Cafes & Restaurants
Lyons’ Popular Café, London
The international was a social as much as an economic or political enterprise. Its social spaces ranged from those of high society cocktail bars to cheaper, everyday venues. Lyons’ cafes emerged out of an exhibitions catering company founded in 1887. The Piccadilly cafe, opened in 1894, was the first in a chain that would spread across the country. It could seat 2000 people and was popular for its set price lunch and dinner menus. Lyons’ cafes provided relatively cheap spaces that were both accessible and loud enough for political conversations to take place confidentially. Hindu nationalist delegate to the Round Table Conference Dr BS Moonje met colleagues and reporters at Lyons’ Popular cafes, corner houses and restaurants 10 times within one month of his 1930 visit to London. Unable to stay in or eat at the exclusive restaurant hotels frequented by the Maharajas in the city, Lyons’ provided the base for his campaigning for Dominion Status for India.
Further information:
On Lyons’ history: https://web.archive.org/web/20170412125900/http://www.kzwp.com/lyons/index.htm
On the chain and their workers: Rob Baker (2015) “The Rise and Fall of the Lyons’ Cornerhouses and their Nippy Waitresses”, Flashbak (21 May), https://flashbak.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-lyons-cornerhouses-and-their-nippy-waitresses-35186/
On later Lyons’ design: Matthew Partington, “The Lyon’s Corner Houses: Steak Houses & Big Business”, Designing Britain 1945-1975, National Electronic and Video Archive of the Crafts, https://vads.ac.uk/learning/designingbritain/html/lyons.html
Veerasawmy's India Restaurant, London
Interwar London was an increasingly cosmopolitan city in terms of the diversity of religious spaces, its diasporic communities, and its restaurants. While French cuisine dominated most venues, Indian delegates to the Round Table Conference were able to dine on Indian food in the centre of London. Shafi’s Restaurant on Gerrard Street, in what is now Chinatown, posted advertisements in the summer of 1931 attempting to pitch for business during the forthcoming second session of the conference (‘The Shafi’s is not merely a public restaurant: It is a proper rendezvous for all decent and dignified people’). Yet it was Veerasawmy’s (later spelled Veeraswamy’s following a printing error that became permanent), located on Regent Street near Piccadilly, which attracted most conference trade. It boasted of being London’s oldest Indian restaurant, founded in 1926, and claimed to have invented the pairing of lager and curry, after a visiting Prince of Denmark sent a barrel of Carlsberg in appreciation. Organisations such as the Indian Medical Association, the United Punjab Association and the Indian National Congress League used it to host lobbying events with domestic and visiting politicians and businessmen. Veerasawmy’s chefs supplied food to the delegate’s social club in Mayfair, while delegates could also use the restaurant to return the hospitality of their hosts, such as a dinner hosted by the visiting delegate for the Anglo-Indian community in January 1931, attended by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for India. The restaurant still operates in the same premises.
Further information:
Veeraswamy’s restaurant today: http://www.veeraswamy.com/
On the restaurant’s history: http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/veeraswamys
For a longer history of Indian restaurants in London see https://londonist.com/2016/06/the-story-of-london-s-first-indian-restaurant and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8370054.stm
Pavillon Dauphine, Paris
While some interwar internationalists proclaimed the value of small private gatherings in rural retreats and country houses far from media intrusion, others emphasised the need for larger, more public conferences in capital cities where debates and resolutions could be readily communicated to the media. The latter usually involved conference dinners in urban restaurants, some of which began to function as international conference centres in their own right. This photograph shows diners from the early 1930s in the Pavillon Dauphine, an art deco restaurant on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne in affluent western Paris, which has been an important conference venue, able to accommodate more than 2,000 delegates, since the 1920s.
Further information:
On the Pavillon Dauphine today, see pages linked to this website: https://en.convention.parisinfo.com/Parisian-news/pavillon-dauphine-paris
Women were drivers of internationalism, but many of the sites of internationalism also served within broader gendered economies that fetishized female bodies. Such is the case in this silent British Pathé newsreel on the Pavillon Dauphine’s use as a Paris fashion venue: https://www.britishpathe.com/video/bathing-fashions-aka-paris-bathing-fashions