Jeremy King

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0:06Today is a particularly special day for me as one of my very, very best friends, Jeremy King, is our guest on Table 4. With his restaurants to name just a few, the Caprice, the Ivy, the Wolseley, now the Park and the Arlington, and soon Simpsons in the Strand, Jeremy is given London, and in fact, the world, joy, stability, and celebration. He has given me the same. Jeremy's brilliant new book, Without Reservations, Lessons from a Life in Restaurants, is beautifully written. It's on the table with us now. We're going to talk about this, restaurants, memories, the future, and much, much more. A special day, indeed.

0:50Thank you. Here we are. It's so good to have you here. We've been waiting for this because we said we were going to do it when you finished the book. And you did take kind of a long time to finish this book. so we are rather so happy to have you. What makes a great restaurant? Well, it's a question when I would do inductions with staff, they would often say, what are the most important elements of a great restaurant? And people generally, and of course they expect us to say, well, the location, the chef, it might be the maitre d 'hôtel, any number of those things. And I always say, no, two elements.

1:28And it's heart and soul. and people look at me and say well what does that mean and i said well it's difficult to define but the heart and soul that we feel in a restaurant comes from the fact that the best restaurants are run by proprietors like yourself and the best proprietors are open restaurants they would like to go to themselves and then you hope that enough other people would bring and we are both restaurateurs i often talk about the when i correct people sometimes which is a bit nasty pedantic when somebody very successful in the restaurant business for instance is is described as a restaurateur i said no they're restaurant owners restaurateurs do it from the floor restaurant owners do it from the boardroom and the different shows and it particularly the case with the river cafe and i like to think with my own restaurants because the staff feel it and the staff know it and i had a wonderful example recently is because we were recruiting for simpsons we made an offer to somebody in a group uh restaurant and they accepted and we went we're going through the process and their current employer suddenly realized what was going on came back and counter offered with a lot more money and they said no because i just received a card from jeremy king welcoming me nobody even knows my name in this company really um and that's what counts and i think it's heart and soul two good ingredients and when you and the last part of the book is about the future.

3:18It's about Simpsons. So tell us. Oh, thank you. Well, Simpsons is a 25-year journey. When we sold Caprice Holdings, Caprice Ivy, Sheikis, Simpsons was coming up on the market in 2000 and tried to get it. And it was all across the papers, in fact. and then i tried again in 2008 and 2015 and they did a version then it closed it at um with covid and i put in a successful offer i think it was spring 22 and we'll be opening effectively spring 26. um it's been quite a journey and quite labor of love and the date keeps changing people get a bit frustrated about it and we've heard everything from the main contract to going bust and so on but a lot of these things in life sometimes you forget just how brilliant it is and um i think with with all of us we we see things much better through other people's eyes um and i remember taking a hotelier around a friend and uh showing around in the early days and he was very silent and I was at the point because I was fighting on the contract we'd had delays there's problems all sorts of things investments and so and I think I was a bit jaded and then he went around and started I was thinking because I was in that mood I thought oh he thinks I'm stupid he thinks it's wrong and he looked around he said Jeremy I mean, I assume I can say this.

5:06This is fucking fantastic. Fucking fantastic. He kept saying it. I thought, oh, yeah, maybe it is. It really is. And it restored my faith. And often we rely on other people at our low points or whatever just to restore us. We're really close. We should be open by end of February, early March. And it is actually very exciting. and the tradition and the history and two restaurants, two bars, one large event space. It's massive. Hopefully I'll be all right. Maybe we should start with the first piece of writing in your book, which is a dedication. Because as we know, dedications are usually to one's wife or one's father, one's mother, one's children.

5:54And this one, the dedication reads, to all the wonderful people I have worked with over the last 50 years in this indefinably beguiling and wonderful world of, quote, hospitality. Can you talk about that? Yes, well, the publisher said I couldn't do this dedication because it went on. I can't remember the exact words, but it basically was saying, even those of you who've cheated me bewildered me exasperated me and so on I still learned from you even that in that case and I wanted it to to mean something it was an opportunity I know we have acknowledgements in the book but it's it's different and I I like you care most of all about the people and the people is not just the customers it's very much the staff and uh without them we would have nothing now that sounds like a beginning of a sort of oscar acceptance speech which always always but actually it is the people which make it work even the bad people taught me it is i think that our work is about collaboration you know so we walk in the door and we're talking immediately with somebody who does something differently from us you know i don't know how to make a dish that probably they can make and i don't know how to do the bookings and i'm not sure how to do the cashiering and i i would be i probably personally would be the worst waiter i was once a waiter for about a week and then i was sacked but i think it's you know there are all these but what we do is we collaborate and we share and we learn and we work together so part part of my satisfaction in being a restaurateur is that because of my inherent belief that all great movements whether literary musical creative painting revolutionary whatever they might be tend to have their formative stage in a grand cafe or a brasserie or something restaurants are the catalyst for what we all want to make of our lives and that's that's where it really happens and that's what i feel people are missing out terribly on by so much working from home because you don't have that interaction and the person who gave me a great deal of belief was of course caroline michelle who's you know very very close friends of yours as well and she and she helped me through it were there other books that inspired you i think a lot because i it's interesting i've got thousands of books and adrian gill used to say what are you going to do with all these books that you haven't read them all have you i said no no i'm keeping them for when for when i have time trouble is i haven't generally had much time but i have read a lot and i tend to repeat read i mean at the moment i'm to change the style i'm listening to a dance the music of time which of course is 12 novels or slightly Roman Eclat um because it's different and I have sort of mixed group of favorite books like can be tender is the night um Fitzgerald was really important to me I've taken a lot of I don't know why in many ways but I've taken a lot from the leopard including the famous line which has helped me which is if things are to remain the same everything has to change which is is a little bit part of the credo of my life

9:46well first of all where were you born i was born in taunton in somerset and then we were peripatetic and went around the country and then ended my father taught me a massive lesson which i i didn't write about i thought about it as he left a really well-paid um prestigious job on principle because he realized that the proprietor was criminally dishonest and he'd so he gave everything up he was actually in the that was the sad thing for him is that he wanted to be an architect and would have been a brilliant architect and he had a wonderful drawing hand he was a one of those great left hand drawers and um he gave everything up and he his other lasting impression on me is that when he told me at his retirement dinner that there wasn't a single day in the previous 40 years that he had hadn't got up and wished he wasn't going to work which was the most awful awful uh realization on my on my part and there were the other thing other things about it he i think i i wrote he he had a terrible boss who wanted me to come into their company and i it's a sense i felt i had a sense of obligation it was a good learning lesson when i plucked up the courage that i don't want to come because i was very much a people-pleaser how old were you at that point I was about 22 23 I think and yes around that and they wanted me to come in they thought that I'd be the person to groom to take over the company etc and I was miserable and it taught me that great lesson about only do what you want to do in life not what you feel you should do and which I passed on in many ways the book because dear Caroline and prior to that of course our old friend Ed Victor also an agent had tried to get me to write a book and I said no rest restaurant biographies are the most boring genre you can ever hope to come across they're all got names like i shall die on the carpet or you know or the narrative is it was my honor to serve the beggar marga khan they're boring in their list of names and so on i i'll only ever write a book if i've got something to say and and i don't want to sell for grand eyes but i i love teaching i love passing on i love helping people i love helping people even if i don't like them That's the weird thing.

12:34Chris, who, of course, was my partner, used to say that about the staff. He said, they drive you mad, but you're helping them. Why is that? I said, well, for me, it's a trigger instinct. If somebody's in need of help, is being bullied or whatever it is, I have to help. And so the book came around really because of Graham Norton talking about the fact that when somebody was saying to him that national service should be brought back to give backbone to the youth of today etc he said no they should work in a restaurant yeah it does teach you and it and and i think we learn so much and all my kids who've had some very very good things happen in life they're very quick to put on their cv that they worked in the Yeah, I told you that I'm at the recruiting press at Apple for everything, for whether you're going to be a graphic designer, industrial designer, technical engineer for Apple, whatever you were doing.

13:37And if hospitality restaurants was on the CV, they had a better chance of getting a job. But we were talking about your father and growing up with a man who didn't want to go to work every day. What was life like in your house? Who cooked? Did your mother cook a meal? Did you sit down for dinner every night? We would eat together quite a lot. If you asked my mother what's the biggest chore of her day, it would be cooking. She didn't like to cook. Of course, something we never see nowadays, thank God, is a pressure cooker. And that was the most utilized thing in the kitchen. She'd throw anything into a pressure cooker and what came out was degelas as they would say as a friend uh and the the level of her finding cooking an anathema she i caught her once when she she wouldn't come out on christmas eve to a drinks party and she said don't go into the kitchen because i've got presents out and i'm wrapping but and i came back early and she'd left the room and i looked in it and i realized there weren't any presents there She didn't want us to come into the room because she didn't want us to see that she'd cooked the following day's Christmas lunch already and put it in a hostess trolley.

14:56And where it was going to sit for about 18 hours. And that's her approach. But you did sit down to dinner. Would they take you to restaurants? They would. My mother was secretary of the local hotel on the seafront in Burnham-on-Sea, and we would go. I found it very exciting because, for some reason, the menu would be melon with ginger. Pate was the most exotic thing. Those are the days where there was a legitimate dish on British menus of tomato juice that you'd get a small glass of tomato juice. Oh, that was a start. In those days. But for me, it was very exciting. And I think what we do with our parents, we either adopt or reject.

15:49And I did a lot of rejecting. A very, very particular moment in my, the two moments, as I mentioned in the book, is one at school when the headmaster said to the prefects, let's go back to my study and warm a bottle of claret in front of the fire. and it was one of the most evocative things I mean you shouldn't warm it in front of the fire anyway but it caught my imagination and then I would find out about food through literature certainly not from the school um so when we'd finished A-levels and all my friends on their free day out 24 hours out who went to London and the Marquis Club and got completely schwasted I went to Petworth to eat in the hotel there by myself By yourself?

16:39What age would that be? That would have been 18 And it taught me the joy of eating by yourself And I had roll mop herrings Followed, I think, bad choice By trout with almonds So you can remember that meal Oh, I can remember that meal I can remember everything about it I went back on a pilgrimage to find it and the hotel had closed, unfortunately. The other reason to go to Petworth, which wasn't far from where I was at school, was to go and look at the Turner paintings which had been commissioned by Lord Egremont. And that, for me, was perfect. You went to boarding school, did you? I went to boarding school.

17:23What was the food like there? It was terrible. We had one dish which would come up once a week which was called skiffage pie. and Skiffage Pie was named by the boys, and the urban, the folklore was that it was made out of leftovers of the food from the day before. Yeah. This is a place where powdered egg, scrambled egg, it was... Did it upset you, or do you think you were just, you know, I thought we talked to Stephen Fry, do you remember that, when we talked to him about his experience at boarding school, which really changed, you know, it was traumatic. It sort of did, but funnily enough, all of this I realized much later was kind of happening in parallel with Nigel Slater, who wrote that wonderful book, what's it called?

18:17Toast, I think it was. And I was acting out much of what he was doing. The beauty of the food being so bad is it got me off quite a serious punishment for smoking because I'd been caught going over a fence and I played the, you didn't actually catch me even though it was clear I was going to smoke that and so on. And then I got the Encyclopedia Britannia out and looked up hunger. And hunger, they explained what it was and a contraction in the stomach and so on. They said there were three ways of getting rid of hunger. One was to eat. two there was a chemical which could be taken which would assuage the hunger and three was to smoke and so i put it to the uh headmasters that i was forced to smoke because the food was so bad and uh and in the end as often that they are go away and let me off the hook and when was the decision to go into into restaurants well i think i think one of the things for me and what i try and teach anybody who works for me or other children or grandchildren is whatever we do in life just let's just do it really well and I remember that the moment I discovered that when one of my mother's other jobs was a secretary to school and I got a holiday job at the age of 14 and they asked me to sweep the gym with a not very good broom and I was just about sort of at that point oh I can't you know bothered and doing the best and I suddenly heard myself saying to myself I'm going to do this sweep this gym better than anybody else has ever swept this gym and it started to become a mantra for me and when I was meant to be an Oxbridge scholar and the school was deeply irritated and frustrated by me that I wasn't going to be and I was going to go to a red brick university and I thought no because I'm just going to go into my default danger position of not aspiring and aspiration is is so important so I thought I'll go into the city and I'll become a merchant banker and I'll make lots of money because that will make me happy that's where I discovered that money doesn't make you happy um a fulfillment decided to go to up to cambridge after all um and applied and got a place and meanwhile i was i'd read a book by luke reinhardt called the dice man and that's a book where the protagonist decides the course of his life through the throw of a dice and and i got intrigued and it was very simple at first i'd where should we go to what film should we go and see and then it got more um more complicated then I started to decide who I would be that day I mean we were joking earlier about getting up but I'd throw the dice to decide whether I went to work or whether I went to work and lost my voice or any number of different variations and I like that and then I got a tip on a horse in in the 73 derby which won at extraordinary odds because a bank client had come in and drawn down 5 000 pounds this is a time when i earned a thousand pounds a year and put it on a horse and uh i got a tip off from the banking department and that was the most exciting thing is at danger i suddenly realized i was actually rather addicted to danger to risk to gambling with so many things and anyway i'm rambling a long story but the matriculation papers came through for cambridge and i threw the dice on whether i went and one of the throws said long shot because there has to be danger if you get the managership of the wine bar i was in temporarily waiting to go to cambridge if within a month of your 21st birthday you will stay in hospitality for life and that's what happen and it's the throw of the dice throw the dice which was a double six and then I stayed and then and they carried on and then when I regretted that and went for career guidance I was told emphatically that I was perfect to be an accountant and I know why because I'm arithmetic I'm logical I'm all those different things but um and I said well I might be a turf accountant a bookmaker but they said perfect i don't know so i thought stay in hospitality and try and be as good as you can be even though it's not vocational well you have you you're better i i don't know if you could be better but what you've done personally you might think there is nobody better and i think that you have to look at that as the greatest throw of the die because What would London be without you?

23:24But if you were giving this book and you hadn't written it, but you'd read it, what other story that you'd like to tell all the people listening to this? I think the first story or lesson I wrote, which was elaborated upon, was actually with my daughter Hannah, who was working in the restaurant. She was at university in America, and she was just about coming up to graduation, and she said dad you know i'm graduating i said yes i do um and she said but you know i'm thinking i've really enjoyed my time working in the restaurants um and people say i'm doing well i said you're doing extremely well she said i was wondering whether i should come in to the family business when i finish uh what do you think i said absolutely not and she said well that's a bit harsh why do you say it like that you know it's your profession i said it's very simple because you used the word should she said how do you mean i said you said i'm wondering whether i should come and i don't deal in shoulds all the things i regret in my life pretty much have been things i did because i felt i should i'm only interested in wants you want to be a theater director go and be a theatre director go and fail go and find out you don't like it get anything if you come back to me and say now I really want to be in the restaurant business I'll welcome you with open arms but everybody has to do what they should and that was I mean it went on I showed some professional examples of the shoulds versus the wants and in a way that's the essence of the book is, yes, there are chapters on Princess Diana or Harold Pinter or people like Peter Langen, who was a hero, not a mentor, but a hero, the restaurateur, Lucian Freud.

25:24I've tried to write them so that we can learn from people because if we don't constantly aspire to learn from people, we're nothing. when you when you um interview someone for a job and working with you at any level do you do can you sense somebody who's doing it because they should instead of they want to yeah yeah it's very often and uh and i i one of the you were talking about books earlier i think one of the very really really good books to learn from in all walks of life is danny myers um setting the table and he's actually doing a sequel at the moment which I'm fascinated by I made a mistake once which I will never repeat when I interviewed somebody for a very senior position who everybody wanted to hire in the company and I was the sign off and I sat down with them and within 60 seconds I knew that they were wrong for the job and 60 minutes later I gave them the job and that's because I felt I should and that's because and the pleasing and it wasn't right for them and I felt guilty for for for so long I think we do know I think we instinctively and intuitively we know so much and the trouble is with society at the moment is this is all being suppressed that money ball mentality where everything has to be statistically supported or you hear people say proof of concept etc we're not allowed to be instinctive anymore and we know much more and um but we've suppressed it suppressed our ability because of social conditioning and expectation and not upsetting people and so on and so forth and there's a certain amount in the book about using instinct and intuition.

27:28And when I said that you've given us all stability and you've given us celebration you've also given us joy and what do you think of the joyful days that you have? Yeah I do realize I take I'd say most of my joy from other people's happiness and I think something which is missing in society today is altruism and I love altruism the notion that you could do something for somebody else without any expectation of reward and we at the restaurants years ago we closed capris for christmas and in those days we had to paint every every year because the nicotine stained white walls uh it was terrible and when you paint in those days it was lead paint so you had to wait a week before you could trade because it stank and i we had happened to have i think we had to close a day early because of a storm or something and I had a quite a lot of food and staff saying what are we going to do with that I said well I tell you what there's a traveler's church um near where I was living in Wapping I'll drop it off there and I arrived at the date but knocked on the door this um cleric came to the door I said yes I said I've got some food okay put it through there I thought it was a bit off and I said can you give me a hand and he was a bit and then he came and I opened the back of the car and he couldn't believe it and he said I'm so so so so sorry I'll explain I'll get this in and I'll explain and they'd made an appeal for food and they had boxes of different types of tin food spaghetti hoops he said I've got a hundred people downstairs who are getting angry because we promised them a three course meal we don't have a dessert and you bring me a car full of fruit and i said that's good then he said it's brilliant he said who are you well thank you i said doesn't matter so i didn't tell him and the next year i i came back with an even more because we bought food and he said i did wonder i did wonder this is amazing this is like a miracle let me help you who are you i said doesn't matter and then we started buying more and more food and for 15 years we'd turn up with a van and put it down and the condition with the driver was you must not tell them and they still don't know they don't know, maybe we should tell them now but funnily enough I went back to look and the church had been deconsecrated but I think that's joy that's joy

30:38Would you like to read the recipe first? Or we can read it later Oh, I'll read the recipe first You want to read it now? And you said that you were looking for something in the blue book Blue book You chose potatoes with pancetta Why this recipe? This recipe because this cookbook has always been incredibly special for me when it came out I it was the first cookbook I'd actually ever been excited about and I had an opportunity to talk about it because I happened to sit on the Glenfiddich Awards which was the big cookbook awards of that year and argued with the committee because I'm sure you won't mind me saying there was famously one or two recipes which didn't quite work and they said how can we give best cookbook to to one which isn't technically necessarily 100 and i said very easily because without question it's the most inspirational of of cookbooks and it will get people cooking and it got me cooking more and this is a particularly poignant time because um i'd taken the kids three young kids down to the locked valley we were looking for a new house to rent where we didn't have to be social that whole thing about going on holiday and people driving 30 miles to have dinner where they don't drive somebody in london yes don't even see them in london and i happened to pick up this recipe and uh started using it and kids loved it and the kids i mean the memory of the holiday was great although i i did laugh because come the end of it um we got back to london and i said did you enjoy that holiday and they said yes very much i said what did you enjoy about it and i thought would they talk about the fishing on the river going through or the roman gladiators we saw in the local town and they looked at each other and conferred and then said because we got to eat more ice cream than usual that's all we can do that in Bognor Regis but actually in a way it was a metaphor because the ice cream wouldn't have tasted so good if it hadn't been for the setting and I think it's no setting, no experience is ever the same without the quality of food which accompanies it.

33:09And I cooked this recipe. The kids loved it and insisted on cooking again, even though it had alien ingredients as far as they was concerned. And one of them was on that steadfast jam on bread and nothing else. And this unprepossessing recipe kind of changed them. Well, it's a very comforting recipe as well, isn't it? So we can read it here. So we're talking about potato and pancetta al forno, which serves six, which is appropriate. There were five, and I'd always have double portions. So 100 grams of pancetta, thinly sliced, fingers not to be cut, four tablespoons of olive oil, four garlic cloves peeled and finely sliced 20 sage leaves one kilogram of rosevile or similar yellow waxy potatoes peeled now interestingly i hadn't fully realized how important those potatoes are and it's a really really good a really good lesson 250 mil of double cream parmesan finely grated preheat the oven to 190 degrees see i always go 180 but there you go lightly fry the pancetta stir in the garlic add the sage cook for a minute and remove from the heat i actually always use shallots because i'm not so good not so good with garlic enough to self it's a bit fresh for the river cafe but yeah absolutely slice each potato lengthways into thick slices place in a large bowl, add the pancetta mixture and the cream, season and toss.

35:00Evenly distribute the mixture in a baking dish. Cover with foil and cook in the oven for 40 minutes. Halfway through, remove the foil so that the surface of the potatoes becomes brown. Sprinkle over the parmesan and cook for a further five minutes. Delicious with grilled beef or lamb. I used it with lamb a lot. And it is so critical, that moment of removing the foil and knowing how long to let it go brown. But it was extraordinary. And something as simple as this was the catalyst for the children changing their attitude to food. Do you think that they... I think children did... How old were they at the time?

35:44The kids were 2, 4 and 6. Wow. Little ones. No wonder they want the ice cream. Simpsons is so exciting. I think that if we do measure a city by its restaurants, then I think that London is a better city because of Jeremy King. The fact that we all, whenever we hear a restaurant's going to open, there's that anticipation. What's it going to be like? What's the food going to be like? How will we feel when we're sitting there? Will we go before the theater? Will we go after the theater? And so, again, you've given us something to look forward to in these I would say these quite dark days especially now it's a bit of light and so if we all need light we all need anticipation and excitement we also need comfort if you do need comfort is there a food that you would turn to it is strange and thank you for what you said no and I think the effect we have on the city I always remember with Richard who would quote I can't remember the philosopher that we should leave the cities better than better than we found them whatever we whatever we do i think there is a lot to be said for restaurants because they are the catalyst for so much and we all go to them for different reasons uh i spend a lot of time by my by myself when I when I can and the comfort food which probably I if I if it's at short notice I'm taking some rye bread and putting anchovy a lot of butter and anchovies on on top if I've got a bit more time I want to have some uh mash salad um and I will saute chicken livers and often with a raspberry vinegar, strangely, etc.

37:41And luxuriating that, the combination of the two. That's good. Do you toast the bread? If it's fresh bread, I toast it. If it's one of those old-fashioned rye breads out of the packet. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you. Ruthie's Table 4 was produced by Alex Bell, Robbie Hamilton and Zad Rogers with Andrew Sang and Bella Selini. This has been an Atomize production for iHeart Media.

38:20This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.