Up West

by Pip Granger

  You really had to be there to know just how truly dreadful food was in Britain in the late forties and fifties – and, some would say, for decades after that. Frankly, we English were the laughing stock of Europe when it came to our cuisine. We were so notorious for our lousy victuals that it is only comparatively recently that we have even begun to live it down. There was some excuse during the Second World War: times were trying, supplies were meagre and minds were very busy with other things, such as worrying about our fighting men and boys, keeping Hitler on his side of the English Channel, dodging doodlebugs and making do and mending.

  ‘There’s a war on, you know,’ was the standard reply to timid complaints about the food in cafés and restaurants between 1939 and 1945. Rationing carried on being the excuse for a good while afterwards, and even after it ended, standards didn’t improve much. We’d become used to eating badly – we’d all been trained up on school dinners after all, and there was no sterner test. The meals provided by all of the schools that I attended were brought by van in large metal containers and by the time they were served up were tepid and laced with congealed fat. Anything green, which usually meant cabbage, was reduced to a soggy blob on the side of the plate. Mashed potato came with hard lumps, often grey in colour: these were used as missiles to be flicked at enemies and friends alike while teacher’s back was turned. Many a café, buffet and restaurant produced food to a remarkably similar standard, although the spud missiles tended not to fly in cafés quite as readily as they did at school.

  J. Lyons & Co. was a rare exception, in that it provided some of the best plain food of those times. There were three basic kinds of outlets: Lyons Corner Houses, Maison Lyons and the tea shops that later became among the very first self-service cafés. They owned other enterprises as well, but the places affectionately known as ‘Joe Lyons’ teashops’ are what they remain famous for, long after the last of their kind closed its doors for ever. The company always aimed to provide good food at reasonable prices and cooked in immaculately clean kitchens.*

  Most reasonably sized affluent towns with a large middle class had the boon and blessing that was a Joe Lyons Corner House. These were huge buildings with restaurants on several floors, all served by a central kitchen. The food was schlepped by ‘Nippies’, highly trained, silver service waitresses clad in black dresses, white aprons and caps. A national institution in their own right, Nippies were so famous, and so instantly recognizable, that their various uniforms over the years were made in children’s sizes so that little girls could play ‘dressing up’ and aspire to becoming a Nippy themselves.

  London had three Corner Houses, all in the West End. The first was in Coventry Street. Later, others opened in the Strand and Tottenham Court Road. The poshest Lyons outlets were the two Maison Lyons, one at Marble Arch and one in Shaftesbury Avenue. The musicians and Nippies were set in sumptuous surroundings: I remember loads of greenery and stylized fake palms at the Marble Arch Maison.

  Meals in a Corner House or Maison Lyons were usually accompanied by live music from the sort of piano trio I always thought of as Annie Crumpet’s Tea-time Three, or a small orchestra, playing light classics and the popular music of the day. Each floor of the Corner Houses had a name like ‘Grill and Cheese’, ‘Bacon and Egg’, ‘Restful Tray’, ‘Brasserie’ and ‘A La Carte’.

  The tea shops were much more basic, but still knocked out decent snacks, a choice of maybe two cooked meals and, of course, teas, buns, cakes, ice cream sundaes and all sorts of things on toast, including baked beans, sardines, eggs and tomatoes. At one time, there were eleven Lyons outlets in Oxford Street alone. As always with the English at the time, the difference between eateries was a class thing. Anyone in the lower middle class or a bit above could nip into a tea shop when out shopping, but the Corner Houses were a touch more genteel.

  Of course, anyone with the money to pay could use them, or the Maisons, but the Corner Houses were aimed at those who considered themselves ‘a cut above’, being at the top of the middle-class tree. Corner Houses had a food hall on the ground floor where various Lyons products were sold, including chocolates, preserves and many more grocery items from across the Empire. But they never sold the leaf tea that they served in the cafés and restaurants, a special blend that was unique to them and which, they boasted, produced the very best cuppa to be had anywhere. Lyons also anticipated the home delivery service offered by pizza parlours today – they delivered food anywhere in the Central London area twice daily.

  Sonia Boulter remembers her local Lyons Corner House fondly: ‘In those days it used to be a shop, a grocer’s shop, and you used to go down Sunday and buy a French cream sandwich for two and six. My dad would say, when we were a bit older, “There’s some money, go and buy a cake,” on Sunday. I remember there was live music; you’d go upstairs to the Brasserie I think it was, there was someone playing a piano. Now it’s an amusement arcade.’ The Trocadero Restaurant on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Windmill Street was then a J. Lyons enterprise, although it had opened its doors in 1896 and finally closed them in 1965. The building is still there, and still called the Trocadero, but the inside has changed beyond all recognition.

  I remember spending many a happy hour scoffing in Joe Lyons with my mother, my grandma and a variety of great-aunts. The demise of the Lyons empire was a real loss to us all. As it is, they are remembered with nostalgic affection by anyone who ever noshed a toasted teacake, a banana split, a boiled syrup roll, or sautéed kidneys, or who supped a reviving cuppa in any of their tea shops or Corner Houses.

  ‘At the end of the Second World War, catering was a kind of visual and nutritional desert between the works canteen and the Ritz,’ Ken and Kate Bayne noted in an article written in 1966. This was true, with the exception of Joe Lyons and their much smaller, and snootier, rival, Fuller’s Tea Rooms. Things were so bad on the food front that, in 1951, the journalist, campaigner and gourmet, Raymond Postgate, launched the Good Food Guide in an attempt to give the long-suffering British public a definitive guide to where to find edible fare. To this end, he enlisted the aid of family, friends and the readers of his column.

  He started off by writing articles inviting readers to send in their recommendations of places where eating could be classed as the pleasure it should be, rather than the endurance test it usually was. His aim was not only to help the public to find something good to eat, but also to encourage chefs and cooks to try harder. Readers responded enthusiastically, and eventually he had collected enough information to launch the first edition of the guide. A grateful public fell on the book with glad cries of joy. Postgate was neither knighted nor sainted for his efforts, but in the opinion of many he should have been because restaurateurs – posh and humble, and those between – began to strive to gain entry in to the guide. Thus Britain began its slow progress towards good dining. Those restaurants, inns, hotels and cafés that achieved the status of an entry in the guides strained to stay there. This was good for business, and it was good for the taste buds and stomachs of those who cared.

  There was only one place, though, where you could always find an actual selection of decent eateries, and this was Soho. Soho restaurants were famous as far back as the late eighteenth century, when the artist Sir David Wilkie sang the praises of the King’s Arms in Poland Street. The food was simple, tasty, cheap, cheerful and, what is more, ‘we have all the advantage of hearing all the languages of Europe talked with the greatest fluency, the place being mostly frequented by foreigners: indeed, it is a very rare thing to see an Englishman; while there are Corsicans, Italians, French, Germans, Welsh and Scotch.’*

  According to Richard Tames in Soho Past, a review of Kettner’s restaurant in The Times towards of the end of the nineteenth century kick-started Soho’s wider fame as the place to eat. Before then, its establishments had largely catered to locals. Oscar Wilde loved Kettner’s, and dined there often. Kettner’s Book of the Table became a must-have reference work for anyone interested in things c
ulinary. The founder of the restaurant, an Austrian, had formerly been chef to Napoleon III, Emperor of France. I don’t know how he wound up bringing his skills from the French court to the modest, sooty surroundings of Soho in 1868, but we can only be profoundly grateful that he did.

  France also sent us Maison Bertaux, which set up shop in Greek Street in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian war deposed Napoleon III. It is believed to be the very first French pâtisserie in London, and is still providing gorgeous cakes and strong, French coffee almost 140 years on. Sonia Boulter remembers that ‘They used to serve the most beautiful coffee cake, luxury, really nice.’ I’ll second that.

  The 1886 Baedeker’s Guide to London recommended ten ‘cheap and good foreign restaurants in Soho’, and more were to follow. Georges Gaudin opened L’Escargot around 1900, and this, too, survives into the twenty-first century. Around the same time as Gaudin was introducing the joys of snails in garlic to the English, there was a rash of theatre-building in the West End. The theatre crowd – audiences, players and the supporting cast of dressers, lighting bods, scenery shifters, stage managers, prompts and all – opened up a whole new trade to the enterprising restaurateurs in the area. Then, as now, audiences tended to eat before the show, while the players and the rest came after it, exiting the stage door looking for food, good company and a place to unwind.

  Gennaro’s is thought to have been the first Italian restaurant in Soho. It opened its doors in Old Compton Street in 1909, but was bombed out in 1940, and moved round the corner to 44/45 Dean Street, where the Groucho Club is now. John Carnera was bought up in the flat above the restaurant, where his father, Secundo, was employed.

  Many Italians love their opera, and the Royal Opera House is close by in Covent Garden, so, naturally, once Gennaro’s had settled in, Italian singers and patrons, looking for a taste of home, soon found the restaurant and passed the good news on to their friends, colleagues and relatives. Both Caruso and Gigli ate there in their day, along with many another famous, and less famous, face.

  Penelope Seaman wrote in Little Inns of Soho that 160,000 people had dined at Gennaro’s in the previous year, suggesting that the English appreciated decent food, just as much as the visitors to our capital. ‘In the forties and fifties,’ John Carnera told me, ‘it was one of the most famous restaurants in Soho. If you wanted Italian food, that was the place to go.’ Mr Gennaro was a man who simply loved to serve his patrons, taking real pleasure from ensuring that people were both well fed, and served with courtesy, knowledge and charm. John Carnera described him as a ‘wonderful old Neapolitan, with a handlebar moustache. There was a rose in his lapel and he used to greet the ladies, “Ah, signora,” he would say and kiss their hands. He was a real old smoothie.’

  ‘Our aim is not to make money and get out – our business is to look after our customers,’ John Koiza is quoted as saying in 1988 about Jimmy’s, a Greek restaurant that was opened by his cousin, Jimmy Christodolus, in August 1949. It’s a theme that keeps cropping up in reference works and in the interviews I conducted. Providing the very best in food and service really was a labour of love for Soho restaurateurs, and in many places it remains that way to this day.

  Peppino Leoni opened the Quo Vadis restaurant in Dean Street in 1926 with just seven tables. By working hard and, most importantly, providing food of a consistently high standard, impeccably served, he saw his enterprise grow. He always felt that it was important to make a customer who wanted beans on toast and a glass of water as welcome as the customer who wanted a three course meal and a bottle of wine. This philosophy helped him build the place up until it was serving more than 450 meals a day in the tourist season, and a little over half that number in winter. He took pride in keeping up exacting standards, and employed seventy people to make sure that they did not slip. ‘My kitchen is not as clean as the Savoy’s . . . the Savoy’s is as clean as mine,’ he assured Jeffrey Bernard when he was interviewed by him in the mid sixties.

  Wheelers, in Old Compton Street, was one of my father’s favourite haunts. During his time in Soho, it was a hangout for an arty, bohemian crowd. Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Deakin, Colin MacInnes and Daniel Farson were just a small handful of the regulars who could be found knocking back white wine and oysters throughout the fifties. In the same period, Wheelers was offering more than thirty different recipes for lobster and the same again for sole, which illustrated that English fare didn’t have to be dreary, and that inventiveness was alive and well in Old Compton Street.

  Most of Wheelers’s cooks at the time were Chinese – which may explain the diversity of the menu – but the boss was a Whitstable man, Bernard Walsh. He originally took the Soho property to sort his Whitstable oysters for the kitchens of the big London hotels, but as soon as he opened, he found that the local people kept dropping in to sample his shellfish. Oysters were thought to be an ace cure for a hangover, so eager local tipplers were often the first through the doors in the morning. Walsh decided to make his informal customers more comfortable, and built a bar for them to sit at. It wasn’t long before he was running a full-blown fish restaurant and, over time, a modest chain of restaurants that were to become nationally – and indeed, internationally – famous.

  In complete contrast, Pitta’s, at 10 Old Compton Street, was a relatively cheap and cheerful place run by a reticent, retiring Greek Cypriot called George Pitta, who was rarely seen out of his kitchen. His fellow countrymen, Andy and Nick, waited tables, along with a red-headed waitress called Ruth. She was Irish, and had a prodigious memory, which made the service both efficient and friendly. Like all successful restaurants, they knew that good service always adds to the charm of a place. It is such a pleasure to be recognized, to have your favourite order memorized and to be made much of. Of course, such treatment brings patrons back time and again.

  I am pretty sure that Andy and Nick went on to found the Star, just a few doors down from Pitta’s. Pitta’s was the favourite haunt of theatrical people and artists of all kinds, whereas the Star catered for many musicians and, like Pitta’s, also provided basic English food at reasonable prices. By the late fifties, diners had grown a tad more adventurous, so that the Star also offered a variety of Greek dishes.

  Most of the places I have mentioned so far started life in Old Compton Street. If one street could boast so many good eating places, it isn’t hard to imagine just how many there were spread around and about Soho as a whole. Little Inns of Soho lists twenty-six places that its author, Penelope Seaman, thought had something special to offer: they included representatives of France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Russia and Austria, all of them cooking away and enriching the gastronomic lives of Englishmen and women, as well as children like me and a good few of my interviewees.

  Soho was also virtually the only place, apart from the docks, where you could find Indian and Chinese food in the decades after the war. Sonia Boulter grew up in Newport Dwellings, in what is now Chinatown, right beside where the pagoda stands today. Opposite her flat was the Canton – it is there to this day. ‘It was the second Chinese restaurant or café in the area that I can recall. That’s going back to the forties.’

  Maxim’s, at the Wardour Street end of Gerrard Street, was the first Chinese restaurant in the area. It boasted a small band, complete with a bandleader, and there was music and dancing to accompany the food. ‘It was quite posh in those days,’ Sonia Boulter recalls. ‘I knew Maxim’s Chinese Restaurant very, very well, because my dad worked there. He was a barman. After school, I used to go down to the staff entrance, a long way downstairs, and I’d be fed by the Chinese people with noodles and that. It was the first place I ever had a lychee. I was eating Chinese food from about the age of eight [in 1948]. We didn’t say no to any food in those days.’

  At the time Sonia remembers, the area between Shaftesbury Avenue and Leicester Square was on the cusp of a massive change. It was about to metamorphose from a typically multicultural, working-class district of Soho, into th
e Chinatown we know today. Property was old and cheap, and was offered on short leases only, which made it cheaper still. The landlords were hoping to make a post-war killing on the land for redevelopment. Before the war, England’s Chinese population of around two thousand souls had been concentrated in the docklands areas of Liverpool and in London’s Limehouse. These areas had been battered by bombs, and after the war were flattened by the bulldozers that came to finish off the job that Hitler had begun. As well as losing their homes, the Chinese lost their jobs, as the authorities made it difficult for non-British nationals to sign on as merchant seamen. To top it off, much to the delight of British housewives, the twin-tub washing machine had been invented, and was soon making its appearance in our homes: launderettes began to flourish, too. This was not good news for the traditional Chinese laundries that had flourished for decades, but now began to disappear.

  Something had to be done, and, in the late fifties, Chinese businessmen and entrepreneurs began to move Up West and open restaurants. Earlier Chinese restaurants had catered mainly for their own people, but the war changed all that. Servicemen who’d been stationed in the Far East came back home with a taste for Chinese cuisine, and soon the restaurants began to flourish. Farm workers displaced by changes in the world rice markets flooded in from the Hong Kong Territories to staff the new restaurants. Not long afterwards, Chinese food outlets of one sort or another had spread beyond London, to towns and villages everywhere.

  Indian food has had a place in our hearts since the sahibs and memsahibs who served in the British Raj brought a taste for its spices back with them on retirement to Blighty. Then, of course, there were the lascars, or Indian sailors, who had to eat when they arrived in our ports. Once again, military service in India during the war brought back men who loved the food, and they, in turn, introduced it to a wider range of appreciative stomachs. As a 1956 food guide, which lists four Chinese restaurants and two Indian in Soho alone, suggests, many Londoners liked to embrace cuisines very different from our own.