The Gourmet's Guide to LondonNewnham-Davis, Lieut.-Col. (Nathaniel)
General
The Gourmet's Guide to London
Newnham-Davis, Lieut.-Col. (Nathaniel)
Restaurants -- England -- London -- Guidebooks
Pagani's in the forty odd years of its existence, has increased in size
to an extraordinary extent, and the building, with its elaborately
ornamented front of glazed tiles with complicated figures in the
pattern and ornaments of Della Robbia ware, its squat pillars of
blue and its arches, luminous at night with electric light, differs
immensely from the little, stuffy Italian restaurant that it originally
was. It has a second entrance now in a side street, and a Masonic
banqueting-room, and a lift, and its restaurant on the ground floor is
a very large one and always reminds me of those great establishments
that I see in the German cities. It is a very comfortable restaurant,
and its brown walls, its mirrors with trellis-work and creepers painted
on them set in brown wooden frames, and its ceiling painted in quiet
colours, all give a sense of cosiness. There is in this downstairs
restaurant a dispense bar, which looks very picturesque seen through a
glazed screen, and just by this screen is the entrance from which the
waiters stream out from the kitchen carrying the dishes ordered by the
patrons of the restaurant, which they show as they pass to a clerk. To
dine habitually at Pagani's at a table facing the kitchen entrance is
to obtain a complete knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of the Italian
waiter. He is not run into a mould as a French waiter is, but retains
many individualities. He always wears a moustache, and is pleasantly
conversational with his fellows and with the customers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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