Between the Gaiety Theatre and Romano's there grew up an indefinite alliance, and golden-hearted Nellie Farren would lunch there when a new burlesque was in rehearsal, and "the Child" and dear "Jack" St John and others of the principals looked with favour on the restaurant, and on Lord Mayors' days made a brave show of beauty at the windows of the first floor. The Gaiety Girls of those days, splendid women and jolly good fellows, who enjoyed life, and by their beauty and sociability helped other people to enjoy life, lunched and supped at the Roman's. I have a dozen names at the tip of my pen, but if I wrote them down I should stray into a gossip over the ladies of the burlesque and light opera stages in the seventies and eighties, and should require columns and columns of space to deal adequately with such a subject. Most of them married, and, as the fairy tales have it, "lived happy ever after." And the "halls," we didn't call them variety theatres then, were also represented at the Roman's. Jolly, humorous Bessie Bellwood lunched there five days out of six, though she kept the Roman humble by asserting that she preferred the tripe and onions at Chick's to anything his kitchen could produce, and when she was in good anecdotal form kept everybody near her tremulous with laughter. And the sisters Leamar, who used to sing a duet as to Romano's being "a paradise, sure, in the Strand" and added the information that "the wines and the women are grand," naturally paid frequent visits to the restaurant to assure themselves that the description was a correct one. The Roman gathered about him a staff which exactly suited the tone of the restaurant, proof thereof being that so many of them remain in its service to this day. M. Luigi Naintre, the manager of Romano's, has climbed the ladder of promotion steadily through all the grades at the restaurant, and though for a while after Romano's death he wandered into other folds, one of the first acts of the company which now controls the restaurant was to ask him to come back to it. Long experience has taught him the art of making each frequenter of the restaurant believe that the establishment is maintained entirely to meet his or her taste and whims, and he is essentially the right man in the right place. M. Minola, his second in command, also graduated in the "Roman" school. The cellarman, L. Bendi, and the wine-butler, L. Villa, have been in the restaurant as far back as I can remember.