No place like it

     There is every kind of restaurant in London, from the restaurant which makes you fancy you are in Paris to the restaurant which makes you wish you were. There are palaces in Piccadilly, quaint lethal chambers in Soho, and strange food factories in Oxford Street and the Tottenham Court Road. There are restaurants which specialize in ptomaine, and restaurants which specialize in sinister vegetable-messes. But there is only one Simpson's. Simpson's in the Strand is unique. 

    Here if he wishes, the Briton may, for the small sum of half a dollar, stupefy himself with food. . . . Its keynote is solid comfort. County clergymen, visiting London for the annual Clerical Congress, come here to get the one square meal which will last them till next year's Clerical Congress. Fathers and uncles with sons or nephews on their hands rally to Simpson's with silent blessings on the head of the genius who founded the place, for here only can the young boa-constrictor really fill himself at moderate expense. Militant suffragesttes comes to it to make up leeway after their last hunger strike.

(from Something Fresh, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)