I am told wealthy bankers go in person every morning to the butcher's shop and purchase the mutton chops, which they carry ostentatiously to some tavern in Fleet Street or Cheapside where they insist on grilling them themselves.
Francis Wey, A Frenchman Sees the English in the Fifties, 1935
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Chops and Steaks.—It is only recently that a great superstition as to chops and steaks has been exploded. It was for very many years a popular delusion that west of Fleet-street chops and steak could not be had—or, at all events, could only be had in a very inferior style. The West-end chop or steak, it is true, was for a long time difficult to come at, and, as a rule, exceedingly bad when you got it, although the grill-loving Londoner was even then able to go to Stone's in Panton-street with a tolerable certainty of finding what he wanted. This house, which dates from the beginning of the century, and has been well known to literary London, still holds its own, although grills have of late year grown up round it in all directions. The Inns of Court Hotel, the Criterion, the Gaiety, the Royal Aquarium, the St. James's Hall, the "Holborn," and the "Horseshoe" restaurants, and many of Spiers and Pond's railway refreshment rooms make a specialty of their grills, and the foreign reader of the DICTIONARY who wishes to try this peculiar English form of meal can be recommended to any of these places. The City itself absolutely swarm with chop-houses, and it is only possible here to say that anywhere about Finch-lane and Cornhill the grill business is thoroughly well understood and well done. Between the City proper and the West-end is the "Cheshire Cheese", Wine Office-court, Fleet-street, one of the old fashioned chop houses, specially famous for rump-steak pudding on Saturday afternoons.
Charles Dickens (Jr.), Dickens's Dictionary of London, 1879
NORTH LONDON
RESTAURANT
27, HIGH STREET,
ISLINGTON
OPPOSITE THE "GRAND" THEATRE.
3 MINUTES WALK FROM THE AGRICULTURAL HALL
The Best Place in Islington for
CHEAP BREAKFASTS, DINNERS,
TEAS & SUPPERS
EVERY ARTICLE SUPPLIED OF GOOD QUALITY.
Chop or Steak . . . 8d.
Roast Beef . . . 6d.
Roast Leg Mutton . . . 7d.
Roast Pork and Apple Sauce . . . 7d.
Steak Puddings . . . 4d.
Vegetables . . . 1d. and 2d.
Pastry and Puddings . . . 1d. and 2d.
Tea . . . per cup - 1½d. per pot 2d.
Coffee or Cocoa . . . 1d. and 1½d
Sausage and Mashed Potatoes .... 2½d.
Bacon . . . 2d. Egg . . . 1½d
Stewed Tripe & Onions from 6 to 12 p.m. 4d. & 6d.
BUNS, SCONES, COLD MEAT & MINERAL WATERS.
BEDS 1/- PER NIGHT.
T. EVANS & Co. Printers, 327, Goswell Road, London, E.C.
advertisement from 1884 [British Library]