricate, roundabout approach, a mixture of flattery about her and offensiveness about her friends.
One of his gambits, which I could not resist recording on the back of an envelope, was: 'Let's face it . . . you're very, very Beautiful, and I am very, very clever.' And even when she came up out of the mists of dumbness which swirled around her with some riposte,, he had his come- back : 'You and I would be an ideal pair, actually, because we see through each other.'
I trust she did.
But I digress : what I want to do is to collect and sift as much information about the London restaurant as I can in the next few weeks, and have a fresh list ready for the Christmas holidays. The more help I can enlist the better.
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