The East Room at the Criterion is a trophy of one of woman's victories over man, for it was one of the first, if not the very first, restaurant-rooms designed and decorated to harmonise with feminine frocks and frills, and made beautiful that mankind should bring beautiful womankind there to eat things delicate. In the sixties, restaurants were few and far between, and were mostly places where men dined without their feminine belongings. But all this was changed in the seventies, and the East Room did its full share in persuading man that it added pleasure to a good dinner in a restaurant to be faced by a pretty woman. The East Room of to-day is twice the size of the one that Messrs Spiers and Pond first built, and its decoration of white and gold, and panels painted with Watteau subjects, its harmony of greys and pink in carpets and furniture and curtains, its ante-room with old French furniture, and the satisfactory arrangement by which the music of the orchestra, perched in a gilded cage above the big entrance hall, comes softened by distance to the diners in the East Room, are all happy second thoughts. But the East Room was, in 1873, when it was first opened, the dining place to which every lady asked her husband to take her, and it has held its own against ever-increasing competition through the years. Its windows look down on the rush and swirl of Piccadilly Circus, a wonderful scene either by day or night, and it adds to the pleasure of an unhurried meal to watch the hurry of thousands of one's fellow-creatures. At one period, after the extension of the building, there were two East Rooms, a dividing wall being where the arches and curtains now are. The one of these nearest the grand staircase was a strictly _à la carte_ restaurant, while in the other, approached through a corridor, a _table d'hôte_ meal was served. The East Room of to-day smiles on both classes of diners. When a man sits down at his table there at dinner-time, M. Kugi, the _maître d'hôtel_, puts before him the _carte du jour_, an ample one, with any special delicacies in larger print than the others, and also lays on the table the menus of the half-sovereign and seven-and-six _table d'hôte_ dinners, and it is his experience that the greater number of diners look at the _carte du jour_ and then, mistrusting their own judgment, order one or the other of the _table d'hôte_ meals. This was the menu of the seven-and-six dinner one night when I dined at the East Room at a tiny dinner-party, before going to the theatre down in the cellars of the big building to see the play running there: