The grill-room is less gorgeous in its decorations, though its buff marble pillars and walls are handsome enough. It is in this room that the _table d'hôte_ dinners at half-a-crown and three-and-six are served, and it is here that many men of business feed, and feed excellently well. Not many days ago I lunched in the grill-room, my host being a gourmet who knew all the resources of the establishment, and I enjoyed the _sole Monico_, a sole with an excellent white sauce; a woodcock _flambé_ and a salad of tender lettuce which, like the beautiful peaches with which we finished our repast, must have been grown in some Southern, sunshiny clime. I also enjoyed the cheese _fondue_, made, I think, from the _recette_ that Brillat Savarin set down in his "Physiologie du Goût." The Monico has gained special celebrity for its banquets, and the requests for dates for such feasts made to the Messrs Monico have been so overwhelming that they have turned the Renaissance Saloon, which used to be devoted to a _table d'hôte_ dinner, into a banqueting-room, and have redecorated it for its new uses. It remains in my memory that men who were present at the banquet given to Lord Milner in the International Hall of the Monico before he left England to take up his duties as Pro-Consul in South Africa, and who talked to me afterwards of the feast, told me that it was the best public dinner, best served and best cooked, that they had ever eaten, and last year, when I dined at the Poincaré dinner of the Ligue des Gourmands, which was held in the Renaissance Room (the occasion on which M. Escoffier's "creation" of the _poulet Poincaré_ was first disclosed to a discriminating gathering), I thought then that M. Sieffert's (the _chef_) handiwork was worthy of all the praise lavished on it, and that M. G. Ramoni, the manager, had arranged most admirably all the details of the banquet. The Renaissance Room now quite justifies its title, for its decoration of peacock blue panels and frames of gilded briar, with strange birds perched on the sprays, somewhat suggests Burne-Jones and the colouring of his school. As a specimen of a Monico banquet I cannot do better than give you one eaten by that famous Kentish cricketing club, the Band of Brothers, the menu of whose dinner bears their badge in dark and light blue, and has also a bow of their ribbon: