Dining room

“ It is a fine room, this Strangers' Dining-Room. The ceiling is nobly ornamented, and the clusters of electric lights dropping from it illumine the room cheerfully. On the walls is a paper with a pattern in which heraldic roses and fleurs-de-lys play the principal part; the curtains to the windows are of a soft green, and at about the height of a man's head, topping the oak panelling, is a fine work of art, a broad border of carvings of such things as furnish the good fare of the table. ”

“ The dining-room was at the end of the house, with windows opening upon the side and back galleries. There was a high, simply carved wooden mantelpiece, bearing a wide, slanting, old-fashioned mirror that reflected the table and its occupants. ”

“ The State Dining-room, an elegant apartment, has a richly decorated geometric ceiling and a recessed buffet, the recess being formed by well-proportioned Corinthian columns. The rich cornice, the gilt festoons that adorn the walls, the mirrors between the windows, the antique Venetian crystal-glass chandelier and side lights, and the silver-gilt service on the buffets give a sumptuous air to the room, while the four magnificent Snyders, and the other fine old paintings which adorn the walls, add materially to its beauty. ”

“ The noble dining-hall, with its delicately tinted walls, its pillars and gilded roof, with neatly dressed waiters, and the master of ceremonies patrolling the room seeing to the comfort of the guests, the arrangements of their places, and that each servant did his duty, gave a zest to one’s appetite which the tempting viands increased a hundred fold, and the soups, fish, relèves, entrées, game, relishes, vegetables, pastry, and dessert of the menu differed from the bill of fare of the previous day as does light from darkness, sweet from bitter. ”

“ Then the doors leading into the dining room were thrown open, disclosing a table covered with rosetrees in full bloom five feet in height and a concealed orchestra began to play. There were twenty-four seats and a footman for each two chairs, besides two butlers, who directed the service. The dinner consisted of hors-d'oeuvre and grapefruit, turtle soup, fish of all sorts, elaborate entrées, roasts, breasts of plover served separately with salad, and a riot of ices and exotic fruits. ”

“ Never allow a kitchen to be placed under the same roof as your dining-room or drawing-room: cut it off completely from the corps de logis, and let it only communicate by a passage;—so shall you avoid all chance of those anticipatory smells, the odour of which is sufficient to spoil your appetite for the best dressed dinner in the world. ”

“ It was a saying of Gildea’s that a dining-room ought to give you an impression somewhat similar to that of a beach-brake in spring: the architecture and furniture should have clear outlines, the colours should be clear, the lights should be clear. All massiveness and duskiness was to be avoided. A meal ought to be a repast, not a feast: we should rise pleasantly satisfied, not dully satiated. ”

“ Past the large, low dining-room, where preparations are being made for a dinner-party, up a short passage lined with bookshelves, an open doorway admits you to a room — large certainly, but so choked with contents that it rather reminds one of the inside of a disorderly portmanteau. ”

“ To the kitchen and the pantry the storeroom is always sending tribute, and they send it to the glass-doored dining-room which, with its long tables, its dazzling white cloths, and its glittering array of silver and glass, looks at night like an enchanted realm. Seats at table are assigned by the steward or the purser, who gives out the seats to those who ask for them first. ”

“ The great dining-room may be thought by some to be a whit gloomy; but the saloon, in which the dinners are served, to use a French term, à la carte, is a bright and withal handsome apartment, panelled to the ceiling with oak, and with tapestry spread on the walls. I fear that you do not approve of the game of billiards; but there is a very delightful room for the pursuit of that game in this hotel, and an ante-room of much comfort, from whence ladies watch the strokes and cannons. The private rooms are most excellently appointed. ”

“ Upstairs there are extensive ranges of kitchens where burnt sacrifices are being perpetually offered up in the shape of mutton and beef; a dining-room and a smoke-room, dark-panelled and cosy, where a man may forget the world and be lost to it during a much coveted mid-day rest. ”

“ Then, in the dining-room, windows are absolutely useless, because dinner is always uncomfortable by daylight, and the weight of furniture effect which adapts the room for the gastronomic rites, renders it detestable as a sitting-room. ”

“ The dining-room is one of the principal apartments of a house, and ought always to be of a bold and an accommodating proportion. In noblemen’s dining-rooms, where the windows are all on the side opposite 342to the fires, there may then be a recess at each end of the room in which a sideboard may stand, with columns before it placed at the extremities, which produces a very august appearance and renders the service considerably more easy at dinner than where there is but one sideboard. The furniture of a dining-room ought to be bold, substantial and magnificent, in proportion to its dimensions. ”

“ The dining room was in communication with both front and side parlors by a door in each, and kneeling down on the rug at each door, with first their eyes then their ears at the keyholes, they heard every word and gazed their fill at the awful guest, who proved to be a very mild and amiable person, apparently quite harmless, and certainly handsome. ”

“ Simla Club dining-room is built, as all the world knows, in two sections, with an arch-arrangement dividing them. Come in, turn to your own left, take the table under the window, and you cannot see any one who has come in, turning to the right, and taken a table on the right side of the arch. Curiously enough, every word that you say can be heard, not only by the other diner, but by the servants beyond the screen through which they bring dinner. This is worth knowing: an echoing-room is a trap to be forewarned against. ”

“ In the magnificent dining-room are seated at dinner a large, well-known, and incongruous company. The Ghosts are chatting away in the most genial manner with the living distinguished people, and positively making the "celebrities" quite "at home." ”

“ A sumptuous feast is represented: the handsome dining-room is filled with voracious guests; footmen are waiting on the diners, or attending to side tables; butlers are drawing corks, course is following course, the cook and his assistant train are hurrying in with fresh dishes. Among the waiters, undetected, is our friend the grisly skeleton, who is busying himself with a dish he is conveying to the table. ”

“ Serving luncheon at one was an innovation, but an excellent one. When the dishes were cleared away the anxiety was over, and the hostess moved about among her guests without a thought of a meal to be served at the end of the games. We set ten small tables, three in the dining-room, four in the sitting-room, two in the parlor and one in the hall. The tables were snowily linened, there were doilies in blue and white, and the centrepiece on each table was a glass dish filled with small bunches of splendid blue and white grapes. ”

“ Well-arranged houses will have the kitchen on a level with the dining-room, and the dividing wall will be so contrived that a table, ready laid at each course, can be made to slide through it into the presence of the seated guests. An immense amount of running to and fro between kitchen and dining-room, and of lifting food and table-ware into and out of elevators, will thus be obviated, to the vast gastronomic improvement of the meal and the salvation of servants’ time.
Naturally the bedrooms of the new age will have many amenities lacking to our own. ”

“ The next development of the house was as a cosy hotel, with the big rooms broken up into little suites of apartments, the anteroom turned into a dining-room, where a very good table-d'hôte dinner was served, and a bid made to attract well-to-do couples who liked hotel life. ”

“ A delicious smell of roasting comes from the kitchen, and in the dining-room the long table is laid for a good, old-fashioned dinner with good old wine. How nice and comfortable everything is! One might fall ill with longing to be home. ”

“ She looked about her, and closing the book she had been toying with led the way into the dining-room beyond, where the ten or twelve small tables, with their snowy covers, and softly shaded candles gave the room more the appearance of a quiet restaurant than the ordinary school refectory. ”

“ The immeasurable superiority of a dining-room built above-ground over one even partially beneath it hardly needs demonstration—it is more cheerful, more airy, and as a consequence more healthful, better lighted, of finer proportions, and more susceptible of effective decoration and furnishing—the advantages might be continued ad infinitum. No one who has ever had the pleasure of using an up-stairs dining-room can contentedly [Pg 3] descend to one below the level of the street. ”

“ We might manage to manufacture a few made dishes from the tinned things in the store-room, but entrées and savouries seem out of place in the middle of spring-cleaning, and the dining-room is impassable—a perfect block. ”

“ In one room is a "merry-go-round." The chairs are placed in a circle and a graphaphone in the center plays popular tunes. At 10 o'clock the doors to the dining room are opened. The table cloth is spread on the floor, surrounded by cushions. In one corner of the room are the baskets containing the supper of sandwiches, olives, pickles, baked beans, cake, pie and other picnic favorites. The girls take the viands from the baskets and arrange them on the floor, while the men serve coffee from a coffee boiler on a small table. ”

“ You go inside to a big, spotlessly bright dining room and get as good a meal as you can get anywhere on earth—and served in as good style, too. To the man fresh from the East, such an establishment reminds him vividly of the hurry-up railroad lunch places to which he has been accustomed back home—places where the doughnuts are dornicks and the pickles are fossils, and the hard-boiled egg got up out of a sick bed to be there, and on the pallid yellow surface of the official pie a couple of hundred flies are enacting Custard's Last Stand. ”

“ Afterwards, when he saw the porters and waiters and the other guests catch sight of the slippers, he was sorry he had not chosen the boots. However, to make up for any want of style at that end, he had his crush hat under his arm.
He found the dining-room without excessive trouble. It was a vast and splendidly decorated place, and a number of people, evidently quite au fait, were dining there at little tables lit with electric, red-shaded candles, gentlemen in evening dress, and ladies with dazzling, astonishing necks. ”

“ A large dining-room may be paneled with dark wood, with a painted fresco, or tapestry frieze, and a ceiling with carved or painted beams, or perhaps one of those interesting cream-white ceilings with plaster beams judiciously adorned with ornament in low relief. Given a large dining-room and a little money, you can do anything: you can make a room that will compare favorably with the traditional rooms on which we build. You have a right to make your dining-room as fine as you please, so long as you give it its measure of light and air. ”

“ But on these evenings I used to dine earlier than the others, and to come in afterwards and sit at table until eight o'clock, when it was understood that I must go upstairs; that frail and precious kiss which Mamma used always to leave upon my lips when I was in bed and just going to sleep I had to take with me from the dining-room to my own, and to keep inviolate all the time that it took me to undress, without letting its sweet charm be broken, without letting its volatile essence diffuse itself and evaporate; ”

“ When the evening of the tea comes, and the guests have all been introduced one to another, they may be ushered into the dining-room and the supper be served. The dining-table should be arranged in as old-fashioned a style as possible. At the four corners place candlesticks with wax candles, and for a centrepiece have a large bouquet of artificial bachelors' buttons. Use old-fashioned china and silver if you happen to have any. At each place put a few bachelors' buttons, to which attach a menu card by a narrow white taffeta ribbon. ”

“ Side lights (adding candles for grace and charm) are far pleasanter to the eyes and look better.
In the dining room the table is the dominating furniture note. A round table, an oblong table or a square table may be the more desirable according to the shape of the room. But a round dining table may be harmonized with an oblong dining room by means of an oblong rug, with rounded medallion, by a round flower bowl, a round tray or even the wheels of the tea table. In the dining room, as elsewhere, repetition in color establishes the color tone of the room. ”

“ In the dining-room, unless it will accommodate all your guests at once, have a silk cord so fastened that, when the room is full, it can be drawn across the door-way; those following the guests already in the room, will then return to the parlor, and wait their turn. A still better way, is to set the supper table twice, inviting the married and elderly people to go into the first table, and then, after it is ready for the second time, let the young folks go up. ”

“ It is sometimes a low, dark, ill-constructed room, reached by stairs often unsafe by reason of darkness, and usually opening so abruptly to the kitchen that the appetite is destroyed the moment you enter by the fumes from cooking which have been gathering in the dining-room all the morning; and the pleasant intercourse which should enliven each meal is often sadly interrupted by overmuch talking from the adjacent kitchen. If there ever is dispute or misfortune there, it seems always destined to occur while you are at your table. ”