Antique & Vintage Postcards

A bustling wartime London dining scene frozen in a multi-view promotional card — the Hong Kong Chinese Restaurant at 58–60 Shaftesbury Avenue beckons with promises of "You Will Dine Well," just three minutes from Piccadilly Circus. Six crisp black-and-white vignettes capture the full experience: white-clothed dining rooms packed with smartly dressed patrons, a steaming kitchen where cooks in whites tend to towering stacks of dishes, and the handsome street-front façade with its bold clock sign. The restaurant was "fully licensed" — a pointed selling point in rationing-era Britain. The reverse carries a handwritten message in German, sent by a writer identified only as their first initial, addressed to the Zimmermann family in Rüsselsheim, in the U.S. occupation zone of postwar Germany — a vivid reminder of how London attracted displaced Europeans in the late 1940s. The writer gushes about dining with a "Dr. B." and Chinese companions, visiting a jazz café, and attending a "wunderschöne" chapel — a slice of cosmopolitan postwar life crackling through every line.