Adolph Seeger and his brother Carl, who were chefs, left Vienna two weeks after the Russians pulled out and headed for the brighter lights, at that time, of London. They worked hard and diligently and in the early Sixties secured a failing greengrocer’s shop in the then exploding Kings Road and turned it into a thriving and fashionable restaurant, serving Viennese and German specialities, which they called ‘The Mayerling Hütte’. Everything from the Sacher Torte to the gherkins, the waiters and the waitresses, was imported from their home city. For a reasonable sum you could drink your steins of beer, sup your bohnensuppe, and savour your smoked eel beneath vast murals of Rudolph and Maria entwined in amorous delight, or rocky peaks staccato with dark fir trees, laced with racing torrents. There was zither music and candles, stags’ heads and pine benches carved all about with broken hearts. The waiters were blond and personable, flapping about in lederhosen, the waitresses comely, smiling, with plaited hair, swirling about in dirndls with foaming jugs of beer. The Seegers made a modest fortune. But by the end of the Seventies knew that a change was needed. The folksy-zither had become a deathly cliché, the lederhosen shiny with sweat and wear, the dirndls definitely dated. To this end they stripped out the murals, stags’ heads, and pine-cone candlesticks, dressed the staff in black satin and white shirts, covered the walls in plastic tortoise-shell, illuminated the room with coloured spotlights and built a minute glass podium, lit from below, at the far end of the room on which from midnight until one, every night, a small figure in a shabby black dress, hair cropped short and held in place by a cheap plastic slide in the shape of an airplane, sang old Zarah Leander songs from a Berlin long since pounded to dust.