Café Royal

“ The Café Royal is pleasantly conservative, and it is more like a good French restaurant of the Second Empire than is any other dining-place I know in London. Its fame has reached to all other countries in the world, and a French waiter who hopes to become in due time a manager looks on an engagement at "The Café" as a step in his career. Therefore, if ever you feel inclined to be tight-fisted in the matter of tips to the waiters at the Café Royal, reflect that you may meet them again where their good word can help to make a meal comfortable for you. ”

“ That is why the choice of the right restaurant is so important. If we are in the mood for conversation there is our club or the Café Royal; if we are alone and it would amuse us to watch other people dance, or should we wish to add as a flavouring to the music and the dancing the note ever so slightly struck of fugitive romances, there is the balcony of the Elysée Café. ”

“ However they might differ as to the colour of their politics, they were all Frenchmen, they all sighed for the blue skies of France; they found in the Café Royal a little corner of their beloved native land, and they naturally all gravitated to it. The house was much too small for the number of its frequenters, when, fortunately, the old Union Tavern in Glasshouse Street came into the market, was bought, and converted into the café as we know it, with its painted ceiling and its wealth of gilding, and the restaurant and the private dining-rooms were established on the other floors. ”

“ And with this dinner we drank a good bottle of St Marceaux.
But men when they dine together think little of the rightful sequence of courses, and order what their taste prompts them to eat. I have dined at the Café Royal, and dined well on moules Marinières—and one can eat moules at the Café without fear, half a cold grouse, a salad and a petit Suisse cheese. When the ham is a dish of the day it always tempts me, for the Café Royal hams are princes of their kind, and the cold mousses that the chef de cuisine, M. François Maître, makes are beautifully light. ”

“ There is a romance in the history of most restaurants that have existed for any length of time, and the rise of the Café Royal from small beginnings is interwoven with the Franco-Prussian War and with the rise and destruction of the Commune. On 11th February 1865 M. Daniel Nicols, who had been in the wine trade at Bercy, that part of Paris where the great wine depots are, opened a modest little café-restaurant in the lower part of Regent Street. ”

“ This does not mean that the Café Royal is a literary café, or an artistic café. The literary, dramatic, and pictorial elements are certainly stronger there than in any other London resort, but at any time you may see there the strangest assembly: foreigners, a great many; smart people who are seeing life; and very dull, ordinary, fat men who stop on their way from business or shop to have a drink before dinner. ”

“ At dinner time the room is not itself, for half of it sees its marble tables covered with cloths, which means that eating proceeds, and eating does not, so well as123 drinking, favour turbulent debate. It is just before dinner, and especially after dinner, that the Café Royal enters upon its true function: to provide a pleasant, cheap place, fairly noisy, fairly smoky, and fairly comfortable, where the young arts may meet and joust. ”

“ It had come to this after two days, either that I must shift my quarters from the Ritz into cheaper lodgings, or abandon my engagement altogether and go back alone.
One afternoon, aimless and thirsty, I turned into the Café l'Univers in the Place du Palais Royal, and sat down at one of the little tables under the awning where was a vacant chair. This is a busy spot, upon which many streets converge, and one may rest there idly and study an infinite variety of human types. ”

“ In the mid-nineteenth century a revolution came over the cafés of Paris. Tobacco had invaded their precincts; previously one smoked only in the estaminets. Three cafés of the Palais Royal resisted the innovation, the Café de la Galerie d'Orleans, the Café de Foy and the Café de la Rotonde. To-day, well, to-day things are different. ”

“ Diderot tells in 1760, in his Rameau's Nephew, of the life and frequenters of one of the Palais Royal coffee houses, the Regency (Café de la Régence) :
In all weathers, wet or fine, it is my practice to go toward five o'clock in the evening to take a turn in the Palais Royal.... If the weather is too cold or too wet I take shelter in the Regency coffee house. There I amuse myself by looking on while they play chess. Nowhere in the world do they play chess as skillfully as in Paris and nowhere in Paris as they do at this coffee house ”

“ Where the turn-outs bear such a proportion to the drays, no wonder cafés thrive, exquisite drinks are served, and a corky people, who have a happy faculty, as illustrated by the late war, of coming up the quicker the farther they are pressed down, find the thing enjoyable.
A café-front indeed is better than an omnibus-top for studying Paris, and the café itself is a club for everybody. People go to it to gossip and regale themselves, play games, talk politics, read the newspapers, write letters, transact business it may be, sit, think, dream, and rest themselves. ”

“ The little bar is in the dining room, and above its mahogany top you may see the head and shoulders of the proprietor's youthful daughter—a girl of such rare and artistic southern beauty that men and women too stare in admiring wonder.
But the military and the nobility are not the only guests. The crowded café distils a broad Bohemianism which startles one. At one table we see two dark-eyed "ladies-of-the-street" boldly ogling a couple of young subalterns in khaki who have just arrived from England. ”

“ There are other cafés famed for cuisine and cellars, but my Lady of the Chiffons finds them dull, and in the creed of a Parisienne dulness heads the list of mortal sins.
Americans and English are the mainstay of the Ritz, save during the tea hour, when the crowd becomes cosmopolitan. At the Café Paillard one finds the diners of the Madrid a clique aristocratic, mondain, and chiefly French. The Café de Paris repeats the story of Armenonville, though without the picturesque woodland setting and the attractive al fresco features. ”

“ As a Frenchman rarely asks an acquaintance, or even a friend, to his apartment, the café has become the common ground where all meet, for business or pleasure. Not in Paris only, but all over France, in every garrison town, provincial city, or tiny village, the café is the chief attraction, the centre of thought, the focus toward which all the rays of masculine existence converge. ”

“ Life still thrilled in song. Youth was not yet dead. Art was long and exigent.
It was their custom, after dinner, to adjourn to Champoreau's for café noir, served in the French style. In this large, bare saloon, with sanded floor, with its bar and billiard table, foreign as France, almost always deserted at this hour save by their company, the genial patron smiled at their gaiety, as he prepared the long glasses of coffee. ”

“ It is in this place of duels and babies and tipsy penitents that the new restaurant is to shine resplendent, if plans do not miscarry. Whether with all its grandeurs it will attract the crowd remains to be seen. A restaurant's success is not always in proportion to the money spent in equipping it. There, for example, was the Café des Fleurs. It was the prettiest café in Paris. The men behind it were so wealthy that they did not care whether the place paid or not. They lavished money upon the decorations, the cuisine, the cellars. ”

“ These splendid cafés are multiplied by mirrors, and being open, or separated only by panels of glass, appear to form but a single tableau with the street, and those outside and in seem parts of the same company. I recommend you the Café de Paris, the Café Hardi, the Café Veron, if you wish to mix with the fashionable and merry world; if with the business world, with the great bankers, the millionaires, the noblesse de la Bourse, who smooth their cares with fat dinners and good wines, where else in the world should you go but to Tortoni’s? There are not two Tortonis upon the earth. ”

“ At noon the band plays in the music pavilion, and by degrees the idle world drifts in that direction. The round café-tables under the trees gradually sort out their little coteries, and white-aproned gentry skate about with liqueur-bottles, clinking glass beer-mugs, baskets of rolls, and the inevitable long-handled tin coffee-pots. The outdoor scene tempts us more than a hotel luncheon; we cast in our lot with an alert-eyed waiter, and the syrups and chocolate he brings are doubly sweetened with the strains of Martha. ”

“ When you’ve done your morning’s work you go to your favorite café—not with the one object in life—to cram a Châteaubriand down your dry and resisting throat because he who labors must live,—but to see your friends, to read your daily journals, to write your letters, and do it incidentally in the open air while some diplomat of a waiter serves you with food that assuages the palate, 64 without insulting your mood. That’s what I like about the little restaurant in the court there. It’s out-of-doors, and you may stay there without feeling your table is in requisition for the next man. ”

“ These people who suffered in Paris at every turn were now beginning to find a cyclopedia of their own in another invention of comparatively recent date—the cafés, warmed and lighted, where even men who had not sous enough to satisfy their hunger might cheat their stomachs with a thimbleful of sour wine or a morsel of food, and sit for hours listening and pondering the talk of others who came and went. There was much talk, and in one part of Paris or another it touched upon every known subject. Each café had its specialty; politics in one, philosophy in another, science in a third. ”

“ To take a final survey, let us enter the Café de la Paix, the most imperial, cosmopolitan and stylish of cafés. That well-preserved man sitting by himself is playing solitaire—a group of one. That white-haired old gentleman sitting in the alcove yonder is drinking sweetened water—surely not a beverage calculated to pollute the palate. Those round-headed men, whose bald pates are fringed with gray, are now settling up their score. ”

“ For the student, newly arrived from the provinces, to whose modest purse the theatres and other places of amusement are practically closed, the café is a supreme resource. His mind is moulded, his ideas and opinions formed, more by what he hears and sees there than by any other influence. A restaurant is of little importance. One may eat anywhere. But the choice of his café will often give the bent to a young man’s career, and indicate his exact shade of politics and his opinions on literature, music, or art. ”

“ There are unsavoury little cafés, outside which, at all hours of the day, uncouth men, in dirty costumes, sit drinking and smoking narghiles, which the café-clods carry from one to the other with the long tubes between their lips, and then pass it to the lips of their customers, who are vivaciously, and in passionate earnest, discussing the affairs of Europe, while Providence and the womenfolk are equal partners in the care of their own. ”

“ In some parts of London women leaving the factory at midday may often be seen taking a cold and unsatisfying meal in the open air—on a doorstep or in a corner, anywhere—exposed to the inclemency of the weather. Wherever suitable coffee-room accommodation has been provided for them, working women have gladly availed themselves of it. One of the houses of the People's Café Company in High Street, Whitechapel, has many customers of this class. ”

“ THE PARIS CAFÉS.
Alimentary, and not literary, is the modern café. Times are so changed since Voltaire, Diderot and the rest sang and shouted in the Café Procope—jested, reasoned and made themselves immortal there—there are so many people who have the means to frequent cafés, and there is such an immense floating population, eager, curious and bent on sightseeing, that no clique can live. ”

“ If we quit for a moment the interior of the city to follow between two hedgerows of mastics or aloes, one of those capricious paths which lead one, now up to the summit of a hill, now to the depths of some ravine, very soon the tones of a rustic flute, the modulations of the Djou-wak, will betray some cool and peaceful retreat, some rustic café, easily recognized by its facade, pierced with large openings. ”

“ If you wish to buy your tickets in advance for the evening performance at the Alcazar d’Été, the open-air café concert of the Champs-Élysées, you go there some afternoon, and are ushered by a waiter through a narrow corridor of the adjoining restaurant, past little rooms, shining in copper pots and pans, and pungent with steaming sauces, through a pair of swinging doors well worn by hurrying waiters, and into a square room piled high with snow-white linen, pyramids of lump sugar, and rows of glittering silver. ”

“ We have our obvious models on the Continent in the large café, the beer-garden, and even in the small café. The poor man would not be ‘robbed of his beer,’ nor would the change be quite ‘un-English,’ as the record of our little tavern gardens will show. Even in London at this moment there is an (almost solitary) instance of a café-restaurant of this kind, in Leicester Square.
The one feature common to all these Continental places is the custom of sitting down at a table; there is no standing at a bar, or the rapid displacement of one customer by another. ”

“ When young men form a society among themselves, a café is chosen as their meeting-place. Thousands of establishments exist only by such patronage, as, for example, the Café de la Régence, Place du Théâtre Français, which is frequented entirely by men who play chess.
Business men transact their affairs as much over their coffee as in their offices. The reading man finds at his café the daily and weekly papers; a writer is sure of the undisturbed possession of pen, ink, and paper. ”