Mafeking at Romano's
ARNOLD BENNETT, writing in his Journals, put down one day:
Romano's. This restaurant is quite different at lunch time from dinner. Theatrical people entering, mutually known, a few actresses pretty and vapid . . . waiting bad. Tables much too close together as usual.
Romano's was hardly the place to suit him, nor did it ever suit Oscar Wilde, who much preferred the Café Royal, but its impact on the gay Lon- don world for the half-century between the Seventies and the First World War was colossal. Its real name was Café Vaudeville, but everybody called it Romano's after its proprietor, who was known as 'The Roman.' Actually, he was a Neapolitan and never mastered the English language. Having been taught to put the word `Esquire' after a gentleman's name, when writing to him, he invariably addressed his clientele by their nicknames, always adding 'Mr. Eskvire.' Romano had learnt his trade as a waiter at the Café Royal, and when he started off on his own he was financed by a bookie to whom he had lost a large amount of money. All his profits went on gambling, at which he was never lucky. The irony of fate was such that after he had put a large sum on Little Eva, which won the Cambridge- shire in 1901, he died a day or two before the race. Had he lived he would have made several thousand pounds.
Of the many delightful anecdotes in this book I like best the story of the great gourmet Hugo Astley, who lay a-dying and was visited by his best friends, all habitués of Roinano's. 'Bear in mind,' he said to them, 'that two things are
absolute certainties: Death and Quarter clay, but it is not generally known that it is also a million to one on crab-sauce against lobster-sauce with turbot. God bless you all, goodbye.' Theatrical folk were much in evidence at Romano's, and George Edwardes once observed to a respectful gathering there, 'The King creates the peers but it is I who choose the peeresses.' Marie Lloyd, First Lady of the Halls, invariably ate at Romano's, so did the Second Lady, Bessie Bell- wood.
At a recent West End revue there was a scene with the nostalgic song '1 Remember Romano's —Just as it Used to Be' and we were shown the familiar salle-a-manger with its red plush seats. 1, too, remember Romano's 'just as it used to be,' for. it was there that I drank for the first time in my life a glass of champagne on Mafeking Night.
GERALD HAMILTON
Previous page
