THE HOUSE OF LYONS

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 142, 12 March 1938, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE HOUSE OF LYONS

Where Weather Experts Arrange The Daily Menu

House of Lyons is almost a tradition to London people. It operates 250 eating-places, which supply excellent meals at costs within the reach of every puise. This firm controls a string of hotels all over England, and employs between 30,000 and 40,000 people directly, and uses nearly 2000 trucks to deliver food. In the 40 years of its life, the pioneer cafe at 213 Piccadilly has fed over 35,000,000 people. Some guests were young men who lunched and dined there when this first branch was started in 189 7. They still lunch and dine there.

ha s seen many changes in London’s eating habits. During the first year of their operations they served only 40 dishes of ice cream a day; liow they sell as many as 3,000,000.

It is a curious fact that about 70 per cent, of all Lyons’s customers ask for vanilla flavour. When this fact was discovered by journalists, hundre'ds of letters followed, many to “The Times,” wanting to know why people did not eat more strawberry, lemon, and other flavours.

It may be of interest to New Zealanders to know that Lyons’s are keenly interested in Australian passion fruit, and are encouraging the production from the Australian States and Norfolk Island. They are educating the London public to the delicious flavour and building up an Empire trade in this product. Another instance of development is salad. Years ago they served none at all. Now their customers eat half a million dishes a day. 'Weather is an important factor which affects human habits. The firm lias its own weather expert, who forms a definite opinion on the prospects between 3 o’clock and 5 o’clock every morning. The change point in diet lies between 50 and 00 'degress. Fifty is on the cold side, and people start to order more soup, hot entrees, stewed .steak, hot .sweets, suet dumplings, and jam rolls. Sixty is the beginning of a milder spell. Then demands upon the cold counters an'd ice cream increase.

So huge is the firm’s tea business that it pays one-sixth of the whole tea duty collected in the United Kingdom, and sells more than 1,250,000 packages of tea a day. It even owns its own plantations in Nyassaland, though these grow but a small share of all the tea it sells. At Lyons’s Greenford factory in London are tea-tasters. These men of keen palates may taste a thousand different brews a day. Samples of drinking water from different places in the world are tested and tea blends are made up to suit each locality. Kobin.son Crusoe, of course, never heard of vitamins, but he was on the right road when he packed and stored limes and dried grapes. This vitamin problem is only' one of the many studied in Lyons’s laboratory, with its 150 chemists. They not only test flour, dough, and other foods for nutrition value, but make bacteriological examination of fish, meat, and poultry, and work to

control milk aud its products and to keep jam and sweets pure. Each year they test at least 50,000 food samples. The work of laun'dering linen alone is a giant task, which would stagger some of the biggest laundries in the world. Training employees is a task which is undertaken by experts. On the roof of Lyons’s Teashops Building in On-e-hard Street, London, every would-be “nippy”—London’s nickname for waitress —is put through a course in physical culture to improve her poise and carriage.

The chain of Lyons’s eating-places serves more people in a year than live in the whole of the United States. One 40-year-old ciistomer offered a substantial cash payment in a'dvance for two meals a day for the rest of his life, a curious form of insurance. Another customer ordered a wedding cake to match his bride’s leaf-brown bridal frock. Lyons’s own the business in Creechurch Lane, which is the successor of the original company whose tea was dumped into the harbour at the “Boston Tea Party” in 1773. Conspicuous on tlie shelves to-day are goods from all over tlie Empire, including huge stocks of drie’d Australian fruits. It will be a matter of considerable interest to watch the progress of the House of Lyons; if the wonderful success of the first forty years can be taken as a basis, it will be indeed an outstanding romance of organisation—forty years on.