SOCIETY " TOUTS."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 204, 29 August 1935, Page 20

SOCIETY " TOUTS."

PAID FOR GUESTS. FREE MEALS AND "HAKE-OFF." (Special.—By Air Mail.) LONDON, August 10. A Police Court case in which a fashionable woman told the magistrate that a London cafe proprietor paid her commission on the bills of all people she introduced to his establishment draws attention to one of the West End's more curious professions—that of the paid restaurant tout. Sometimes payment is made in cash—a percentage on the bills of people induced by the agent to visit the restaurant, or a flat fee of a shilling or two a head. More often it is made in kind. Such people can count on unlimited free meals for themselves and their friends, or at least on a heavy discount on their bills.

Stage people and socialities are the most successful free niealers. One much publicised young Mayfair hostess had an arrangement with .a certain club for the whole of one summer that she should receive one shilling for exery single person known to her or not. who had supper there. Suppers numbered 150 on ordinary nights. On the weekly 2 a.m. extension night there might be as many as 400. There are young peers who frequent each new restaurant in turn, either dining out free on some such "understanding" or blatantly running up huge bills in the knowledge that their gossip column publicity value is eo great that no restaurant would dare to sue them.