Issue 27

Entering The Wolseley is a little like stepping into a private members’ club you haven’t paid to belong to. Once you’re through the heavy velvet curtains of the former-car-showroom-turned-white-table-cloth café, you’re into a world where everyone’s chummy and chatty and knows what to order and knows how to dress. The sort of place you keep your blazer on, just in case you get kicked out for taking it off. A.A. Gill famously wrote a book about breakfast at The Wolseley. Giles Coren scribbled a spiteful review because he couldn’t get in (most unlike him).

I’ve wanted to interview Jeremy King, one half of the hospitality duo behind the Piccadilly restaurant (as well as The Delaunay and, once upon a time, Le Caprice and The Ivy) since we launched this magazine four years ago. Not that King is particularly media shy, just that the stars never seemed to align. This year, they did. Which turned into something of a scoop.

If you follow the thrust of London’s dining scene, you’ll know that back in January, Corbin & King was forced into administration by its Thai-based majority shareholder (“It’s not me in financial trouble – it’s them!”). We’d love to claim our subsequent chat with King as a nimble piece of direct-to-source journalism. Truth is, we’d teed up the tête-à-tête several weeks earlier. It just happened to be scheduled for two days after the news of the administration broke.

Naturally, we presumed King would cancel. Quite the opposite. King did politely ask for the interview to be postponed (something to do with more pressing matters, whatever they could be), but a few days later he joined us on Zoom in characteristically combatant form. Rather than ignore the elephant in the room, he addressed it with a four-bore shotgun.

Some other London institutions in this issue: Phil Daniels, who’s about as London as a Routemaster crossing Tower Bridge; interiors doyenne Katharine Pooley, whose Walton Street boutique has become a Mecca for high-end design lovers; and Downton Abbey newcomer Laura Haddock, who’s far too young to be called an institution but who was born in Enfield and is fast on her way to becoming a national treasure, so there.

Enjoy the issue. See you in The Wolseley (which is still open by the way).