“These Soho dinners are excellently cooked and very cheap. Only the wine is dearer in England than in France. There you can get a carafon for a few pence, and good it is. But here the cheapest half-bottle is tenpence, and often disappointing. The wise drink beer. It is Charles Godfrey Leland who, in his jovial scrap of autobiography, ascribes all the vigour and jolly energy of his life to the strengthening effects of Brobdingnagian draughts of lager beer drunk under the tuition of the German student. It is good companionable stuff, and a tankard of it costs only sixpence, or less.”
From Bohemia in London, pp113-114, via the Internet Archive.
(And for more of this kind of thing, get Gambrinus Waltz for Kindle.)