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
Almost across the way, in the great building of the Piccadilly Hotel,
quite an unpretentious entrance and a small staircase with marble walls
lead down to the grill-room. There is a lift by the stairs which is
much used by the people coming up from the grill-room, though only
lazy folk use it to go down there. This unpretentious entrance and
staircase are the portals to a suite of very high, very spacious rooms,
running the full length of the building. There are pilasters with
gilt capitols; and casemented mirrors in the walls. The electroliers
holding imitation candles give abundant light. The grill is behind a
great glass screen; carvers in white wheel about big joint waggons
and a Turk in gorgeous raiment is ready to make Oriental coffee. The
deep rose of the carpet contrasts with the white of the walls. At a
multitude of tables are hundreds of people of every comfortable class
in life, from the bank clerk to the field-marshal, and from the typist
to the duchess, eating meals simple or elaborate, just as they will.
This grill-room, like most of the others, caters for every taste; for
there is an elaborate _carte du jour_, two _table d'hôte_ luncheons
at half-a-crown and three-and-six, and a _table d'hôte_ dinner at
five-and-six. Electric fans keep the atmosphere pure. This grill-room
is all day long a very busy place, and as many as five hundred dinners
are served nightly.
Of the Criterion grill-room, the great airy hall on the ground floor of
the building, I have already written in another article.
On the other side of Piccadilly Circus the Monaco has a grill-room with
light buff walls and light buff marble pilasters. Its entrance gives
on to Shaftesbury Avenue. Near by is the Trocadero grill-room, down to
which a staircase of green and grey marble descends, and which, with
its walls of grey marble and gold and buff, its mirrors, its hammered
copper-work, its great grill and its orchestra, is handsome almost to
the point of gorgeousness. A _table d'hôte_ dinner is served here, as
it is now in most modern grill-rooms.
In Regent Street the Café Royal possesses a heavily gilded grill-room,
with entrances through the café and from Air Street, a grill-room in
which the best _entrecôte_ and the best pint of Burgundy in London
are obtainable; and on the other side of Regent Street, its entrance
hidden away in that dead little road, Haddon Street, is the grill-room
restaurant of the New Gallery Cinema Theatre, in the basement of
that establishment. It consists of two rooms, panelled with oak and
hung with copies of old tapestries. From these it takes its name Les
Gobelins. Mr Goetz, of the Vienna Café, opened this little place of
refreshment, and there were always Austrian and German dishes on its
bill of fare, but it has now changed hands, and M. Victor, late of the
Imperial and Les Lauriers, is in command. Its cookery remains very good.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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