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
The windows that give on to Glasshouse Street are of the glass that
looks as though the bottoms of wine bottles had been used, and in the
centre of each window is an escutcheon with armorial bearings. At
one side of the room is a gallery of dark wood, and on the front of
this is also a wealth of heraldry. The heads of animals of all kinds,
which seemed a little strange in the _brasserie_ by the entrance, seem
quite in place in the big hall which has all the appearance of the
dining-room of some old baronial castle converted into a German inn. On
the side opposite to the gallery is a long counter under two arches of
dark wood. On this counter are many beer mugs, and fruit in baskets,
and on a series of shelves all the _delicatessen_ which are recorded on
the _spiese karte_. On the wall at the back of the two arches hang the
beer mugs which belong to the customers, rows upon rows of them forming
a background of coloured earthenware and glass. By the side of this
long counter is another, where a pretty girl sits and hands out to the
waiters the liqueur bottles and keeps the necessary accounts.
If the trophies of the chase in the _brasserie_ are various they are
infinitely more various in the big hall, for the Herr Baron must have
hunted on all the continents and did not disdain to add monsters of the
deep to his trophies, for a spiky fish, looking like a marine hedgehog,
dangles from the ceiling, and below it is one of those curious things
which sailors call mermaids and the right name of which is, I believe,
manati. He was a collector of curios also, this imaginary baron, for
a curious lamp in the shape of an eight-pointed star hangs above the
gallery, there is a carved owl immediately below it and various other
wood carvings in different parts of the restaurant, and on the broad
shelf above the panelling are a wonderful variety of earthenware
and china and pewter mugs and dishes and jugs and candlesticks in
quantities that would set up half-a-dozen antique shops.
The heads of animals on the wall would supply material for an
exhaustive lesson in zoology. There is the skull of an elephant, the
head of a rhino, a bear grins sardonically on one side, and opposite
to him a zebra appears to have thrust his head and neck through the
wall. There are several boars' heads, an eagle with his wings spread
dangles from the balcony, and a black cock appears to be rising from a
forest of liqueur bottles. There are horns or heads of half-a-hundred
varieties of deer, from the wapiti and elk to those tiny little fellows
with horns a couple of inches long who run about like rabbits in the
German forests. There are antlers of red deer and fallow deer, and
heads of wildebesste and hartebesste, and black buck and buffalo, and
of many more that are beyond my knowledge of horned beasts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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