In her new book, Brenda Assael, author of The Circus and Victorian Society (2005), mines diverse unpublished materials together with vast numbers of newspapers and other primary sources (including contemporary novels and illustrations) to explore a neglected subject, the Victorian and Edwardian London restaurant. She emphasizes the City of London because “as a centre of both wealth creation and employment [it] was the most important development in the capital's fortunes” (7–8). Especially impressive is her use of published directories to chart the growth and distribution of various dining establishments in London from 1840. An enormously laborious process of counting individual entries to generate categories, this compilation, presented in two tables, establishes clearly the persisting dominance of the City, which accounted for over one-fourth of the total dining facilities in Greater London as late as 1910.

Numbers, however, raise the issue of what Assael counts, especially because she adopts “a highly elastic definition of ‘restaurant’” (18). Based on listings in London post office directories, she casts so a wide net that dining, coffee, and refreshment rooms join with restaurants to yield her universe of establishments. Nonetheless, some eateries surely escape her attention. For instance, what of depots, the designation commonly used in London for diners serving the working- and lower middle-class, a group that falls outside the classification forced upon Assael by her directories? On one hand, Assael claims to encompass such diners in her survey; on the other hand, they fail to fully register. For example, Assael reports that Slaters had eleven refreshment rooms chiefly in the City and West London in 1900 (28), whereas at the annual meeting of the previous year, the board of directors’ report revealed the company was operating thirty-eight depots.

Had Assael defined restaurants more broadly, she might have followed John Burnett's approach in England Eats Out (2004) of dividing the eating public of the masses—patronizing a whole range of inferior places—from that of the more affluent classes, dining in more exclusive settings. If Assael had embraced a similar class-based approach, she could have explored deceptively named coffee public houses, which spanned the working- and middle-class divide from the 1860s. A national philanthropic movement, ultimately operating some hundred locations in London alone and associated with five philanthropic companies, coffee public houses constituted one concerted effort to reform working-class drinking habits. Nonalcoholic beverages were the key plank in the movement, but, eager to draw diverse patrons, coffee house proprietors equally offered food and successfully sold it. Middle-class customers transformed some strategically located venues such as at St. Paul's Cathedral and Ludgate Circus into enormously popular restaurants, generating £34,000 annually in revenue.

Assael's uneven coverage of London's big catering companies belies her book's title. More limited in scope, it really explores the London restaurant of the propertied classes, with only glances at some companies feeding those socially below them. Readers may wish they had the story of these catering companies’ strategies of competition and their expansion, contraction, profits, and distinctive business styles. Assael's preoccupation with up-market enterprises and patrons explains why she fails to scrutinize the business life of John Pearce, pioneer of the capital's mass food market, whose rags-to-riches career two friends—James J. Ellis (1910) and Marguerite Williams (1928)—captured in biographies. However justified given her restricted scope, this omission results in a limited picture. It means that the book cannot account Pearce's later ventures into catering with the British Tea Table Company and JP Restaurants, two companies that both successfully and increasingly drew middle-class customers before the war. At the firm's fifty-four outlets, a staff of 1,200 fed some 300,000 Londoners weekly.

How Assael conceptualizes her study explains much about her findings. Her six chapters focus on various dimensions of restaurants: their location, proprietors, waiters, dining ambiance, health regulations, and what she calls gastro-cosmopolitanism. To this list, she might have added religion as a motivator of social change, enabling her to explore the restaurant's intimate relationship with nonconformity and temperance. Most major catering companies operating in the City of London—Aerated Bread Company (ABR), Lockhart's, Pearce & Plenty (later the British Tea Table Company and then JP Restaurants), and Lyons’ tea shops—were teetotal, serving no alcohol.

Of all omissions from her bibliography, the most remarkable is Robert Thorne's “Places of Refreshment in the Nineteenth-Century City” in Building and Society (1980), an essay tracing evolution of the late Victorian restaurant and mass catering. Thorne's superb study emphasizes how changing architectural layouts of buildings reflected not just perceptions of appropriate public space use but also new public attitudes.

Assael's book displays an unfortunate sense of timelessness, with the Victorian and Edwardian years treated as monolithic, rather surprisingly in a survey covering almost a century of important market changes. Little is said about the late Victorian origins and rise of the mass market, in which chains of restaurants called multiples emerged and offered customers wider selections of food. Two key studies—A. E. Dingle's “Drink and Working-Class Living Standards in Britain, 1870–1914” (Economic History Review 25, no. 4 [1972]) and W. Hamish Fraser's The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850–1914 (1981)—get no mention here. Likewise, the Edwardian crisis in catering, affecting even Lyons’ profits, is overlooked entirely.

These questions of comprehensiveness and continuity raise deeper concerns about Assael's periodization. In adopting 1914 as a logical terminal point, Assael misses the rapid postwar recovery among catering firms and so underrates the Depression's impact. By the end of the 1920s, the late Victorian catering world had disappeared. Three stalwart firms—the British Tea Table Co., JP Restaurants, and Lockhart's—had been liquidated or taken over. Lyons, in a distinct category, was flourishing but soon would be moving into food processing as the main basis of business. Ye Mecca, smallest of catering companies, survived the decade, though the 1930s would force its departure from catering altogether.

In assessing this book's overall merits, stress must be placed on Assael's ingenuity in ferreting out often obscure materials, both published and unpublished, at unexpected places. The London Restaurant makes an important contribution to our understanding of eating out in Victorian and Edwardian England, providing greater depth to Burnett's wider survey. Nonetheless, it leaves plenty of room for future researchers to refine its chronology and fill its significant gaps.