Restaurants James Pembroke

DINNER TIME

An old friend, who in his seventh decade is still a creature of the night, is spitting feathers about being ejected from restaurants at 10pm, half an hour after he normally arrives.

Knowing him to be a devout Francophobe, I tried to placate him by reminding him that Paris now shuts down at 9pm, but he’s convinced it is an early sign of England being turned into a homely, J B Priestley-style workers’ paradise with dripping on toast at 6pm.

Yet dining late became a mark of sophistication only after the First World War. Well into the twenties, the legacy of DORA (the Defence of the Realm Act), dating from 1914, combined with the Licensing Act of 1921 compelled restaurants to shut at 10pm and nightclubs at 12.30am – and they could stay open that late only if they served food.

The smarter clubs, like the Embassy and the Café de Paris, served a proper dinner at a guinea a head, with champagne at a massive 30 shillings a bottle. The majority served bacon and eggs to keep on the right side of the law, albeit at 10s 6d, the price of a five-course dinner in a top restaurant.

Plates of days-old food were as much a part of the table furniture as the candles. During one of many police raids, Brenda Dean Paul was obliged to pick at an antique sausage on a plate that had been permanently glued to the table. Little wonder that Evelyn Waugh dubbed nightclubs ‘second-rate places for third-rate people’.

The dinner hour has throughout history steadily got later and later, mainly because lunch achieved its current stature only in the second half of the 19th century. ‘Nunch’ or ‘nuncheon’ was ‘as much food as one’s hand can hold’. Johnson described it as ‘a piece of victuals to be eaten between meals so not even a meal in itself’. Jane Austen thought ‘noonshine’ a fashionable novelty. In the 19th century,

at midday a city gent sustained himself on a biscuit and a glass of sherry. In his 1952 masterpiece, Movable Feasts, Arnold Palmer cites 1903 as the first reference to a lunch party.

Henry VII’S court dined at 11am; Cromwell’s ascetic contemporaries at 1pm. By 1700, a merchant’s family would dine at 2pm to allow for a little more wealth-generation. In 1712, Steele said the dinner hour had slipped during his lifetime from 12pm to 3pm, which seems to have been the usual hour until the 1760s for London – but 2pm was still customary for the less fashionable country gents. Boswell talked of leaving for dinner at 5pm. Work would have continued for the conscientious, who could look forward to supper at around 9pm or 10pm.

It was the popularity of afternoon tea, whether at Lyons Corner House or at a smart hotel, and the boom in theatregoing that compelled London hotels and restaurants to offer a later dinner from 5.30pm to 8pm.

César Ritz, who ran the Savoy from 1889, saw a hotel as having 24 hours in which to make money. He introduced thés dansants between 3pm and 6pm before encouraging guests to visit the American Bar for the new cocktails, pushing the dinner hour forward to 8pm – and even later if after a show.

Yet dinner then was shorter, too. Lady Jeune, a society grande dame, wrote that ‘no dinner should last more than an hour and a quarter if properly served and should consist of no more than eight dishes’.

Let me confess, I may not like being moved on at 10pm but, like that lady who was a tramp, I ‘get too hungry for dinner at eight’.