Jeremy King knows more about the feel of rooms, perhaps, than any man in London. The co-creator (with Chris Corbin) and inspired reviver of restaurants that immediately became fabulous institutions – the Ivy, the Wolseley – King has honed a genius for hospitality over 45 years.
He can tell, he believes, when there is a full moon, because the noise in the dining room is a little more skittish. And, he suggests, he can sense without looking, as soon as he walks through the door, if there is a properly famous person dining in that corner (there usually is), or if there is a high-stakes business lunch over there, or if “a couple who really shouldn’t be having lunch together, are having lunch together”.
He has chosen to eat today at Maison François, a French brasserie just off Jermyn Street, and not far from his own recently opened restaurant, Arlington, on the site of his first love Le Caprice. He arrives with his warm half-smile, Savile Row suited, and settles his tall frame into a leather banquette, offering full attention to the matters at hand: lunch and conversation. He has just turned 70, and gives the perennial impression of having just that morning learned the secret to the best life.
I ask him first why he likes it here.
“I like proprietor-led restaurants and you see François [O’Neill] here every day,” he says. “A restaurateur does it from the floor. A restaurant owner tries to do it from the board room.”
He briefly surveys the vibrant clatter, nods to one or two friends. “And I like going to a restaurant where there are corners and booths. In the short term, a lot of corner tables might seem extravagant. But I don’t actually believe so. Because I think people have a better time if they are sitting in a corner; you create intimacy; they come back. And I like the menu.”
He orders from it from it without fuss; lamb brochette and a quarter of poulet roti, and starts with a Lucky Saint non-alcoholic beer.
King has spent a lot of time in this restaurant over the past couple of years, plotting. On April Fool’s day in 2022 he lost control of his restaurant group, Corbin & King, that included the Wolseley, the Delaunay on Aldwych and the vast Brasserie Zédel at Piccadilly Circus. He was ousted by the Bangkok-based American billionaire William Heinecke’s Minor International which had earlier bought a £58m stake in the business. When the investor proposed a roll-out of Wolseleys in the far east, King wanted no part of it. Demanding repayment of a loan, Minor International forced the business into administration, saying Corbin & King was “unable to meet its financial obligations”. Minor then bought it for more than £60m from the administrator in an auction, bidding against a consortium led by King. The restaurateur was left with nothing. A group of A-list regulars, led by Stephen Fry, vowed never to set foot in his former restaurants again. While King has planned his next steps, many have decamped along to Maison François, along with him.
This year marks his triumphant return. Along with Arlington, he has opened the Park, an American-style brasserie opposite Kensington Palace Gardens. And he is preparing to relaunch Simpsons in the Strand, a fixture since 1828, and “London’s last grande-dame restaurant”. It still pains him a little to walk past the Wolseley, he says, mainly because he had no time to say goodbye to staff, but he is thrilled to be starting again. Like his most fabled customer – Lucian Freud was in the habit of dining at the Wolseley six or seven times a week, and one of his final works was a portrait of King – he has a gambler’s instinct. As a younger man he was in thrall to the ideas of Luke Rhinehart, whose protagonist in the novel The Dice Man lets chance dictate his life; King reportedly turned down a place at Cambridge on the roll of a die, and instead took a junior job in the City before gravitating toward restaurants. He has never lost that instinct.
“If you are a real gambler it is only worth doing if there are serious ramifications,” he says. “Lucian Freud for example, early in his career, had to cancel an important exhibition because he was hiding from the Kray twins because he owed them so much money. He mostly stopped gambling when he could afford to lose. It was no fun then.”
King doesn’t bet as such, but he is comfortable with risk. He references a time when he was wrangling with a private equity firm over the delayed opening of the Delaunay. “I said to them: ‘I should just warn you that if you try anything on, I will happily be prepared to lose everything. But when I go down, I will make sure to bring you with me.’”
He is, he says, fortunate to be somewhat fearless. “If I get upset – and you do in this business – I never swear. Because if I articulate my anger it is more likely to disappear.” He says he was lucky to have sent his three children to a progressive nursery school where they were taught the basics of transcendental meditation. He was so impressed by the calming results of this that he took a course himself. “I find that if I’m too tired, too tense, too angry, meditation is the best way out,” he says. “Five minutes of TM is a very useful tool.”
King describes himself, against all appearances, as a permanent outsider. He grew up in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset; his Brummie father, who had hoped to be an architect, instead ran a local building company. His parents sent him to Christ’s Hospital school, which accepts pupils on the basis of what the family can afford to pay. “As a result I had the advantages of public school education without ever buying into it.” He spent any money he had in his early 20s dining, often alone, in grand brasseries in Vienna and Paris and became determined to bring that atmosphere back home; to break down the stuffiness of white tablecloth eating.
“I’ve been into too many restaurants where it’s a hush as you walk in. I want bustle. I want to be scooped up by a maitre d’ who ideally knows your name. Nobody’s on their phone. Nobody’s taking pictures. You join a hubbub and feel uplifted. Foodwise, ideally, perhaps halfway through the main course, one of you might look up and say, ‘you know really this is really rather good’ and you’ll agree. And that’s it.”
We break off talking and glance at our plates and nod approval.
If King had a single mission it was to import the continental habit of it being just fine to eat alone (in Who’s Who the capital’s consummate host lists his hobby as “solitude”). “In the early days of the Wolseley a woman came in and eventually realised she had been stood up,” he says. “She got up, embarrassed, to leave and I said: why are you going? Stay for lunch, as my guest. I’ll bring you a newspaper. And I assure you people will not look over and think ‘who is the sad woman by herself?’ They will all be looking over at you and thinking, ‘God that is so cool. So classy.’ I was right.”
Jeremy ate lamb brochette, caillé de chèvre, harissa, £18; quarter poulet roti, fine herbes, £18; pommes purée, £7. Tim ate oeufs en gelée, £14, quarter poulet roti, fine herbes, £18, pommes frites, £6. They both drank petit chablis Bernard Defaix, £12 per glass; Jeremy drank Lucky Saint, £6; Saumur-Champigny Roche Thierry Germain, £11 per glass; fresh mint tea, £6. Tim drank double espresso, £5. Maison Francois, 34 Duke Street St, London SW1Y 6DF Photograph: Sophia Evans/The ObserverHe smiles as a server brings him, unprompted, a madeleine, with a candle, to celebrate the previous week’s birthday. “Perfect.” he says, “It’s always good to celebrate [Proustian] memory.”
Of all the thousands of lunches and dinners he has enabled, I say, which are the most memorable?
“Two things pop into my mind,” he says. “I think the first time I was really impressed by anyone was Meryl Streep who came into Joe Allen when I worked there, in 1979 perhaps. I’d seen plenty of stars in that room but she just destroyed the restaurant because everyone was just looking at her; she had an incredible luminosity. Diana, Princess of Wales, had a similar impact when she used to come to Le Caprice. People would look at her and then look at me to see if I would go rushing over.”
Did he?
“I quickly learned,” he says, “that that was the moment to go and talk to the least well known person in the room. Because that always reset things, and she appreciated that.”
And the other memory?
He smiles. “One day at the Wolseley, I was chuffed because at two separate tables there were Nobel prizewinners. I went down to the kitchen and I was pleasantly surprised when a chef said how fantastic it was ‘to have them both in at the same time…’ I said ‘Wow, that’s great I’m so pleased you have noticed them.’ There was a short pause and the chef said ‘Yes I can’t wait to get home to tell the wife that both Ant and Dec were in tonight.’”
The Park, Queensway, W2 3RX; Simpsons in the Strand reopens in 2025