LONDON RESTAURANTS.
AFEW weeks ago, a daily contemporary inserted two or three letters of complaint against the character of London public dining establishments, and we were in hopes for a time that at length the whole subject was about to be fully discussed and the many grievances connected with it ventilated. But the season was not yet sufficiently advanced in silliness ; a large class of those most closely interested in the subject were just going out of town, and consequently were for the time indifferent ; the complaints proved to be only sporadic, and all passed over without anything like a really effective expose: of the discom forts, annoyances, and extortions to which Londoners who do not form a constituent part in any domestic organization are subjected in the matter of din- ner, and the difficulties which stand in the way of family parties desirous of occasionally varying the monotony of English household cookery by a good and yet reasonable meal at a restaurant. It is the former class, of course, to which the question is of the most urgent importance,—the esurient monads of society, men living in chambers, men who cannot endure either the desolate loneliness of the meal which the London lodging-housekeeper is pleased to call " dinner," or the enforced " sociability " of the waifs and strays who congregate at boarding-houses,—and men who are coin- pelled by irregular hours of occupation to dine when and where they best can,—men, in fact, who are under the necessity of " dining round," as the Americans call it. To them, of course, every dining discomfort is a daily-recurring evil in life, and every dining extortion a very heavy, peculiarly annoying, and capriciously levied tax, the only escape irons which is a club,—an alternative, however, not always available. We are not speaking at present of the men to whom variety of style and change of scene in dining are almost essential, and who, while grumbling at the annoyances and expenses, still prefer a nomadic life as regards dinner. They have their grievances, but they are, of course, to a certain extent, incurred at their own option. But what is a man who wants to dine simply, but welt, with the accessories of cleanliness and civilization, and yet at a daily expenditure in fair proportion to a moderate income, to do in. London ? Supposing that his wants are merely a sufficiency of a well-cooked, well-carved sirloin or saddle, served decently and in order, the plainest of vegetables, bread and cheese, and a pint tankard of Bass, there is not a place in London where. they can be satisfied under three shillings, or at the rate of over fifty pounds a year ; while if he is tempted into such wild luxury as vegetables which every suburban villa-holder with- a quarter-acre garden grows in abundance for a household, or indulges in such delicacies as a spoonful of currant jelly with his another shilling is added with facility. There are places, it is true, where the same typo of dinner is offered to the credulous• at a lower price ; but no human being accustomed to the moat moderate of household comforts in the way of dining can ever reconcile himself to the huge overcooked joint, hacked and mauled by barbarous carving, periodically soaked with greasy water called, gravy, placed on your plate in chunks by a slipshod waiter either offensively impertinent or more offensively obsequious, and eaten on a table-cloth on which grease appears to have been deliberately poured as a charitable means of sustenance for flies, in the pre- sence of a vis-a-vis whose performance with the knife suggests that he must be in training for sword-swallowing at a music-hall. Yet such is the prospect before those who are tempted by " a joint dinner for ls. Gd.," so liberally offered in certain quarters. Then there are old-fashioned chop-and-steak taverns, such as that which once upon a time entertained a Laureate unawares ; but they are few in number, and confined to a certain locality, and are certainly far from cheap. But great as are the grievances of people who are not so much restricted to time and locality, those whose fate- it is to have to seek a substantial mid-day meal in the City have still greater cause to complain. With scarcely a single exception, the dining-rooms and luncheon-bars within half a mile of the Royal Exchange are simply as bad as they can be, and in reality exorbitantly dear. The pro- prietors, relying, of course, upon the fact that thousands and thousands of clerks and others have to spend eight or ton hours a day in the City, and must eat, treat their victims with almost undisguised contempt. There are heated and noisy chop-rooms ; luncheon-bars covered with an array of plates of cold beef, indi-
gestible veal-and-ham pies, and such like, after the lowest style
of railway refreshment-rooms ; anomalous places where, on the strength of the menu being written in bad French, and the
youthful clerks devour curious messes of bad food, still worse AUTUMN MAMEUVRES. cooked, under the impression that they are enjoying the handi-
pared to pay doubly for everything he has, ton shillings a bottle Our corps contributed a fairly strong company to the Seventy- for wino that he can buy for less than sixty shillings a dozen, and Seventh Blanks' Administrative Battalion. We had never worked twice as much for an indifferent dinner as would be charged together before, and we turned out for the first brigade field-day for a good dinner at a first-class club. There seems no room without any opportunities of a rehearsal. The result was, on the in the English mind for the idea that men may want to whole, very creditable to our drill ; the battalion became a tolerably dine well and comfortably, and yet not be utterly reckless as to homogeneous military unit much quicker than might have been expenditure. Such a man is treated in a Loudon restaurant—we expected. The time was not long enough, however, to let us use the French word, inapplicable as it is, because we have really acquire that common instinct which enables a mass of men to obey none in our language—as if he were a visitor at Hastings or Ilfra- an order with one single impulse. When our colonel told Combo in the height of the full season, to bo charged upon ,the us to march, we did march, no doubt; but there was a pause, theory that it is advisable to make hay while the sun during which each man made up his mind separately to march, shines. There is no recogpition of the fact that if one could dine and we got off with a sort of heave and shuffle. One result of in a pleasant, well-appointed restaurant, without paying one hun- this was, that instead of starting with a clear, defined step, wo Bred per cent. tax for house-room, cooking, and attendance, it bad to settle our marching step after we were in motion as best would induce a very largo class to become regular customers, espe- we could. Even the several companies would have gained much &ally if it were possible to establish a restaurant in London where cohesion and certainty of action by another week's training. The ladies could dine without being stared at as if the mere fact of soldier ought, I suppose, to expend no thought or volition at all in their entering a public dining-room rendered them fair objects for obeying the orders which effect the usual movements of troops ;
impertinence. the whole of his intelligence should be reserved for the unforeseen
It is a most unsatisfactory state of things. Despite periodical chances of war. As far as I could observe, the Volunteers are outbreaks of grumbling, it improves but slowly, and it is not easy still far from having attained this ideal. Something must bo to see from what quarter reform is to be looked for. If the average allowed for the novelty of the circumstances in estimating our Englishman could only be brought to see that the idea of a club performances in drill during the campaign. Probably most of us does not necessarily involve a palace in Pall Mall, gorgeous apart- had never exercised on rough country, and the difference ments, social exclusiveness run mad, and an entrance-fee of between a smooth parade-ground and a common thick with twenty or thirty guineas, an extension of the club system might furze and heather, and intersected with ruts, is greater for work wonders. A few clubs whore members were content with an troops in heavy-marching order than for casual pedestrians. Of ordinary house, no ostentation of luxury, an entrance-fee and course, drilling with tolerable correctness on the natural face of subscription sufficient to defray due expenses and to establish a the earth, and in the presence of the enemy, was one of the lessons good reading-room, with good plain fare and honest wines, would we had to learn ; perhaps the most important of all for us rank and coon bring the dining-rooms to their senses, and save thousands of file. Our route-marching, too, was at first painfully lumbering men of the class we have referred to from the extravagant and incoherent, though we never fell into the disorderly straggle expenditure in living at present unavoidable. Or the experiment which certain Militia regiments affect. But the improvement was might be tried—there is great reason to believe it would succeed, far more marked and rapid in marching than in manoeuvring. By
and if it did succeed at all, its success would be great—of a well- the end of the time our column was as compact and steady on the appointed dining-hall on a really large scale, established on the road as could reasonably be desired, and we got over the ground system that there should every day be a certain number of at a very creditable pace. On the last morning of the campaign " house dishes," sufficient in variety to meet the taste of all but we covered twelve miles in three hours and a half of clear walking. the most capricious, and charged for at prices which a large and This will seem nothing to boast of to those who are accustomed to
steady consumption would render remunerative. Or the same measure times and distances by what they can do singly or iu principle might be applied with regard to wines, and a fair couples and unburdened. But for a battalion in heavy-marching Bordeaux and Burgundy, red and white, Rhine wine, and sherry order it is really a good piece of work.
placed on the carte as the staple wines of the house at small If you ask what other useful things we learnt, the essence of
profit rates, while the grands tins should also be attainable, them may be summed up in the reply : scouring of pots and but naturally on a higher scale of profit to the house than kettles : which may seem trivial, but means something considera- those purchased in larger quantities. In the same way, given ble. The ordinary routiuo of camp life is not very complicated, custom enough, the price of a pint of pale ale might surely be but it does not coma by nature. For instance, one of the most reduced from the preposterous figure of sixpence, at which it elementary duties is to care for one's rifle before oneself. After a stands in most London dining-rooms of any pretension to comfort hard day's walk one is apt to think one has earned the right to and decent cookery. And if capital enough were embarked in wash and eat. Far otherwise in the military life. The rifle comes the enterprise, Delmonico's New York system might be followed first ; the tent and other necessary works of encampment next ; with advantage. He has three establishments, in situations car- accoutrements and boots next ; and the person last. The days responding, say to Tower Hill, Cheapside, and St. James's Street, before the actual manoeuvres began had not much interest for the all admirably adapted to the requirements, taste, times, and public, but they were not ill spent by us in becoming familiar with
seasons of the locality. Three dining-halls, under one proprietary, all these matters of detail. Precious time and pains would be on the system we have hinted at, in the three situations we have saved to a Volunteer regiment in the day of need by having in named, would be a costly enterprise, but in all probability an its ranks even a per-centage of men who had learnt these extremely remunerative one.
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