Jeremy King is back — with three new London restaurant openings
When he lost his empire, many of the capital’s restaurant-lovers went into mourning. But he is back with projects that will change the way London dines — again
What makes a restaurant buzz? At Le Caprice, which is about to be relaunched by Jeremy King, the man who propelled it to prominence in the Eighties, it is the bar. More specifically, it is the long mirror behind the bar. “The essence of Caprice was that bar,” King, 69, says. “If the bar was not full, not only did the restaurant not sing, it didn’t make money. And if you were sitting at the bar and had your back to the room the mirrors were essential, because if the Princess of Wales walked in, you could watch her going through the restaurant to her table. You could see what was going on, feel connected.”
The mirror behind the bar is just one of the features that King will be reinstating for the restaurant’s relaunch in January. It will be a loving recreation of the original — the first restaurant King opened with his business partner at the time, Chris Corbin — and the first in this new phase of King’s professional life. In fact, there will be three new restaurants: Arlington, on the site of the old Caprice (the name has been the possession of Richard Caring since 2005); the Park, a “21st-century grand café” in Kensington; and a reboot of Simpson’s in the Strand, “London’s last grande-dame restaurant”.
These ventures are still in the making, so we meet at Maison François, a Mayfair brasserie from where King has been conducting operations during this limbo period. It was 18 months ago that he lost his former hospitality empire, Corbin and King — which encompassed such London destinations as the Wolseley, the Delaunay, Colbert in Sloane Square and Fischer’s in Marylebone — after a bitter wrangle and a failed bidding war with his majority shareholder, Minor International. It is a curious displacement, King as customer rather than in charge, yet still wearing a pristine three-piece suit. He is recognisable to anyone who has dined in any of his establishments, where he was a constant tutelary presence, and is still commanding something resembling awe from the Maison François staff who serve his lapsang souchong with cold milk and hot water on the side.
“I did not want to lose the Wolseley and those restaurants. I never wanted to walk away from the staff without even the opportunity to say goodbye,” King says. “Not being able to say goodbye felt likea bereavement in many ways.” But, he adds, we are here to talk about beginnings, not endings.
King grew up in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, where he had a Saturday job selling ice cream. One of his foundational culinary memories is coming home early on Christmas Eve to find his mother, a school administrator, loading the already-cooked Christmas lunch into the hostess trolley. “We would not be eating until three o’clock the following afternoon,” he says. “I thought, ‘There has to be a better way.’ ”
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King was a shy child, whose social unease was at odds with his imposing appearance — by 14 he was 6ft 5in — and who was not encouraged at home. “Any feeling of self-worth was prohibited. My mother would say, ‘If anybody ever says anything nice to you, they are only saying it to be nice.’ I was happy to get away for all sorts of reasons.”
He won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, a pioneering boarding school in Sussex. “You got the education for free — or paid according to how much your parents earned. It meant that there was fallen aristocracy alongside East End boys and the only common factor was that you had to be fairly bright, which I loved. I learnt a lot of the fundamental principles and beliefs of my life there, which are to do with egalitarianism.” After A-levels, King moved to London, to the World’s End in Chelsea, working part-time as a merchant banker and part-time in a wine bar called Charco’s, where models from Nevs, the nearby agency, would drink Flambeau d’Alsace wine at 24p a glass (this was the early Seventies).“I hated the merchant banking, but I liked the physicality of the wine bar,” he says. At 21 he was made the bar’s manager, which was partly why he didn’t take up the place he had won at Cambridge (also partly because at the time he was obsessed with the Luke Rhinehart book The Dice Man and was throwing dice to determine his actions, and the dice told him not to go to university).
King remained in London, trying to work out what it was he was meant to do with his life. A career adviser suggested accountancy, but that left him as cold as his mother’s Christmas dinner. More than anything, he enjoyed the evenings he spent at the capital’s two most scene-y restaurants, Langan’s Brasserie and Joe Allen, where a character called Max was running front of house. “He looked a bit like James Joyce, with little glasses and a platinum star in his front tooth. He had been to Harvard and was a Rhodes scholar.” Max offered King a job as assistant maître d’hôtel, and it was while he was at Joe Allen, where all of theatreland would gather post-show, Allen himself at the piano, that King came to the attention of Peter Langan.
By the late Seventies Langan was London’s most storied restaurateur, presiding Caligula-like over the celebrity revels at his brasserie. “I’d been at Joe Allen’s for about six months when Peter came in and said, ‘I hear that you should run my next restaurant.’ I was only 25.” King was impressed by Langan’s creativity and clarity of vision, but was aware of the destructive impact of his excessive drinking. The restaurant business is filled with alcoholics of varying degrees of functionality and King decided early on that he would never drink while on the job — a rule he broke for only one customer, Lucian Freud. “And that was many years later. Because when he was alone he would look for attention.”
Unlike so many others surrounding Langan, King did not encourage his drinking; instead they focused on conceiving a new restaurant. “We worked on the idea for a bit. The working title — and this was the forerunner for what Caprice would be — was Joe Langan’s. But Peter started to flounder . . .” Meanwhile, King had met Corbin, who was working on the floor at Langan’s, and the pair of them instituted a weekly lunch club, for which they would attempt to find the most unusual and interesting places to eat out in London. This blossomed into the idea of opening a restaurant together, Le Caprice, in 1981. Back then Corbin and King’s modus operandi was to revive old restaurants: ones with history and texture. There had been a restaurant on the Caprice site, on and off, since the Twenties. “But it was sitting there empty. We took it on and we did it up for £30,000.” More restaurants followed, including the Ivy and J Sheekey. The aim was always to deliver atmosphere, seamless service and delicious food, rather than promoting the ego of a celebrity chef.
In 2003 they opened the Wolseley on Piccadilly, on the site of a former car showroom. King would stroll the tables every day, talking to his famous guests — Harold Pinter, Kate Moss — while keeping an eye on the cost of a cup of coffee at Starbucks to ensure that his space remained accessible to all, in keeping with his egalitarian credo. (At Brasserie Zédel, another of his restaurants, the three-course prix fixe could be had for £11.25.) And when a restaurant did not have a history for King to plunder, he would create one. For the bar and restaurant at the Beaumont Hotel, which he opened in 2014 (and relinquished in 2018), he created a fictional past: a former owner, Jimmy, who escaped prohibition America. King scoured auctions and antique shops to find items that would bring his creation — the hotel and its pretend owner — to life.
“I wanted to write, to be an architect, to compose, to perform,” he says. “The beauty of the restaurants is that they have allowed me to include all those elements, as well as my love of history.”
King still laments not going to university. He has the autodidact’s restless enthusiasm for several disciplines — he loves Turner, Mozart, Coleridge. He has three children by his first wife, Debra Hauer, one of whom is the actor Jonah Hauer-King, and lives in Belgravia with the interior designer Lauren Gurvich King, whom he married in 2012. He relaxes by meditating most days and is a big, discursive talker. We talk for two hours, at the end of which I still have not got through all my questions. He is an entertaining and wry storyteller, a living receptacle of the history of London’s restaurant scene, which he has observed and participated in, which he has transformed and hopes to continue doing so, drawing on the past to create something new. “As Prince Tancredi says in The Leopard: ‘For things to stay the same, everything has to change,’ ” he says.
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At the new Caprice (it will be hard to remind ourselves to call it Arlington) King wants to reinstate works by David Bailey and will canvass the 800 or so people to whom he sends his newsletter to find out what were their favourite dishes so that he can plan the menu. “Bang bang chicken, salmon fishcakes, tomato and basil galette. For an old customer, it will feel emotionally nostalgic to walk back through the door,” he says.
The Park, meanwhile, is a completely new proposition in a modern building and with a tentative opening date of spring next year. “It will be very American-influenced,” he says. “The cooking will have its roots in California in the Seventies, chefs like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse with just a touch of American diner, and there will be lots of booths.”
The third element in King’s strategy — the regeneration of Simpson’s — is at a more embryonic stage. The restaurant dates to the mid-19th century and was famous for the roasts that were wheeled around on silver platters and carved tableside. “That will be more of a big-theatre brasserie,” he says. “But one that will very much hark on its tradition. I want people to walk in there and say, ‘Oh good, they haven’t changed it’, although it will have changed.”
If all goes to plan there will be a big restaurant downstairs, another upstairs, a basement bar and a private dining room. It could be a daunting proposition, but King seems excited, raring to get back to the business that he never intended to enter, but one that he has made unequivocally his own.
“There is probably no great artistic, literary, musical, political movement that hasn’t started in a restaurant, particularly the kinds of restaurants I like: the grand cafés. They are the catalyst for so much, and that is what excites me.”
