The Alpha Inn and His Eating Habit

The photo of the pub which is appeared in the narrative.

There is a pub in the narrative, named The Alpha Inn and you can find it in Holborn.  In “The Blue Carbuncle”, he drops in the pub, the Alpha inn. It is needed to his investigate so he drops there and orders beers.  “In a quarter of an hour we were in Bloomsbury at the Alpha Inn, which is a small public-house at the corner of one of the streets which run down into Holborn. Holmes pushed open the door of the private bar, and ordered two glasses of beer” (193).

The photo of The Museum Tavern. Credit for their Facebook.

The Alpha Inn has explained it locates near the museum, and it supposes British Museum. There is the pub, The Museum Tavern, and you can find the article in the pub which says the Alpha Inn in the story is The Museum Tavern! It is a small pub and it very nearby British Museum (less than a minute to walk) so they are many tourists but you can try it.

Holmes often skips meals. However, it does not mean he is not interested in foods. In “His Last Bow”, Von Bork says that “Altamont [Holmes’s false name] has a nice taste in wines, and he took a fancy to my Tokay” (229). Therefore, Holmes is interested in wines and he has the favourite one, Tokay, the Hungary wine. Actually, we do not know his finances but his skipping a meal is not because of finance problem of course. It seems that his biggest interest is a mystery. Solving the cases has priority over health/starving for him. For example, as I already told it in the introduction, Holmes says that “Because the faculties become refined when you starve them. Why, surely, as a doctor, my dear Watson, you must admit that what your digestion gains in the way of blood supply is so much lost to the brain. I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix. Therefore, it is the brain I must consider.” (Doyle, “The Adventure of Mazarin Stone”).

It is his thinking of himself. Even he starves; it does not matter for him. As he tells Watson that “My mind, […] rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routines of existence” (The Sign of Four, 11) In addition, Holmes suggests Watson that “we turn out dinner into a supper, and follow up this clue while it is still hot” (“The Blue Carbuncle”, 193).

Those description seem to emphasise Holmes's the order of priority. Doyle shows the readers Holmes's first priority is solving cases, not eating.

There are not so many descriptions of eating or drinking in Sherlock Holmes series. I think it is because Sherlock Holmes is an English Bohemian man.

 According to John Stokers, "[m]ale English Bohemians can be said to divine into two: the solitary and the sociable. those who loved to relax in company had their preferred haunts, more or less respectable. [...] Holmes, unsurprisingly, appears to belong to no club at all and nor does he haunt public houses" (76) .
Therefore, Doyle gives the readers Holmes's eating description in restaurants/pubs merely.