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Does anyone recognise the monogram below, RI or IR below a Kings' Crown?
The dessert spoon, 7½" (19cm) in length, was made by William Hutton & Sons of Sheffield, and is of excellent heavy quality and struck from a private die.
I wondered about the Royal Institution of Great Britain, but could find nothing else to connect the spoon with it beyond the initials.
The mask front suggests to me that the spoon might have been made for a place of entertainment such as a theatre, winter garden or hotel. If the RI stood for Rex et Imperator/Regina et Imperatrix/Royal Imperial it could have been something like a Royal Imperial hotel or club perhaps, but that is a fairly wild guess.
I think you're very much on the right track. The Imperial Restaurant opened in Regent Street, London, in, I think, 1901, to rival their very near neighbour, the Cafe' Royal. As I understand it, it was a very lavish establishment and perhaps it is of no surprise to the extent they went to with the quality of their flatware.
Many thanks for leading me in, which I think is likely, the right direction.
Should it turn out to be the Imperial Restaurant, and I think it will, then it was a grand establishment indeed:
For certain very good reasons—of which the principal one is that the publisher of this book has a prejudice against bringing it out in six, or more volumes—I have not been able to describe fully every restaurant, great or small, which merits an article. The Imperial Restaurant in Regent Street, for instance, is sure to stand very high amongst the best restaurants that have ever been opened in London; but at the time of writing the workmen are still hammering away, and M. Oddenino spends his days in a little subterranean chamber near his cellars whence he pounces out at intervals upon carpenters and bricklayers. By the time this little book goes forth the restaurant will have been opened and the glories I have only seen in a half-finished state will be before the public. The kitchen of the Imperial over which M. Charles reigns is an exceptionally large and airy one, and M. Oddenino has built a bath-room for his cooks, a very important addition to a kitchen, but very often conspicuous by its absence. The grill-room in the basement, built so that air can penetrate to it from all sides, is designed on the model of the Francois I. room at Fontainebleau. It has on its walls oval frames supported by cupids, in which are pictures by modern Italian masters, and a high dado of oak panelling. There are in it two grills, one for fish and one for meat. The restaurant, on a level with Regent Street, is a copy of the Salle Henri II. at Fontainebleau, and with its copies of Boucher's pictures, its dome, and its exquisite marble mantelpiece, is a delightful dining-hall. The room has space for fifty tables.
Source: Dinners and Diners: Where and how to Dine in London - Lieut.-Col. Nathaniel Newnham-Davis - 1901
I have just seen an image of a menu online, which illustrates the identical monogram beneath a crown, which confirms the spoon was from Oddenino's Imperial Restaurant, 60-62, Regent Street, London.
