Throwback Thursday: Where's the Beef?

Stranded in the Strand...

(From left, Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens, Lady Mary Crawley and Sherlock Holmes. Priceless AI-generated oil painting)

There is a restaurant in London which I grew up thinking existed only on the pages of my beloved Sherlock Holmes adventures, but which turned out to be a very real place, steeped in history.

Holmes and Watson ate there. So did their creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. So did Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill, E. M. Forster, George Bernard Shaw and even Lady Mary Crawley, of Downton Abbey.

It’s where real people and fictional characters went to mingle and have roast beef carved tableside from silver trolleys.

I thought dining there would be a boyhood dream come true.

I was wrong.

It turns out, some dreams should remain in our imagination and have no business escaping into the real world.

Today’s Throwback Thursday rerun was first published as a 5 a.m. Story in April 2025, and I’m posting it again today because sometimes I enjoy serving up a heaping portion of memories.

I hope you have fun reading — or rereading — Stranded in the Strand?

Meanwhile, this Sunday there will be a crackerjack brand-new 5 a.m. Story, as there has been every single Sunday for the past 168 weeks. No spoilers here, but this Sunday’s story does contain an intriguing sentence:

“Can thee come with us to the witch-burning, Caleb?”

If you’re not already a paying subscriber — $5 a month, and you may cancel at any time, and the money goes to help animals and the environment — this would be a good time to change that, so you can see whether Caleb makes it to the witch-burning.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.