The Criterion restaurant complex, opened by Australian caterers Felix William Spiers and Christopher Pond in 1873, was a jewel in the heart of London’s Piccadilly Circus, and its impressive American bar (aka the Long Bar) was a London fixture for many years. Theater architect Thomas Verity designed both the bar and the five-story restaurant, with its cavernous Marble Hall and “glistering” gold mosaic ceiling, in a neo-Byzantine style to match its adjoining theater. When the American bar opened, a year after the restaurant did, it was the first fully-realized American bar in London. With the German American import Leo Engel as manager, who had worked for Jerry Thomas, the bar was prepared to make any known American drink in the most correct style, along with a few of Leo’s own. Creator of the Ladies’ Blush, Alabazam, and other classics, Engel would go on to compile more than two hundred recipes, including many that he compounded for Criterion patrons (and many that he pinched from Thomas), in his book American and Other Drinks. See Engel, Leo.
In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet, Dr. John Watson stands at the “Criterion Bar” and learns of his prospective roommate Sherlock Holmes. The bar also appears in G. K. Chesterton’s 1914 novel The Flying Inn. The novel is set in a future England, in which an Islamic sect dominates the government, which bans alcohol sales “except when demanded under a medical certificate from one of the doctors licensed by the State Medical Council, or in the specially excepted case of Claridge’s Hotel and the Criterion Bar, where urgency has already been approved.”
“Piccadilly, South Side.” In Survey of London, vols. 29–30m St James Westminster, Part 1, ed. F. H. W. Sheppard, 251–270. London: Athlone, 1960. Available online at British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols29-30/pt1/pp251-270#h3-0005 (accessed March 1, 2021).
Engel, Leo. American and Other Drinks. London: 1878.
Chesterton, G. K. The Flying Inn. London: Methuen, 1914, 30.
“Miss Fanny Montague, of the Montague Sisters …” London and Provincial Entr’acte, April 4, 1874, 7.
Neilan, Catherine. “Piccadilly’s Criterion Restaurant Enters Administration after 60 Percent Rental Hike by landlord Criterion Capitol.” CityA.M., June 24, 2015. http://www.cityam.com/218715/piccadillys-criterion-restaurant-enters-administration-after-60-cent-rental-hike-landlord (accessed March 1, 2021).
By: Anistatia R. Miller and Jared M. Brown