CHEFS OF LONDON

Evening Star, Issue 22066, 27 June 1935, Page 12

CHEFS OF LONDON

SOME GREAT FIGURES THEIR CHEQUERED CAREERS EDUCATED EATERS “ Confidential adviser, tempter, and impresario.” That, said head-waiter Joseph, the Birmingham-born Parisian, is the trifde crown of the good “ maitrp d’hotel,’ 5 writes Phillip Jordan in the ‘ Manchester Guardian.” He should have known, for he, hardly less than the great triumvirate, Cesar Ritz, Escoffier, and Echenard, raised London to a gastronomic eminence for which its epicures had never dared to hope. Joseph has been dead these many years but his flat still runs in London’s pleasure belt, whose western boundaries have, since his death, lurched beyond the slope of Piccadilly, but whose eastern wateway is still_ the glittering Savoy, over the destinies of whose restaurant he presided for so many years and in which, to the astonishment and pleasure of countless diners, he publicly carved ducks as though His weapon were a razor and as though their flesh were no mope substantial than the ice cream with which _he adorned his incomparable creation, “peche a la cardinal.” Not that epicurean London has ever been strictly corseted between Aldwych and the ghost of Devonshire House. Hospitable salients have always adventured beyond the West End lights, but not all have worn those halos of permanent success which shine as brightly around the heads of Ritz, Carlton, and Savoy as they did when they were first mounted. THE SYMPOSIUM. The pioneer outpost was established as far abroad as the ground on which Albert Hall now stands and in a house whose reputation for hospitality has lived longer than the name given to it by the culinary buccaneer wlio took it over. It had been Gore House, from behinds whose splendid doors Lady Blessington and d’Orsay had set the world guessing. When the world fell about their ears London gained its first great international restaurant. Gore House became the Symposium; its master and its new creator was Alexis Benoit Soyer, of whom it was said that he was more likely to be remembered for his soup kitchens than for his soup (an unkind allusion to his organisation of free meals in Dublin during the Great Famine)^ He created a new fashion at the right moment, for his venture was timed to coincide with the * opening of the Great Exhibition. It looked as though he would prosper, this man who is remembered to-day only because Thackeray absorbed him and then spilled him from his pen with the name of Miroholant. Each day more than a thousand people were served with food of a quality and taste hitherto denied them; many, it is true, went not to eat but to catch sight of the rank and fashion who flocked to pay Soyer homage., and to see the gold-framed, embroxdered i quotation from ‘ Coningsby,’ which Disraeli, with his own flashy hands, had presented him for display above the main entrance. HIS BOAST. The Prince de Joinvillo came frequently, and seldom failed to interrupt one of Soyer’s “ cliansohnettes ” by remarking loudly that the proudest boast of his father, King Louis Philippe, was that he could slice ham thinner than could any of the world’s professional “ maitres d’hotel.” But the Symposium was not to last. Whether Soyer spent too much of his time prinking and preening in his famous beret and plum-coloured dressing gown and in singing to his clients when he ought to have been cooking their dinners we do not know; we only know that he eventually closed down with a loss of £7,000. It was he, however, who placed the cosmopolitan restaurant upon the face of London so firmly that it could thenceforth never be removed. The English began, furtively, it must be admitted, to dine out, but at least the habit was planted in fertile soil. It grew slowly, but by the eiid of the century the great chefs of the world were converging on London, ready to teach it the preposterous vocabulary of their calling. They came from all over Europe’s speckled map, whither as young men they had been shaken out of Gascony and the Ticino; they came, lured not only by the money that was gladly poured into the laps of their spotless aprons, but because the English were apt pupils in the school of dining and no longer insisted upon dinners of such length that they could neither understand nor enjoy the food prepared for them with such, care and loving kindness.

NOT CURTAILED. Nor were they disposed to eat too short a dinner. Precise, whiskered Cesar Ritz, so neat that after ono of his frequent two-day journeys across Europe he was seen to “ step from the train as though from the hands of one of his valets,” taught them the correct length for a dinner of elegance which would allow them conversation and appreciation and \Vould satisfy, but not stupefy_ them. Not that the real epicure willingly enshrines his name with those of the immortals, for it was Ritz who introduced the barbarous disease of music at meal times. Despite this “ attraction,” Ritz created a golden world for chefs. They had their clubs, these descendants of Careme, the Prince Regent’s and Talleyrand’s chef of legend, who was the first man to introduce the tall white cap for cooks; and behind the doors of their meeting place in Sackville street they plotted how best to please the unstained palates of the last years of the nineteenth century. Their names belong to history, but their creations are born again every night of the year in kitchens whose comforts and efficiency would have seemed but dreams to most of them. Their names wore by no means legion, but epicures of the period recall wistfully such men as Francois, the vice-regal chef in Dublin, wfro travelled regularly to London to see what new dishes had been created during his exile. . They recall, too, Charpontier, Lord Iveagh’s “ chef de cuisine,” and the three men who held Europe's destiny on the ends of their toasting forks. Their names have not survived, hut men now old will still speak of the dinners they ate at the houses of Lord Rothschild and of Mr Leopold and Mr Vlficd, for upon the digestion of. a Rothschild great matters were decided in those days. ESCOFFIER. In pre-war days the clubs, too, were better able to afford good cooking than they aro now, and men joined the Devonshire because of Journee, its chef, more frequently than because of the company to which he ministered. And when Escoffier came to the Savoy., with alt the poetry of food balanced upon the tips of his elegant

fingers, England reached her gastronomic eminence. So long as he remained here, either at the Savoy or at the Carlton, to which later he transferred his pots and pans, all the world’s gastronomic roads led to London. And they were crowded. But in his last years it was he alone who was the magnet.