‘At the higher end of restaurants, there is no formula’: London’s legendary restaurateur Jeremy King gets us excited about his next three projects.
‘There was zero food culture in my family. Absolutely zero.’ Jeremy pauses as he sips his coffee – espresso, chocolate powder and milk. He’s gone off menu and the server cheerfully says she’ll ask for his feedback later. ‘You should always tell them’, he says. He would want to know.
Following his exit from Corbin and King, the company he shared with business partner Chris Corbin, Jeremy has been carefully orchestrating a comeback. His legions of fans have been waiting in earnest, forks poised, glasses desperately hoping to be filled.
‘One of the beauties of being off the floor so to speak for 18 months is that I’ve been able to think about how it could be better’.
I have, of course, had many wonderful experiences in Jeremy’s restaurants. I say experiences because you don’t just go there to be fed and watered. You knew if you were going to The Wolseley, Brasserie Zédel or Fischer’s in King’s reign, you were going to have a ‘moment’. Whether it was over coffee or champagne, it didn’t matter. But it was destined to be a thing.
‘I think of restaurants as being a catalyst for what we want to make of it. I think Grand Café. So we go to a Grand Café either by ourselves or for a business meeting, with a friend or spouse. We go for interviews. We go to seduce. Divorce. A lot of people use them to give bad news - it doesn’t always work as they think there won’t be a scene. And the great ones allow all those things. But the truth of the matter is, if the music’s too loud or the service too dominant or the food too fancy, then it can’t do that job.’
He speaks of the art of a great restaurant in very romantic, literary terms and I am swept up in the scene. I can see how he’s brought the magic touch to every new place that he’s created and old one that he’s revived; hospitality is the lifeblood that runs through him and has done for the past 50 years. ‘The restaurateur runs the restaurant from the floor and the restaurant owner tends to run them from the boardroom. And that makes quite a difference.’ He says he will be very much on the floor for his latest project, the opening of three new establishments in 2024.
‘Other restaurateurs have said ‘are you mad, opening one restaurant is enough’. Does he agree? ‘A lot of staff are opening junkies and they’ve really enjoyed this incredible buzz and adrenaline rush. For me historically my favourite time was the first six weeks of being open. It’d be demanding, I’d be there for lunch and dinner, but that’s when the whole DNA of a restaurant is really established. By metaphor, I suppose it’s the same as the first few years of a child’s life. I don’t know what the life span of a restaurant is now – 10 years? And a human, 80. It’s like the first few years of motherhood and fatherhood; absolutely crucial.’
This comparison sheds some light on that je ne sais quoi his sites possess; he has treated each and every one individually, as an entity in its own right. Part of a chain, they were not. All of his children - I mean restaurants (he has three human progeny on his roster, of whom he is extremely proud) - were encouraged to grow their own personality and style, whilst retaining the faultless service, accessible pricing and open-hearted attitude which have always been part of the trademark.
‘A lot of the most interesting people in a restaurant at any given time are not the most affluent. So you’ve got to make it affordable. And the ethos is, give people the opportunity to spend, but don’t make it mandatory’.
He speaks of the importance of the building, of reading the space and allowing its own character to flourish. Colbert on Sloane Square, for example, was originally going to be another Wolseley. But once he’d won the contract (much to the chagrin of the other bidders, whom he politely chooses not to name) and sat in the three empty rooms, ‘I thought no this is wrong, so, so wrong, because it’ll feel like the West End deigning to go into the villages. I love instinct and intuition. I thought no, we have to create something specifically for the site which feels like its been here since the building was built.’
This is exactly the approach he’s taking with his three new restaurants. Arlington, which is on the site of the celebrated Le Caprice and will be bringing back some of the old favourites; the American influenced The Park on the corner of Bayswater and Queensway with its 30 booths (Jeremy loves a booth) and Cal-Ital cuisine; and Simpson’s on The Strand, a ‘big-theatre brasserie’. He urges all restaurateurs to boil their projects down to one sentence, with a single comma permitted, and is still working on his.
‘I think in life we learn not necessarily from what other people are doing well, it’s often what other people are doing badly’.
His recent trip to New York gave him several major takeaways: ‘I came back with speed, I was interested in napkins. Pasta was something. Flowers. Good use of flowers’.
Most important of all, however, is his staff. ‘I like the idea of empowering staff. Making everything more positive. When we had Corbin and King, my Managing Director Zuleika and I were talking about how we can improve working conditions. One of the things we came up with – I think she formed the term – was catch people doing things well, rather than doing things wrong. It’s quite British, the notion that you know you’re doing alright because if you weren’t, you’d soon hear about it. It’s a terrible employee strategy.’
He tells a tale involving a friend, The Wolseley and a Battenberg cake. ‘And that’s one of my stories of good hospitality’. He smiles and I smile back, before realising it was meant for the man behind me. In fact come to think of it, he seems to know everyone at his St James’s favourite, Maison François, where we meet. Including, of course, the eponymous François himself. They give each other a knowing nod, restaurateur to restaurateur.
‘The hospitality industry is full of misfits’, he remarks. Despite his suave, confident three-piece suit and colourful storytelling, ‘I’m someone who actually quite likes being by themselves’. He bolsters this statement by telling me about his post A-level trip to Petworth House. ‘Most of my friends chose to come up to London and spend the night at the Marquee Club. I went to Petworth – there were some paintings by Turner, which got me excited. And I had lunch - by myself - at the now no longer existing Petworth House Hotel’. An unusual brand of post-exam hedonism.
I wonder if after the hour we’ve spent together, he’ll need to go and lie down in a dark room. If so, he doesn’t show it. I leave almost as enthused about restaurants as he is. And with a flourish, swerve Pret on the way home.
November, 2023
