arlington-restaurant-review

Jeremy King’s Arlington remains a restaurant for the ‘It’ crowd

22 Jan 2025 | | By Rob Crossan

If you’re not on air-kissing terms with Alexa, Kate and Sienna, beware booking a table at Jeremy King’s comeback restaurant

The building that houses Arlington hasn’t always been a bastion of good taste. The original restaurant found here, Le Caprice, was opened in 1947 by Italian émigré Mario Galati. Attempting to bring a touch of glamour to war-ravaged London, but stymied by the rigours of rationing and austerity, Galati’s solution for how to decorate his new restaurant was to have the walls covered in ruched pink fabrics culled from parachutes, which he then dyed in loganberry juice. Classy. The intensely hideous ‘innovation’ stands as a cautionary tale that a restaurant is never impervious to the whims and eccentricities of its owners.

Like the stock market, trampolinists, and Elon Musk’s lucidity, restaurants are forever going through ups and downs, whether those undulations be brought on by economic, cultural or gastronomic trends (funnily enough, the latter always seems the least important factor).

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Arlington, which most regulars still struggle not to refer to as ‘Le Caprice’, is no exception. You’ll remember Le Caprice. This was the restaurant that became the power dining spot, with paparazzi festooned outside, for the new breed of chattering classes who, as the 1980s clicked into gear, needed somewhere to eat, drink, kiss, and eat Bang Bang chicken. 

Le Caprice, run during that period by Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, was where Mick, Keith, Brad, Kate, Lady Di, and the publishers of every magazine and book you’ve probably ever read, went to meet their friends and confidants. Serving simple, devastatingly well-executed French food, with a smattering of East Coast American comfort dishes, it was all going so well, until it wasn’t.

It was in 2022 that, under immense media scrutiny and sorrow, the majority control of Jeremy King’s empire of restaurants – The Wolseley, J. Sheekey and Brasserie Zédel, among them – was assumed by Thai-American investment firm, Minor International. King had, by this point, not been running Le Caprice for more than 20 years, having sold it to his rival, Richard Caring, in 2005. In 2023, London’s most beloved restaurateur decided to begin rebuilding his empire by reacquiring the same revered corner spot on Arlington Street where it all began.

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Caring wouldn’t let King use the name Le Caprice, however. So, for now at least, it’s Arlington. Not that anybody seemed to mind a jot on my Saturday evening visit. For everyone who dines there, this is still Le Caprice to its core.

The black-and-white David Bailey portraits of Stephen Fry, The Rolling Stones and David Hemmings are present and correct. The bar counter still gleams, the rattan chairs are just as they were in 1987, and the menu is the same straight-to-the-point assembly of pampered comfort food, including shepherd’s pie, salmon fish cakes, and chicken Milanese.

The food, of course, has never been the main reason King’s restaurants are so adored. The ardour of his patrons stems from his rooms being a locus of louche glamour; a place where you can do anything from celebrate a six-figure book deal to express relief that your three-figure freelance pay cheque has arrived (roughly) on time. Arlington is a restaurant that, like all King’s venues, gives you the choice between spending like a member of Kuwaiti royalty or keeping costs down to the equivalent of a night in the local multiplex. Spending £50 a head is easily possible. Spending £500 between two is impossibly easy.

In his many recent press interviews, Jeremy King has opined at length on how he wants his restaurants to be egalitarian places. Funny, then, that my experience at Arlington made me feel more acutely aware of my social standing than at any time since I was told by an oleaginous Russian in Tramp nightclub that he should be served before me as I was, and I quote, ‘a nobody’.

Entering Arlington, I was greeted by a reception desk that was deserted save for a water bottle. I waited. And I waited. And I waited some more. The cloakroom attendant looked at me and shrugged with sympathy. The convivial chatter of the seated diners started to take on a mocking timbre. I began to blush.

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Arlington's Bang Bang chicken, a mainstay at the old Le Caprice

Eventually, a brusque woman hurried over and showed us to our ‘table’. I use inverted commas as it wasn’t really a table at all. It was a gastronomic parole cell with a candle on it. The table was in a space better suited to a plant pot, or fire extinguisher. As a space for my partner and I, it was bordering on cruel.

The next two hours were spent, essentially, dining with the serving staff. A phalanx of them were situated around 15 inches away from us and they were having a frazzled evening, dropping plates, huffing at each other and pretending that my partner and I weren’t there. I could see how they might be annoyed by our presence. Emma’s head was situated a couple of inches from the kitchen door. Each time it flew open, every 20 seconds or so, she’d have to jerk her head to avoid making impact with either the door or a waiter carrying plates to more favoured patrons.

Le Caprice was always small. But the genuinely claustrophobic nook we were crammed into at Arlington makes a mockery of King’s recent comments to Esquire magazine, in which he claimed: ‘I absolutely love going to a place where a restaurateur is not greedy and instead of putting four tables in, putting three tables in with banquette seating where you have corners.’

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Arlington's salmon fish cake with sorrel sauce

The food, it must be said, was impeccable. The hunks of creamy Roquefort cheese on Emma’s endive and walnut salad had that soil-imbued, bovine-accented, rusticated aroma that only the finest blue cheeses possess. My spiced carrot hummus, which came with heritage beets, was an unctuous delight; the crispbreads wedged into it like cracked icebergs offering the perfect tool for scraping the plate clean.

The shepherd’s pie looks like a sponge cake; perfectly round and best eaten with a spoon. The lamb is plentiful and the mash Proustian. The salmon fishcake arrived on a bed of limp and tasteless spinach. This is a leaf which, if treated well, should always have a gentle bounce and lift to it. Yet the fishcake itself, of an almost baleful size, collapsed rather pleasantly into the perfectly tart pool of sorrel sauce.

Yet, as we have said, the point of a restaurant, especially a restaurant like Arlington, isn’t just the food. The point, as King in interviews is always eager to point out, is that even if you don’t possess a BAFTA, you should be made to feel as welcome as if you did. 

I am no diva. And I’m certainly no celebrity. But dining at Arlington made me feel unwelcome to a degree I have never experienced in 20 years of writing restaurant reviews. It’s one thing to have a table situated in the pokiest corner of social Siberia. It’s quite another to be rushed along by waiting staff to the point where, again, for the first time in 20 years, I had to ask one waiter to stop harrying us. Our duty, as it seemed to him at least, was to order, eat up, pay up, and f**k off. 

By the end of mains, we felt we had been more than adequately reminded of our rebarbative social standing. Eschewing dessert, we took the Tube back to Stockwell and had our pudding courtesy of the local Costcutter. At least the staff there were happy to see us.

20 Arlington Street, St. James's, SW1, arlington.london

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