Jeremy King: The Restaurateur Behind The Ivy, Le Caprice and The Wolseley

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:13Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio show. Jeremy King, restaurateur extraordinaire. I won't do any more French in the course of this interview. I just need to get something out of the way early, which is, had I been any good at all as both a gossip columnist and a Fleet Street show business editor, then I would know you extremely well already because of the status that your restaurants have enjoyed over the years. But I don't. So you might be a brilliant restaurateur, but I was clearly an absolutely rubbish gossip columnist and showbiz journalist.

0:52Welcome.

0:53Jeremy King:Well, thank you very much. um for people who don't know who you are there is barely a restaurant that has enjoyed a sparkling reputation in the last 30 or 40 years that that you were not involved in um before you set up your own business you were a stalwart of some of the greatest uh names in in the business but i want to begin at the very beginning because there were no indications in your early life of where you might end up i don't think no i i in the way that so many people fall into hospitality and often it's because not knowing what to do sometimes as i've learned over a period of time learning difficulties precludes people from a lot of um projects and and when i say learning difficulties it might be dyslexia or whatever and as with some of the most incredible dyslexics uh who have lived um including adrian gill or of course richard rogers etc they're brilliant but they're rejected by society so for a long time hospitality was the home of rejects i rejected myself because having gone through a school a good school i decided i didn't want to go to there was a red brick unit university i thought i to i suppose to coin a phrase would potentially piss away three years and um it didn't stop most people no and and thought no i Now, because I'm arithmetically, logically adept, I thought I'm going to go into the city, make a lot of money in merchant banking.

2:45Jeremy King:My school used to have a big connection because it was a charity school, a blue coat school. So people often didn't go to university and went straight to the city. So I did that. and whilst and that was 73 and I was earning 1050 pounds a year and so I supplemented by working a couple of nights a week in a wine bar in Chelsea wine bars are very new thing they're very very popular and of course the beauty of working in a bar is that not only do you get paid but you don't have to spend any money so it's a cheap way a cheap way of saying and so I was still there um when I decided actually I made a mistake not to go to university and I applied to Cambridge and left the merchant bank which had bored me stiff and then the the full story is that in 71 just before I'd left school I read a book I've been recommended called the dice man luke reinhardt luke reinhardt absolutely or they revealed his real name george cockcroft i think i think it was and um and i was very taken by it and i used to use it socially and what film what restaurant what what what will we do and then i would when i was bored at the merchant bank i determine who i was that day at the merchant bank by the throw of a dice and and it's a it's a form of gambling and the thing with gambling it's only really fun if there's danger and so I would put in something which would be dangerous with work option six would normally be you don't go to work the other options could be anything from I've lost my voice or I'm Long John Silver or whatever it might be and I have to I have to adopt that character and or it might be that I've fallen in love with the really ugly department head or something like like that which for me made life more interesting.

4:55You must have been incredibly bored during this period.

4:58Jeremy King:I was bored but the strange thing about it is I'm actually quite a introvert I was very shy particularly when I was young and and so it went on the reason i tell that part of the story is that when my matriculation papers came through to go up to cambridge i threw the dice and a very very uh long shot throw most most of the options were you go up to cambridge and just do your course or you go to Cambridge a year late or you go to Cambridge and you change your course or variations but to bring in the spice a double six meant that if before I went up I got a managership in a wine bar or that I was working in or similar then I would stay in hospitality and as I I wasn't even 21 when I I made that decision, and you had to be 21 to get a license.

6:00Jeremy King:And the double six came up, and then very soon after I was 21, I became the manager of said wine bar. Charco's. Charco's Wine Bar. And it's fair to say pretty much regretted it ever since. Even though things turned out well in the restaurant business, uh i did deeply regret not going up to cambridge i thought that was foolish and i remember when my son who's an actor and was getting a lot of work fresh out of school and had an american agent who was saying he had he had a place at cambridge as well and he was being encouraged by the American agent not to bother, whereas his London agent, Lindy King, no relation, she said, no, you will be a better person if you go and do your studies, because he was doing theology and philosophy, which was a good combination.

7:12Jeremy King:And I think he was a better actor for it. I don't think everybody should go to university at all. I think we're all so different. It can be more appropriate for others. But I should have done. And that is a matter of regret. Gosh. There's a lot to unpack there. We'll start with the amateur psychology. Why? I mean, A, why the dice? Albeit that the book is brilliant and lots of people flirted with similar behavior, but they didn't go all in on it like you did. And B, even after you got the double six, you didn't, or did you? You didn't have to obey it. Oh, in my mind, I did. You really did. So there is something psychologically fascinating going on here.

7:54Jeremy King:And I think if, when I look back on it, the need for the dice is because I, as an introvert, and to a degree, people pleaser and so on, and something which I've learned in life is that the more things we do because we feel we should, the more likely we are to be unhappy. And now I'm a great advocate, whether it's with my children or other people, when they ask my advice, should I take this job or that job? And I'll say, irrespective of money or whatever, which do you really want to do? And my feeling, and I did it with my children, uh i only hear once um my eldest daughter was about to about to uh graduate from she went to georgetown in washington and she said to me at one point i dad you know i'm graduating soon i've really enjoyed working in the restaurants and i'm told i've done very well and i said yes you did brilliantly you were really really good she said well i'm thinking maybe i should come into the family business and i said absolutely not and she and she said why why not i said could you use the word should and you want to be a theater director but you're scared because it's very difficult it's very competitive it's not very well paid and and so on it's really hard to to to rise to the top go and do that for a few years and if it's not working you come back to me and say dad I want I do want to come into the restaurant business then I welcome you with open arms but I think a high proportion of young graduates and and so on are doing jobs because they feel they should be a lawyer they should be a banker they should be in hedge funds or whatever and actually I see so many are really unhappy.

9:57Do you ever allow yourself, Robert, Frost moments? Do you ever look at the path not taken and wonder where your life might have gone had you gone to Cambridge?

10:05Jeremy King:I do, I do. And I stop it fairly quickly because I then, I very rarely become morose, but I become a bit sad because I think it was a missed opportunity. And if I ever say that to anybody, they say, well, yes, but you've done so well. I said, well, yes, I have, but I might have done so well in something else. And I missed out on that very formative period. Another aspect is that as a fairly insular person, what I watch with my son from his time at Cambridge, even my daughters who both went to American universities, is that network of really close friends who've been forged at a particular time in life.

10:58Jeremy King:You tend not to, from what I've observed, to have such strong friendships with people you met when you were 12 or 13 at secondary school. But those at university tend to endure for life. There's a recurring theme in what I have read about you, and I did read that you didn't give an interview for about the first 30 years after you opened Caprice yeah I was about 30 years we're very grateful to you for turning up well I things change of course they do and I I'm often quoted to the point where I think my my colleagues get bored with it but there is a one of the strengths of the restaurant business is that we hate change.

11:48Jeremy King:And one of the weaknesses of the restaurant business is that we hate change. And it's very difficult. And I'm a big subscriber to Prince Tancredi in The Leopard, Lampedusa's book, The Leopard. And when he's questioned by part of his retinue, he said, why do we have to do this? Why can't things stay the same? And he said, for things to remain the same everything has to change and there's a lot of very good philosophers who talk about if you dwell in the past um you and and lean on your previous successes and what made them then you're in danger of losing everything because if we sit here off the top of my head if i you know kodak we used to be paramount ibm i don't hear much about ibm and they thought that they were the innovators and leaders and they didn't have to change and it's it's a really important aspect of life is that and i offered to have my my staff you know let's say we win a best restaurant of the year award i'll pull them together and say how are we going to win that next year and people i've worked with for a long time know exactly what's coming so they keep quiet and somebody new something probably very good will say by maintaining our standards and i'll say thank you that's the route to bankruptcy and they said how can that be if we win an award from for our standards how can maintaining them uh lead to bankruptcy i said because you never actually maintain them.

13:29Jeremy King:They slowly go into decline. And meanwhile, other people are getting better. So we have to constantly try to improve. So you always aim above where you are. Always aim above. However high you are. Yeah. And that's the big failing. And I, you know, I, yeah, I mean, I don't dwell morosely on the fact I didn't go to university, but I knew it was a mistake. But you still had to abide by the dictat of the dice. Yeah, because the dice liberated me. Yes, I understand that. Because I wouldn't have done such interesting things without the dice. And if you talk to gamblers, for many of them, it's not fun if there's no risk.

14:21Jeremy King:Of course. If you talk to some, well, you obviously can't now, but Lucian Freud used to talk about the fact, and he was an inveterate gambler. He gambled so much, and he'd get into debt with people like the Cray brothers, who would very happily break your leg for it and have to hide from them. He gambled and always risked everything. Once he was starting to sell for millions, he couldn't gamble anymore. Because no one would take a bet that big, big enough for him to be scared. To be scared, exactly. Wow. I think you sat for Lucian Freud at some point. I did twice, in fact. Although twice sounds quite brief.

15:02Jeremy King:First time, I think, was two to three years, and the second time, three, four years, I think.

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15:56the recurring theme that i alluded to was this sense of i think you've used the phrase being a permanent outsider which sits quite oddly with what you've done for for all of your working life with with being very much a sort of facilitator of good times as it were and and therefore somebody who understands people and understands what people want but i think i understand it and i think perhaps um that the counter in the in the ice cream shop was at the sea spray cafe where your friends parents had it and you talked about the importance of the counter behind which you would stand yes when people from towns like my hometown of kidderminster would arrive in burnam on sea for

16:36Jeremy King:their annual holiday referred to by the by those in burnam on sea as grockles that's of course the outsiders the grockles yeah um yeah i i think if we go back use the word facilitator and in many in many ways i am and it's my i think my love of restaurants is that i would always wanted to have been a creator and i do to an extent uh in a proprietorial sense because my interests were architecture, art, music, literature, and they can actually come into play within the restaurant environment. I like a bit of distance. I'm very much an observer. I'm blessed, I suppose, partly through practice with very good intuition and instinct, which by just watching people over over the years and i i'm incredibly sad that nowadays instinct and intuition are devalued and we everything has to be transactional everything has to have proof of concept or it's um what was the rather wonderful film moneyball brad pitt moneyball where everything could come down to statistics and it's an it's an interesting thing that that the the purity of a binary life which didn't appeal to me and the way I told my staff several years ago well in advance of AI becoming so common I said I'm going to replace you all the reception staff with robots and they said they couldn't work out if I was serious and I explained to them well because they're never late they're reliable they don't forget things they can do everything you can do they can say good evening do you have a reservation etc any number of examples where it's parity but robots can't love robots have no intuition they have no empathy all these things which you do but you're not using it you're not using any of those qualities which are essentially human so you're bad robots you're inefficient lazy bad robots whereas you can be supreme human beings and and the aspiration has has to be there someone said to me the other day that with the reference to my radio show that the focus groups have shown that their listeners don't like that topic and i said well our job is to make them like it yeah yeah whereas a robot would be moving on to the next possibility absolutely absolutely no i i i'm a big believer in that and so yeah i so the restauraturing has been good to me partly because i've i've been happy to be a catalyst um we i did talk about people pleasing which was a big mistake and i um what do you mean it was a big mistake well people pleasing might seem to be the essential and perfect uh attribute for restaurateur but there is a danger then that the restaurateur becomes sycophantic or obsequious and then and and people recognize that and actually honesty and straightforwardness etc should be more respected so i used to think if i make everybody around me happy including my family then i'll be happy but the truth is those people actually want me to be happy because they'll be happier if if i'm happy and in the restaurant world and whether it's with staff or customers, if you are true to yourself and reliable, consistent, but firm, then everybody knows where they stand.

20:37Jeremy King:And I've learned as time goes on that people are looking to me for leadership and guidance, and I have to put my people-pleasing into people-caring because it's a very different thing. And with restaurants, what people are forgetting in this slightly homogenized life where it's a transactional life as well is actually people just want to be recognized, reassured, loved, cared for, valued. All these things are so important to the human condition and they're not getting them so often. Less than ever, perhaps. Yeah. um so i mean there's so many milestones in in the career that you've led that we will never cover all of them but i am interested in in a couple of things first of all the the pleasure you get from somebody else having a good time but before that the egalitarianism of your restaurants and when i was researching this interview it it it struck me and i think you've said in the past that the school you ended up at, partly as a consequence of your mother working as a secretary at a prep school and finding out about Christ's hospital school.

21:57Some of the kids there would be from very wealthy backgrounds. It's a blue coat tradition, I think. And that was like a penny drop moment for me because I've been to some of your restaurants and I intend to go to more. But they're not places... If I was up from Kiderminster and I was to go to the Ivy when you were running the Ivy or if I were to go to Simpsons and the Strand now, I would somehow feel special and I wouldn't feel as if I had my face pressed up to the sweet shop window. And it struck me, and I used to feel like that a lot as a younger man when I first arrived in London, but never in your restaurants.

22:33And it struck me that's probably linked to your schooling.

22:36Jeremy King:Yes, thank you. It makes me incredibly happy. I'm very gratified that that's the way you felt because that's exactly what I wanted to do. I mean, people try to assume superiority. It might be through the amount of money they have or the way they dress or whatever. I'm not interested in dress codes or anything like that. I'm interested in conduct code. And as long as somebody is respectful of my staff and is there to have a good time, because it's amazing how many people go into a restaurant seemingly without any intention of having a good time. And they bring to bear their – it's a phrase I often use to people.

23:27Jeremy King:I say, are you making your issues my problem? And that can be the case. And I think we are all equal. I was conducting induction for the second restaurant at Simpson's, Romano's. yesterday and I had a wonderfully mixed group of people and I talked to them. I said, we are all equal. I am superior purely in position because somebody has to be. We can't have a utopian society, but all of you are capable of being in my position if you put your mind to it, if you really want it. But in the meantime, if anybody treats you differently because of the color of your skin, your background, your nationality, your religion, your sexuality, your gender, whatever it might be, then retribution will come from me in a very, very strong way, whether it's a customer or whether it's a colleague of staff.

24:32Jeremy King:And I do believe so strongly about everybody equal. and I do attribute that to the school because one of the clever things they did is those people from wealthy backgrounds, they were normally previously wealthy backgrounds, so you'd have aristocrats who were really, really down on their luck next to East End boys from London and it was a wonderful melting pot and we realized that the class, that whole notion of upper middle and lower class had nothing to do with capability potential and so on or conduct or conduct and and some of the best the best brought up people i've known have actually come from very very simple backgrounds by the same token um whilst when i was i was at school i i i loathed the notion of eton and the boys there whereas nowadays the way they teach teach them.

25:36Jeremy King:They are respectful for everybody. And I always remember hearing somebody from the school saying, the boys are brought up to believe and understand, not be told, but to believe and understand that whether it's the headmaster or the chambermaid, both need and deserve equal respect. and that's all I want in life and we only have to look around at what's going on at the moment. If there was anything like that shared feeling through the world, it would be impossible to push the button on bombing Iran, for instance. Yes. Because it's people. Were you ever chippy then? I sense not. I sense that you never felt judged or inferior.

26:29Jeremy King:actually a little bit as a i i hope i didn't get chippy um but i did always um wonder whether me feeling an outsider extended to in some ways feeling inferior okay and in time inherently i began to believe in myself thanks to the the generosity of others uh it's a fine but it's a fine line between feeling inferior and feeling an insider outsider yes of course yes but they're not quite the same thing are they no so from charcos via climb work benson to joe allen is that right yes well in fact there was a as a french as a frenchman lured me away from charcos to go we ran a restaurant wine bar wine importing it was very very useful i was thoroughly miserable um why because it all seemed a chore uh and there was no love and okay i i was going through i felt i was going through the motions and it's thanks to uh an extraordinary man john maxwell who was a harvard scholar he was a road scholar at oxford and he ended up in in restauraturing ran the front of house of joe allen went back to toronto um at a later stage to run his own two restaurants but he was probably the brightest person i've ever worked with and i told him that despite my dice man resolve to uh to be in the restaurant business i was giving up on it and he said no you can't leave just yet uh i think you can make this work and i said really and he said yes right quick analysis what do you like about hospitality not what you don't like what you like about and i said well i like restaurants he said what sort of restaurant i said big restaurants where things are happening so okay you're going to come work for joe allen i said oh no no i love joelle and i was using it um as an individual i said why and he said because we'll show you how not to run a restaurant which is more important than showing you how to run a restaurant and you're the sort of person who'll glean something from it and i got a lot of lessons about human behavior and and so on the the then proprietor who became a very good friend later in life was was very challenged by me very worried very anxious about me being there and why he was insecure and he thought that i was i was a bit of a challenge so he bullied me for for a long time and i learned that actually when somebody is is trying to is trying to break you that's when you get stronger and then eventually rather like a foal like a like a young stallion etc actually that person will calm down when they realize that you're impervious to insults or degradation or whatever it might be.

29:47Jeremy King:And many things I learned. And then I got to know Chris Corbin, who was over at Lang's Brasserie at the time, which is another place I loved going. I thought that was the apotheosis of a great restaurant and where I started to learn how much I liked brasseries. and and as time went on it was very clear to me that all the great movements in the arts and literature and music and theater revolution and politics all these things great movements had their genesis in brasserie or grand cafe restaurants and that started to interest me because then I could be somewhat part of it. So were ambitions forming here, albeit very loosely, that one day you wanted to be in charge of your own spaces and own them?

30:42Jeremy King:Yes, and the first time that really happened is actually when I, with the Frenchman, I was supplying that very same John Maxwell who was advising on a restaurant up St. Martin's Lane called, some people might remember, called Peppermint Park, which was one of the in the vanguard of american-style restaurants and i was standing outside and looked up and saw the sign for the ivy and i said what's that and and max said oh it's an old theater restaurant very sort of fusty and dusty i thought i'm going to go there so i went i went there with a friend and i mean on one hand it was terrible but there was a feeling there and it's all part of that what some buildings some institutions have this heart and soul which is difficult to identify and why why we feel it and why i've always been first taken by the building rather than the ideas and i said this must have been 77 i said if ever i own a restaurant this will be it um so that actually actually came came around and um you're 23 at the time so yeah i was 23 so it was not going to happen and um but it it did and of course i was only 27 when when chris and i had resolved to open a restaurant together and we found what ironically at the time was called the arlington restaurant which had been on the site of the old caprice um with Joseph Teggy, we acquired it.

32:23Jeremy King:The fashion designer. Yeah, fashion designer acquired it. Had he been a customer of you both? Yeah, more so Chris at Langan's. And he thought, if this guy wants to go out on his own, I'm going to back him then. Yeah, what he'd watched was a movement in Paris that a lot of the fashion houses opened restaurants. Of course, yeah. I mean, there's not a lot of that now so much, although LVMH, are big into restaurants and you could say Ralph Lauren of course has his restaurant in Paris and and that works and we joined together but we didn't understand each other and fell out with with Joe and it all broke up and we were technically bankrupt and the whole thing which actually in retrospect was the best thing that ever happened.

33:10Jeremy King:This was the first incarnation of Le Caprice. that's right in 81 i just can we back up briefly to the trips that you and chris uh corbyn would go on together to try and sort of outlunch each other because there's a shared passion there in fact your relationship reads like a like a platonic love affair yeah i think you've used the phrase coup de foudre to describe that moment of meeting someone with whom you were completely simpatico and and then you you start trying to to outdo each other with the obscurity of the eating places that you've discovered yeah that that was always fun i i think my proudest moment was was was finding the kosher kosher eat um what's it called kosher dining rooms i think which was fantastic and we'd go to we just a different atmosphere because the same is happening now is that too much gets homogenized and the expectation of what a restaurant should be and And I remember at Caprice when I, because Chris was classically trained in restaurants and I was autodidact.

34:17Jeremy King:So I was learning as I went. But with my particular type of brain, I would think, why do we do this? Why don't we change it? And that was a lot of fun. And a very simple thing, the discovery was when I went to a five-star hotel for dinner. I was taken for dinner. And I came back and I said to the floor manager, I was at this hotel and they took the order. And after that, they never interrupted us either to do the mise en place, to put the cutlery in front of us or to deliver the food. How do they do that? And he said, oh, it's very, very simple. Each table has allocated number spots. You go from the northwest part of the table and number it around.

35:04Jeremy King:and then because it was important in those days you either put a square around the host number or and a circle around a lady's number and so on it was very straightforward i said that's brilliant um we'll do that and he said oh no no no you don't do that and it was a very strange moment because i said why not he said you don't do it at this sort of restaurant and what he was talking about is you only do it at upper class restaurants and capris was a middle class restaurant and the cafe might be a lower class restaurant and it was that made me bridle so much of course it did and i love because i love a pure socialism in in its way i remember i happened to know tarik alley fairly well um back in the 80s and we were at a dinner party and somebody said how can you call yourself a socialist you wear handmade shoes you drink class growth claret how can you possibly you live in a lovely house how can you possibly call yourself a socialist i have no problem whatsoever yes i do love these things my attitude is that everybody should be able to have these things and and i subscribe to i subscribe to that um the moment we though we have to all be the same it all falls apart because we're not the same there's a great line in um a very british coup the the chris marlin novel which alan plater adapted for the screen when the socialist prime minister is pulling out of the station and one of the journalists shouts at him is it true you're going to abolish first class travel and he shouts back no i'm going to abolish second class travel it's the same principle i hadn't heard that that's very good i love it

37:04so you fall out with joseph um yeah we've over the business yeah over the business and then

37:09Jeremy King:became very very good friends and it was a miss you know we we were misaligned and that's important to recognize yes yeah and and also i mean you and chris corbin knew what you wanted to do so you you You needed to be given your own head effectively. And your parents step in at this point, I think. Mortgage their house to buy you the Caprice. Well, they did. When we had the opportunity to fully acquire the long lease of the Caprice, we needed a certain amount of money. And if it had failed, they would have lost their house. and it was an extraordinary act of generosity and quite unusual. But it was the making of us.

37:56Jeremy King:And, of course, we closed the restaurant, Caprice, after the split the night before I got married in San Francisco and came back. Chris had already secured a new job, and I persuaded him that we mustn't give up, we've got to carry on. And that has been a credo for all my life, is I very rarely lose hope or concede. And I don't mean that in a sort of arrogant way. There are plenty of people who don't recognize an inevitability. I don't think I'm that, but I don't give up whilst there's still an opportunity. In that moment, why? Because the restaurant was shut. The first attempt had essentially failed.

38:55What were you holding on to? I suppose I've never really asked myself that question.

39:07Jeremy King:I think it was a combination that I am determined and somewhat stubborn. But I also, I think, felt the potential. I loved the potential of that restaurant. When we opened, we hadn't got it right. The lighting wasn't right, the certain aspects of it. But with the readjustment, and subsequently, I've actually changed it quite a lot from its heyday in the 80s when it was probably the most successful fashionable restaurant in London. In fact, it was only really eclipsed by the Ivy in the 90s. But there was something about that space, and that endures. I have people still walking in and say, oh, good, you haven't changed anything.