Where to luncheon in 1930s London

I’m writing a new scene in CaseBook 7 (yup, the truck has been restarted friends, in no small part due to your encouragement and inspiring blog posts!) and I need a suitable spot for Portia to meet her friend Elaine Ridley (née Elaine Barclay, first introduced in ‘A Case of Darkness’). First I did some research on eating out in 1930s London, and found some really helpful references and supplementary writing at http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk/eating-out-1900-1950.

Elaine is a member of London’s elite, so I need a spot suitably chi chi for her palate and standing.

The first location I came up with is this Lipton restaurant which would have been located at the corner of Kingsway and High Holborn.  The restaurant here was in walking distance of the Strand and Covent Garden and right next to the Holborn tube station on the Piccadilly line.

The next restaurant option I came up with was Restaurant Boulestin which was described by Cecil Beaton (renowned photographer and interior designer) as “the prettiest restaurant in London.”  The new location featured circus-theme murals by the French artist Marie Laurencin and fabrics by Raoul Dufy. (this is all from the Wikipedia article here by the way).

As the fine folks over at The Aesthete Cooks blog describe, Boulestin is an unsung hero of French culinary art, and the writers of that blog did a fine job of recreating one of his signature meals: foie de veau. It turns out Boulestin was not only a fine chef, but a cookbook author, and on the BBC, the first Chef to have his own program about cooking.

The location of the restaurant is a little hard to lock down, but it was near Covent Gardens and the Royal Opera House, and was sadly replaced by a Pizza Hut in 1994 (reported on with sadness in many papers, including the Independent here). I <think> the Pizza Hut they are speak of is on Henrietta St.

I think this is the better of the two in terms of a scene-setter – eh?

Adding to the menu from a blog post over at The Vintage Cookbook from a Boulestin cookbook for Salade de pomme de Terre aux piments.