London: The Biography полностью

Eating-houses, or restaurants, have for many centuries been an intricate part of that texture. In the twelfth century one monk describes a great “public place of cookery” by the Thames where ordinary flesh and fish could be purchased-roasted, fried or boiled-while the more dainty could order venison, no doubt with ale or wine for refreshment. It may lay claim to being the first London restaurant, except that one historian of London believes that this place of city refreshment was in fact a survival of a Roman public kitchen. In that case the tradition of London hospitality is ancient indeed. The twelfth-century version included, for example, “a dining room for the rich man, an eating-house for the poor man” with a version of “take-away” in the event of friends calling unexpectedly. Certainly it was a large operation, perhaps equivalent to Terence Conran’s vast eateries in Soho and the West End, since according to William Fitz-Stephen “whatsoever multitude of soldiers or other strangers enter into the city at any hour of the day or night, or else are about to depart, they may turn in.”

The number of these eating-houses multiplied as the population increased, so that by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were many cook-shops clustered in Bread Street and East Cheap. These thoroughfares were known as the quarters for eating-houses where, under the supervision of the civic authorities, the price of meals was strictly controlled. Sometimes the customers would bring their own food with them, to be cooked in ovens on the spot, with the price varying from a penny to twopence for the cost of fire and labour.

The “ordinaries” were a sixteenth-century variation upon the cook-shop. There were twelve-penny ordinaries as well as three-penny ordinaries, the price varying according to style and comfort as well as the cost of the main meal. Wooden benches and trestle tables stood on a rush-strewn floor and the tapster or his boy wandered among the customers crying out, “What do you lack?” or “What is it that you would have brought?” Meat, poultry, game and pastry were served in succeeding order; “to be at your woodcocks” meant that you had almost finished eating. The citizens arrived about eleven thirty, and wandered about singly or in groups waiting for their meat to be served while some “published their clothes, and talked as loud as they could in order to feel at ease.” It was indeed an easy environment, and it became the pattern of the London eating-house, continuing well into the succeeding century.

In the late seventeenth century there is a description by François Misson of the butchers’ meat on the menu in just such a place-“beef, mutton, veal, pork and lamb; you have what quantity you please cut off, fat, lean, much or little done; with this a little salt and mustard upon the side of a plate, a bottle of beer and a roll.” At the end of the meal, when the payment or “reckoning” was made, the server carried a basket to the table and with a knife cleared away the crumbs of bread and morsels of meat. In many such establishments there was a “best room” for those with delicate or expensive appetites, while for the ordinary citizen a sixpenny plate in the “publick room” would suffice.

These eating-houses had by now migrated far beyond the bounds of East Cheap and Bread Street, towards the populous areas of the capital. Bishopsgate Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Old Bailey, Covent Garden, Haymarket and many others besides, all had their local and well-frequented places of call.

In the eighteenth century they became known as “beef-houses” or “chop-houses,” together with taverns specialising in more formal or protracted meals. Dolly’s Chop-house in Paternoster Row was a particular favourite, serving its meats “hot and hot”-which is to say, delivered up as quickly as they were cooked. There was also a famous resort of cook-shops behind St. Martin-in-the-Fields, known to the natives as “Porridge Island”; it was a somewhat unsavoury haunt, however, where gin and ale provided as much sustenance as the food carried from the cook “under cover of a pewter plate.”

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