There is not much ancient history to delve into with regard to the Trocadero Restaurant. Part of it stands on the ground which, when Great Windmill Street was a cul-de-sac, before Shaftesbury Avenue was made, was occupied by the Argyle Dancing Rooms, familiarly known as "The Duke's." "The Duke's" played its part in the night life of London in the sixties and seventies, when Kate Hamilton's and the other night houses still existed in the Haymarket, and though there were occasional rows there, some of the officers of one of the Household cavalry regiments being on one occasion marched off to the police station, it was on the whole a well-conducted establishment, with an admirable orchestra to play dance music. But the spasm of morality which passed over London towards the end of the last century swept the Argyle Rooms out of existence, and their proprietor, Mr "Bob" Bignell, converted the vacant rooms into the Trocadero Music Hall. Mr "Sam" Adams was the next proprietor of the music-hall, and then Mr Joseph Lyons, who was not yet a knight, saw the possibilities of the site for a restaurant, and gave a very large price for the old hall. The Trocadero Restaurant, when it first was built, was only half as large as it is now, for that red-brick portion of it which faces Shaftesbury Avenue was a nest of flats and chambers, and the conversion of this building when Lyons & Company bought it, into restaurant premises, was an architectural feat. Where the old building ends and the additions begin can be clearly seen by the difference in the architecture. It is a curious fact that Sir Joseph Lyons, the head and mainspring of the great organisation which controls the scores of restaurants and hundreds of tea-shops belonging to Lyons & Company, wished in his youthful days to be an artist, and that his amusement now, whenever he has any leisure, which he rarely has, is to paint sunsets. XX "JOLLY GOOD" A HALF-GUINEA DINNER AT THE TROCADERO No account of the Trocadero would be complete without an allusion to the _table d'hôte_ dinners which are served in the great hall of the restaurant, and I do not think that I can do better than reprint the account of a half-guinea dinner I gave there some ten years ago to a small Harrow boy. The Mr Lyons of the article is now Sir Joseph, and I fancy that the Messrs Salmon, who are now County Councillors and members of many other important bodies, are too busy to show even such an important person as a young Harrovian all the glories of the restaurant. But in all essentials the half-guinea dinner of to-day at the Trocadero is much as it was ten years ago. It was excellent then and is excellent now. * * * * *