OPEN-AIR CAFES

Evening Post, Volume XCVIII, Issue 40, 16 August 1919, Page 10

OPEN-AIR CAFES

A PROPOSED INNOVATION

Three things stand in the way of Londoners .adopting the French custom of eating and drinking out. of doors in London, states a London journalist who made inquiries into the matter. They ,aro : (1) The climate, (2) police regulations, (3) British self-consciousness. Most Englishmen have a determination not to eat or -drink except between four walls, but the habit is slightly altering, and little windowless cafes, resembling the Parisian cafe-bar, have undoubtedly come to stay in Londou, especially in the quarters frequented by the soldiers of Allied nations, whose families have stayed in London during the war. Soho has several of these, gay little bars, where nothing stronger than mineral waters or coffee is required to attract a most satisfactory clientele. Others are to be found near the favourite feed-ing-places of city clerks, who often take an excellent cup of coffee standing up at the bar, to top off lunch at a more expensive place. THE WAY OF THE SOLDIER. Have these little cafes come to stay? Are soldiers who have seen how pleasantly time can be whiled away with a glass and a straw, or with a cup of coffee, with the passing show of the streets for entertainments, going to be responsible for a social revolution? It looks like it. Travelled readers are already pointing out that the English climate is by no means the worst in Europe. They write that they ■ would not like to make invidious comparisons, but that they have in their' time indulged in a few words about the Belgian climate. And yet pre-war travellers in Belgium will remember the open-air cafes and restaurants which constituted half the 'charm of a sojourn in Brussels, Bruges, or Antwerp. A few light tables and chairs which were easily moved' constituted, the part of the stock-in-trade to which damage might be done by a passing shower. These were usually of the folding variety, and could be cleared away in the event of bad weather, just as they were cleared away for the night. Behind* the chairs was the restaurant proper, open to the street, to which customers might retire when driven inside by the weather. Could not these' arrangements be adapted to meet London conditions? Mr. Gordon Selfridge is of those who think not. "The climate of London is really not suitable for an experiment of the land," he said. One reader points out the example of the Dutch 'towns, which have to struggle •with a climate which could give London's weather-stunts points in some ways. THE DUTCHMAN'S TASTE.

"Dutchmen would fight hard," he writes, "before they would be deprived of the cup of coffee or glass of Schiedam, which they like to sip in the window of their favourite cafe in the evening. And the pleasant thing is that they take their wives and daughters with them.

"They get over the weather difficulty, in the big towns, at any rate, by having a cleverly-contrived window, of the same width as the frontage, which can easily be opened on a warm day and closed on a bad one.

Londoners have already proved their liking for taking their tea out of doors. Breakfast and tea in Hyde Park were social institutions before the gloom of war descended on London.