Jeremy King, Restaurateur

0:00Hello and welcome to another episode of the Gentleman's Journal podcast. I'm Joe Bulmore. I'm the editor of Gentleman's Journal and our guest on today's episode is Jeremy King, the restauranteur behind The Park, where we're sitting today, but also behind Simpsons on the Strand and Arlington, some of the most beloved restaurants in London at the moment. And we're going to talk to Jeremy all about his long career in restaurants and also the opening in a matter of days of Simpsons on the Strand.

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1:13So go to Gentleman's Journal.com and use POD20, that's P-O-D-20, for 20 % off the usual price of a Clubhouse membership. Jeremy, thank you for joining us on the Gentleman's Journal podcast. Great pleasure. We're here in the private dining room. Is that the best way to describe it? Yeah. At the park, which is a beautiful space, and which you've just revealed has a sort of map of Central Park, the park, above us on the ceiling.

1:42Jeremy King:Bird's Eye View. Bird's Eye View. So tell me about this place that we're sitting in. It's obviously on Hyde Park, but it's got a distinctly kind of mid-century American feel. How did it all come about? it started during the period that um after i'd left the what was then corbin and king was the hospitality group and i was looking for new sites not not aggressively as such i was just keeping my eyes out and the agent said do you want to have a look at part modern you know on the corner of queensway and bayswater rose said no and uh they said oh no come on go go along and i always do because i remember same agent saying asking the same question about what became brasseries adele right yeah and i think it's fundamental to me is that i get inspired by buildings and so i walked i walked in here and although there were transfers on the windows that you could feel in the restaurant this sense of light and i said i'm i'm interested and one of the reasons i was interested is because whilst chris and i had specialized in what might one might call early 20th century grand cafe brasserie type operations i've always dreamt of doing something more contemporary and i thought well this is the opportunity and as is my want i'll stand or sit in in the site or look at it and i was trying to think well this is it's fine we can we can do a grand cafe uh for for our times but what's the food you can't do schnitzel and necessarily although in fact we do do a chicken schnitzel the let me think about the name and then the name came to me straight away which has to be called The Park, as it sat at the entrance to Hyde Park.

3:50Jeremy King:And then it followed quite quickly. I thought, this feels like New York. This doesn't feel like London. This feels as though it's on actually looking over Central Park, and hence the seat, this map which you referred to. And so I thought, what would my friends in New York do if they had this sort of place? And soon I was going into the realms of that big movement in New York when Californian, Italian-inspired cuisine was brought to New York. There were quite a lot of exemplars of it, from Jonathan Waxman being a good one indeed, Michael McCarty and so on. and so it went from there so although it wasn't entirely contemporary and and my chronology was going backwards towards the 50s it felt that way and i've always loved um so loved the four seasons in the seagram building which is of course still there in in its own form with the major food group um but i i loved that was always my favorite building and one of the reasons it was because the restaurant was created in harmony with the building yeah and although misandero was a bit disdainful about designing interiors of restaurants he philip johnson came along and of course created for me the absolutely supply sublime interior and so it moved on from there so there we had americ new york italian american cuisine the walls um 50s corbusier prints all about um the right angle there's the from a poem about the right angle uh alex cats who of course was very very big post-war in in new york and suddenly i knew what it was going i was going to look like okay wow it's amazing the different sort of tendrils you pull on very much yeah and for me that's part of the fun of it i think i was always a frustrated architect monke but the i knew i would never be a great architect but one of the beauties of being in the restaurant business is that the things which I really was interested in, apart from people and food, of course, was very much about architecture, history, music, art.

6:27Jeremy King:And I am often heard to say that actually the fun I get out of restaurants is when they're a catalyst for people to be creative and do things, whether that's socially emotionally even romantically and that all to my mind all the major artistic movements whether in music painting literature even revolution and politics have all emanated from grand cafes right and this is this is where it all starts brilliant okay so who knows what works of art could be made upstairs in the park in the next decade who knows what's i mean i've seen over the years it's always been the fun of a might be um a creative team for musicals or whatever it might be seeing those first meetings of uh authors with publishers and agents and yeah and so it goes on and that that for me is the fun because restauraturing if it's purely i say to the stuff if it's purely about creating a room putting out a menu sitting people down taking an order cooking some food delivering clearing the plates it gets very it's actually fairly boring as a profession if you know who the people are what they're eating why they're together who they know in the room the architecture of the place you're in that how food is grown or grown or raised how Well, I mean, look at wine.

8:01Jeremy King:I know a lot about wine, but even if I took a year off and studied wine, I'd really still have a long way to go. And so what people don't realize, because particularly in this country for a long time, we've associated restaurants with being server and service, is that it's actually far more interesting than the majority of occupations. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. At the start, you mentioned Zadel. And when we first met on this podcast in 2020, we were sitting above one of your other restaurants, The Woolsey, in a whirring, huge office. It was actually, I think, one of the hottest days of the summer.

8:43And I knew it was in a suit and tie, trying to mimic your amazing attire. And it was very hot and sweaty, I remember. But it was a very different time for us to meet then, not just because we were in the middle of a global pandemic, which was tough for everyone, but especially hospitality, but also because just two years later, all of those properties essentially were taken away from you. Yeah.

9:03Jeremy King:Although actually, I mean, I'm not too sensitive about it. I would possibly adjust that and say I chose to relinquish them. Right. And the reason, I mean, it was a complicated story because I was fighting with my shareholders and they had the trump card in terms of controls although i could control the destiny of the restaurants and i refused to go to saudi arabia with the with the wolsey as it happens um i just felt it was inappropriate they they had a term loan which technically was out of out of date okay that was through no fault of my own so we were forced into this position where we had to bid against each other for the control of the company and i had i had support from new york and if they'd had their way we would have continued bidding although i gather that minor international with the partners would have gone a lot higher right i wish i wish i had gone that because that would have been beneficial but i felt i had to pull out and i said to my new investors i said that i we have to pull out because if we pay any more i will spend the rest of my life paying you off yeah and i won't have control of the business and so that was no longer of interest so it was it was a self-inflicted death deprivation but actually is one of the best things i ever did yeah did it always feel like that were there moments when it was particularly painful or poignant it was poignant uh my wife lauren was flying to la the day before the day of um the auction the auction was meant to happen at 9 a.m in the morning and eventually happened 2 a.m the following morning wow and i said you know i think i think we might lose it and maybe it's not such a bad thing and of course emotionally it might it might be difficult but i think a very telling moment was about i don't know two months later we were driving up piccadilly and i and drove past the wolsey and i didn't realize she was looking at me and she said you didn't look i didn't know i never do i move on i always move on and it's actually because otherwise and and and it's a life philosophy for me is i tend never to get upset about something which i'm going to forget and if and it might be a week or a month or a year but i'm going to forget about it eventually um unless it's a mistake i've made which affects other people or it's a health issue or something so i move on and of course the feeling i had was of emancipation and yeah um and slow i comparatively slowly i built back and one of the reasons it's slower than anticipated is because the major project now is simpsons and yeah and uh that instead of taking maybe maximum two years it's taking the best part of four years to bring to fruition right But at least we've got there.

12:29You've got there. You've got there. You're about to get there even more. And we'll get to Simpsons in a moment. I wonder, I don't want to say something as trite as everything happens for a reason or something like that. But in a way, that might be the best thing that could have ever happened.

12:44Jeremy King:Totally. And I'm enjoying myself immensely. And I have some very, very good investors. and nobody nobody as has happened before because i was with private equity which was ghastly beyond ghastly and um and one of the problems i think steve jobs always said that the great tragedy about big business and small entrepreneurs is that and he was talking about apple he said we see somebody who's who's innovative and breakthrough wonderful people with you oh we've got to get involved with them we've got to have it have a share in them or even buy them because they're so brilliant and then as soon as as soon as we acquire them we start telling them how to do it which is negates the whole reason for getting involved with them because they're doing it in in a different in a different way yeah um unfortunately in many ways not not entirely but in many ways restaurateuring defies the ability to make large groups because the best restaurateuring is in that word, which is a restaurateur rather than a restaurant owner.

14:00Jeremy King:Okay. And what we see nowadays is there's far too many restaurant owners compared with restaurateurs. And what I mean by that is a restaurant owner does it from the boardroom and a restaurateur does it from the floor. and you see the difference normally yeah absolutely is there a sort of a natural size of a restaurant collective or groups that you think is is is too big at what point does it flip and become unwieldy i i'm not sure uh is is one of those coefficients which is difficult to define and some people are doing multiple restaurants extremely well i mean you think of um von gericht and um or nobu and so on majority of those are very very good restaurants and they've managed managed to do it as a particular style of cuisine maybe and i'm often surprised and i think we'll have pushed it too far but um without being controversial and naming some of these groups which are amazing when there were three or four uh start start to go through problems which ones we can all think of some i think well i think we could we could all think one or two of making incursions into london and um and i'm not sure that's a good idea you look at something like keith mcnally who's had his ups and downs but that's a small group of restaurants and uh i think because the rest return dominates as opposed to the shareholder yeah um it it can actually work but you look at it was always the big dilemma with soho house is that nick jones managed to keep it personal make it feel as though it was still him you might not see him but you you felt it and i don't know when it got too big yeah yeah before my time definitely that that that is a group which is constantly harking back to yeah some imagined kind of 90s heyday which i'm sure was very fun it was unbelievable and extraordinary and incredibly accomplished yeah but then hard to keep that going well and also your monastery considerations are can often be the foe of restaurants.

16:24Yeah, certainly. So you will soon be at three restaurants again. I suppose the question to ask is, you didn't have to do any. At that point, you probably could have sailed off into the sunset almost literally if you'd have wanted to.

16:37Jeremy King:I suppose so, but I didn't really have any money. Well, that's a problem. That's one of the problems about a restaurant touring is that often the richer people are those who successfully do the chains. I suppose I could have, but I didn't want to. I've seen too many people go into atrophy because they retire too soon, and I really enjoyed it. although i i i suppose put it in perspective um in terms of three restaurants the uh simpsons is actually itself got two restaurants and a big private room and two two bars so it's a there's a fairly big one yeah and i'm often asked are you going to do any more i said i don't know um because i'll say no and then something will come along i go oh i can't resist and i'd love to another hotel.

17:40Jeremy King:The hotel is in many ways the supreme achievement of hospitality. Absolutely, it is. It's 24 hours a day. Yeah, and your hotel was the Beaumont. The Beaumont, yeah. Which feels like it could sit above this place in a way. In many ways, and there's certain similarities. And that was a great shame. That was in many ways the only one which really upset me because I became a victim of a fight between um at the time the ceo at grosvenor who were the ultimate landlords and the private equity people i was with and i got caught in the middle and um that was the one which really made made me sad and because it was unnecessary and for me it was um it was incredibly gratifying doing it yeah sadly it's changed almost completely it has sadly when i went there in in its pomp it was remarkable and i didn't realize how many years later that it was a multi-story car park before it was that it feels like it's one of those things that had been there since the 1920s and that that was the wonderful thing about it and i i i have this predilection for if i've got a building which doesn't immediately talk to such as the wolsey um which although it'd been built built as a car showroom became a bank and then became a restaurant i like inventing stories because it gives a sense of purpose because definition in anything we do is so crucial.

19:11Jeremy King:And so in restaurant terms, for instance, when we opened Sheikis, I told my colleagues and Chris, we're only going to do fish. And Tim Hughes, who was the head chef there, I said, only fish. most people were saying this is ridiculous we can't just have a fish restaurant and customers were saying it and and my colleagues i said no fish restaurants have existed for a long time and tim said what sort of fish and i said well i don't want grilled mahi mahi with a mango salsa i want a traditional and he very cleverly said just british coastal waters i said yes so immediately there's definition and that was one of the best menus i've ever done because it was it was so defined because if you look at restaurants nowadays a lot of them it's sort of homogenized yeah vague european modern yes and um i remember my private equity partners when we opened fishers which is a quintessentially viennese restaurant there was and they would say and because their friends have said oh you you can't hope to be successful in malibu unless you've got a caesar's salad and a hamburger i said no absolutely not now it's harder there's much yeah the short term is easier if you if you go for the market if you stick sushi on you stick all these things on but the the customers are much more savvy than restaurateurs believe and if they feel that you don't know what you're meant to be doing yourself and therefore they don't know either then you you lose the support and a word which i often use in restaurants and i think in life generally is is authority and authority is when people believe in you and where you might be a clothes designer and someone said well that's a bit different but i trust them because they they deserve the trust i I will invest in that particular clothing.

21:22Jeremy King:And it can be in any number of ways. And you have the authority. The authority of which Citroën, the cars that they started manufacturing in the 60s, were completely different. Beautiful. And they had the authority and people bought into it. if we go out on the on the road today it's very difficult yeah to just to differentiate between the different cars because everybody's copying each other and in restaurants people copy each other and nobody's allowed it's it's one of my big laments about life at the moment is that intuition and instinct would be marginalized everything has to be proof of concept statistically like um what was that brad pitt from moneyball right yeah everything can be justified through statistics and it can but it strips the fun out of life definitely and most of the best things i've ever done have been when i've used my instinct or intuition or acted um being suspicious about things and thought no this is a person is a badden and everybody said no you're wrong they're wrong they're fantastic and then they turn out to be right compulsive thieves or whatever it might be i i i do wish we use more intuition and then and and i think as a restaurateur you open rest best restaurants um are the ones when restaurateurs say i'm going to do what i a restaurant that i would like to attend and hopefully enough other people will do it yeah that's a pretty good metric I remember Graydon Carter actually talking about, he was talking about magazines, but he was referring to his restaurants and that he's had restaurants which have failed and restaurants which have been incredibly successful.

23:13And he said the difference is the ones that were successful had a point, which is such an obvious thing to say, but it comes back to your definition idea. They had a reason.

23:21Jeremy King:Yeah, and I hadn't heard him say that, but I think they had a point is really good. Yeah, yeah. And it's very easy to sort of agglomerate four or five other successful things together, and it looked good on paper, but it actually had no real reason or kind of idea behind it. Interesting, when you talk about sort of people, do you think you have a very finely tuned radar for temperament and sensibility? And can you spot a rogue in the grass, so to speak? uh it happened once when in particular when i caught somebody at the ivy stealing a loaf of bread okay and i said to mitchell who's the general manager they've got to go he said but i know they stole but it was a loaf of bread and you've seen things like that and you've not sang And I said, it was the way they stole.

24:18Jeremy King:And this guy, he was 40 years old, very popular, cried and said, I've never stolen a thing in my life, et cetera. And I insisted he went. And it was the closest I ever had to a staff dissent. And Mitchell, who's a wonderful general manager, was angry with me. And he said, you can't do it for a loaf of bread. I said, I know, but I'm not acting out les miserables. You know, it's not Travert and all that. He's a thief. And they were very disgruntled for about three weeks until the police came looking for this guy. And he was the head of a credit card fraud ring. Wow. And he was using all our customer credit cards to defraud.

25:03Jeremy King:And the police started saying, did he bring in clothing from his brother-in-law's shop? And they're going, yes. They said, yeah, it was all stolen goods. It was all. And so, and they went, okay. And I go back to that instinct and intuition is that often if we are hiring somebody and ultimately I'm going to sign off, they will come in for their first interview and I'll try and get in and say, hello. And it might be for two minutes or one minute or two minutes. And I get a feeling from it. And as it happens, and you have to believe in yourself, it tends to work. So people rather like that. If I feel something's wrong, and I think it's a good restaurateur walks into a restaurant, we know whether it's going well or not just by instinct or intuition.

26:01In the first five seconds.

26:02Jeremy King:Yeah. And I mean, Adrian Gill used to talk about the hum of a successful restaurant. You can feel when a restaurant's really working as opposed to just full. Full is not enough. It's full and happy is important. Very, very interesting. Are there questions you ask potential interviewees when you pop your head in? Are there certain things you throw them to see how they react, perhaps? No, not even. Occasionally, if I'm doing a full interview, it might be often I'll say, oh, hello, you're Josh. you know whatever it might might be and now is how they respond yeah and there's a lot of these tricks i believe that the best uh and i find it very hard to persuade managers but the best interview for a waiter you can spend an hour talking about theory and so on is give them three plates and ask them to pick it up because the way they pick up three plates yeah tells you whether they've done that job for a while or not.

27:03Jeremy King:And I've known people who claim their silver service on the Queen Elizabeth and can't even pick up three plates. In fact, what was his name? Anton Mosserman. One of his major tests for a chef was giving them a large pot and asking them to take it to the wash-up. And he said, I can tell by the way they carry the pot and move across the room whether they're actually good in the kitchen. Hello, and just a quick reminder about the Gentleman's Journal Clubhouse. It's our membership package which unlocks a whole host of benefits across the world of Gentleman's Journal, including two magazine issues per year, full access to all our pay-award content, membership invites to exclusive events, and a weekly newsletter direct to your inbox.

27:48Enter pod20 at thegentlemansjournal.com to get 20 % off the usual price for a Clubhouse membership. wow how's your plate game are you good at my plate game my plate game actually um

28:03Jeremy King:we were talking about zadel i once i i think i got i got credibility because we had a group in zadel which was actually my entire accounts team etc somebody was leaving and i went to say hello and they hadn't been cleared ah and i was looking so i thought hard clear there was eight of them and so i started clearing and then the and then the waiters in horror and horror came running over i said nope too late and four in each arm and then they started to and then i said no no it's okay and then they're watching and and i it was so clear that they were saying go on then yeah you're going to drop them and i cleared eight wow and one one because you can do it if you if you know how to do it good and they're like okay and it's but in a way in essence that's the point is that if the staff believe that you're equal to them there is no superiority and one of the most important things for me in life is egalitarianism and we're all appointed there's a hierarchy and we're appointed but we're all the same people we're all capable of being ceos and so on so forth and in fact it was back in delaney days i remember a maitre d 'hôtel it came and and joined us and it come from quite a big a big group and with a high profile personality at the at the head of it and and three weeks in he said you know been with it been with you three weeks and previously i previous place i was three years a you know my name and b i've talked to you more times in three weeks than i talked to your equivalent in three years and i think people care about that of course and again it goes back to restaurant owners because when you're in the boardroom you can make decisions which affect people um because you don't have to look them in the eye you don't have to work with them you don't have to experience the ramifications you purely think that'll save us five percent that'll save us ten percent my belief is that often when you feel you're saving it's actually it actually costs it costs you and um there are so many hidden benefits which are not seen on the balance sheet but you've felt when the restaurant goes into perpetuity will you be in most of your restaurants every day if you can yeah yeah i mean i of course i have i work with robert holland who joined joined me at ivy in 19 end of 1990 beginning 91 and we always uh make sure one of us is in the restaurants it's going to be harder with simpsons but there are ways of doing it well what's amazing is that i have so when i look back the first restaurant i opened with chris was in 81 and i was 27 i probably got 20 people who are much more qualified and experienced than i was then to open restaurants now it's a much harder business but one of the most gratifying things when thinking of Simpsons and um was that the Savoy very kindless lent us a private room to bring in the all the management and there's there's about 25 25 people in management and I went to join them to to talk to them and I walked through the door and it couldn't see the room immediately walked through the door just a few people at the table turned around and realized how many people there were and the 85 of them had worked before uh i'd worked with before and knew their name and they're all so capable so and it is one of the great moments for me and i because at that point i was slightly fretting because the estimated time it opened that started to open the doors do trial soft openings was the uh same week as my daughter was getting married in in new york and i suddenly thought it's absolutely fine they don't need me they don't need me wow um they can get this restaurant open really well yes it's great if i'm there because i'll know a lot of the customers and so on and so forth but i'm not needed and it was one of the great feelings okay what a relief the process with Simpsons would have been different I suppose to other restaurants you've done before because whereas as you say you often create things on a feeling or how a building looks and feels with a kind of novelistic backstory, with this there is a huge amount of backstory already, it's a very historic site, what's the kind of potted history if you can go back that far of Simpsons and the Strand well Simpsons is interesting because like a lot of london's institutions it started off as a coffee house and coffee houses were the great meeting places loy's of london was a coffee house um the garrick club was a coffee house all these places and simpsons is a coffee house wasn't originally called simpsons uh opened in 1828 so we're coming up to 200 years on roughly on that on that site and then was taken over by a mr simpson i think 1850 and it became known as the home of chess really it's very very strong chess association and chess in the 19th century was massive i mean for a lot of people it was the equivalent of premier league football right wow and people would play games and runners would go off with the results because people would bet and all sorts of things and indeed the bigger games because they started having world championships at simpsons the the question i get asked all the time as indeed robert every service of people are you opening simpsons yes when's it opening are you keeping the trolleys and the trolleys were roast beef and and people don't realize that that originated because chess players didn't want to be interrupted but the game could go on for quite a while if it wasn't if it wasn't a timed game and so they'd bring the trolleys around to serve beef to the players um and so they could carry on playing but it stayed with it and and the the trolleys and the carvers are very symbolic of the whole place and that thing whereby you tip your carver and so on and so forth which will be interesting in a non-cash era yeah i pulled that off and would you encourage that for people to tip the carver okay i think that it's by way of a digression the i think successful restaurants feel like clubs right I remember when the Ivy had been taken over and it was announced by, this is after our time, it was announced it was going to be a club.

35:30Jeremy King:Some wag said, the Ivy's opening a club? I always thought it was a club. Yeah. And that's the best way with restaurants. And indeed, Margot, my daughter, has got a bar, quasi restaurant, and will do more. operates in new york and people think that's a club but it actually isn't but it it's um it's it's just a narrow cast of who you want in there and that's one that's one of the big things for me about publicity and so on is actually historically i've always narrow casted rather than broadcasted just so that the people feel comfortable so with simpsons with the with the the carvers people in the know will know that you give something to the carver and we'll facilitate that if you want to give some cash and your guests i think what what is that restaurants for me are quasi clubs so for instance i'll get asked why why don't we put up a sign to show where the restrooms are to use of it and my reaction is always because you only ever ask once right and if you're a tourist place you might need to put the sign up because people are constantly asking but if it's this the sort of restaurant i like you ask once and what it means is the next time you're there and you want to go to the loo you get up and you walk with a confidence and a sense of belonging to the loo and when your guest says where is the loo you can just say oh let's go past the clock or whatever it is and it's the first step and the next the steps of membership of a restaurant as club or feeling a club of course is when you walk through the door if they know your name yeah if you if you order some food and say um would you like some why yeah i have a little white wine oh would you like the big ball de piné and and it's a sense of belonging and i mean the ultimate is that they know your name where and what sort of experience you like even you get an account so you can get in a perfect world you can get up and walk out which is is how it is in the clubs and i'm very i'm very keen on all that sort of thing happening with Simpsons the it's got going back to your question about the history it doesn't need it doesn't need to to have that because I don't have to invent it I the Beaumont which we're talking about I invented a very very detailed history and people took it so seriously I'd have people coming in and say oh my parents or my grandparents used to use this as a hotel and I was thinking well they must have slept in their car because it was a garage but anyway if they if people believe it that's that's brilliant and simpsons eventually was taken down it was owned by the savoy and they built this large building just just to the east just to the left effectively of the savoy in 1904 yeah and it was one of the rare purpose-built restaurants i mean a certain amount was there and the first floor of simpsons we've got the grand divan which is the famous restaurant with the beef trolleys etc on the ground floor but on the first floor we have a bigger restaurant and that's going to be called romano's and romano's was a restaurant opened on the strand and late 19th century and it eclipsed originally eclipsed simpsons i was opened by a russian who'd adopted an italian name as in romano who had a who had a great passion for franco anglo cuisine and of course that was the times of escoffier and ritz and and so on so that was very common in in britain and that was bombed in 1942 in fact you can see the building because it's now the Stanley Gibbons building there, but it was bombed out.

39:50Jeremy King:And so I'm celebrating that. And we're also celebrating the chess element. A lot of the chess grandmasters around the world consider it to be the home of chess. They've had world championships there and so on. And we'll continue that. If you walk in, you'll find murals depicting chess games, but painted in the style of duchamp who was because he as a painter he was obsessed with chess as well and there will be and a good a good balance because simpsons on on gender because simpsons was always very male and had its own separate ladies dining room ladies restaurant which made me very uncomfortable there was all these stories of the above the door to the grand divan was a um a clock which was stopped at one o 'clock and they would always the old misogynist would say yes it stopped the first time a woman walked over the threshold you know and i was very uncomfortable about this and the notion of a ladies restaurant until i spoke to the archivist at savoy said oh no no no don't don't misunderstand the women didn't want to be anywhere near the men and i suppose that because of the men's behavior she said yes i mean you're in a beautiful crinoline dress or something you don't want to be in a room full of cigar smoke yeah with smelly men drinking and and so and shouting at each other we wanted more and i thought i feel better about that and i might well do ladies evenings okay in the private room but it's it is a remark where it's 21 and a half thousand square feet um which is almost twice as big as zadel um 21 and a half 21 and a half thousand square feet that's like an entire club members club or something yeah it's it's it's massive it one of the benefits although slightly costly is that almost half of it is back of house normally in in london for instance you're lucky if you get 40 percent back of house um normally it's around 30 percent in new york it's often 20 percent yeah which means it's not a great environment for the staff and in this day and age you have to produce a better um better working conditions all around uh i adore it i and and i have done for a long time tried to buy it in 2000 oh wow just at the time left the ivy capri chic is and it was reported in the paper and tried again in 2008 tried again 2015 and so on eventually 2022 the offer was accepted yeah um it's uh it is the last grand dame restaurant in london yeah yeah absolutely and it's in a it's in an interesting part of town isn't it yeah the strand is is really fascinating because it's right in the middle of something everything it's right near the river it's got huge heritage buildings like simpsons and the savoy and yet it's often seen to people who live in london as kind of a thoroughfare between i guess i don't know what you're aldwych to the to the city and the city and then you've got soho or the south bank and it's not somewhere i ever really go no and yet it is the fulcrum yeah of it should be one of the great high streets absolutely and there's been attempts to change it the i used to sit on the north bank board because of course i had uh delaney there and there was a an attempt i don't think it's ever really stuck to um call it midtown uh interesting to ape new york because the midtown is very legitimate new york never really caught hold in london however things have changed the um is less of a thoroughfare and yet pretty close to the city um it went into demise to a degree also because of the fleet street being um migrating however with 180 strand yeah and mark roller um doing a great job there and you've soho house and all sorts of things and nick jones's new hotel and corner store and so on making a big difference so it's got all the theaters already um that's a 180 strand somerset house is undergoing quite a revolution and you have in one of the most beautiful um period areas where georgian and uh deco architecture combined is in um the adelphi amazing building and conde nasta have just moved into the Adelphi.

44:54Jeremy King:So suddenly it's transformed. That really does feel like a New York building. In fact, is there still Smith and Walensky's? Yes, they're still there. Very, very American expense account dining. Well, no, I think it's long-due Renaissance, the Strand. Is it estate-owned or is it owned by different people, the actual land? It's quite a variety. That makes it harder, doesn't it? It does. I mean, you put your finger immediately on one of the reasons where certain areas work, and the Howard Warden estate around Malibu, and it makes a big difference. The rugby estate around Lamb's Conduit Street in Hoban, Cadogan, of course, to a degree Grosvenor.

45:32Jeremy King:I think they went through a very difficult period where they became very commercial, but I think they're now caring more and more about the environment and who's there. Because the trouble is that if you just take the highest rents, you end up again with homogenization or inappropriate buildings, but most of those landlords are realizing that by curating their estate, they can enhance it. Yeah, yeah. I think Cadogan, I may be wrong with this rule, they have a sort of soft rule that you can't have more than two sites of it. So if you've got it, no chain can really go there. I think they're being very, very mindful of every single thing that goes in.

46:12Absolutely. Yeah, as they should.

46:14Jeremy King:They really are trying to curate it. there's uh um hugh seaborne is is the ceo of it and under the under the the the new earl um he's he's really gets it he really understands it yeah well we're very excited for the strand resurgence led by simpsons so what should what should we order on day one what's the sort of classic thing you kind of got to go for the roast beef if you're not but if you're if you're vegetarian and you won't be precluded. But you might be going for Maligatoni soup or even Russian salad. Who's seen Russian salad? What is a Russian salad? Russian is basically diced carrots and potatoes and so on.

46:59Jeremy King:In Russian dressing? You'll even find, for instance, mutton. Wow. You don't see a lot of mutton in there. So one or two people are starting to use it. Yeah. and the trolleys will develop as time goes on um and if you go there if you're carnivore go for breakfast the one of the great one of the great um challenges amongst rugby players apparently i mean it's different days before they play a big match they'd go to simpsons to to get the 10 deadly sins which is what it was called which is basically a full english breakfast but enhanced with kidneys and chops and so on so will you offer the 10 deadly sins yeah we'll do the 10 deadly i didn't think there was 10 since i thought it was just seven i think there is but okay you've got three more by the time you add on fried bread yeah it starts to get sinful and how much should we tip the what's the suggested tip for myself it's a good question and i was talking to somebody i was a bit shocked because they said well it used to be a fiver when it was really growing sort of 10-15 years ago or more.

48:12Jeremy King:And we haven't decided. We're just watching carefully. I'd rather not be intimidating with it because there's already a cost. Right. But you've got to go with some cash. Unless you buy some cash from us. Oh, very good. Yeah. Very good. It's quite a move, actually, if you're at the table and you know, and so you just pass a little note. Yeah. It's quite slick. It's, again, it's been a member of the club. Yeah. And there's a lot of things which people haven't seen for a long time. You'll find on the menu you can get a carafe of hock. Okay. And there's a fairly extensive German wine list. Hock, that's sort of 9 %?

49:00Jeremy King:Is it 8 %? 8 % normally, yeah. And slightly off dry or even sweet. Yeah, and the Mosells, the Riesling, the Cabinets, etc. are much drier. And they're actually some wonderful wines, which are out of… Yes. And as often, if I go back, I'm old enough now, is that my early days of being aware of people eating is that you would have Liebfram, Blue Nun, Matias Rose, and all those sort of things, and Black Forest Gato, and Porn Cocktail. A lot of which people are now realizing, I remember once saying to a pastry chef, I want to do Black Forest Gata. I'm not doing that. That's, you know, I said, there's a reason why it became popular because if it's done properly, it's really good.

49:50Jeremy King:It's the same with a prawn cocktail or whatever. So I quite like bringing back some of the older. And there will be a differentiation because the first floor restaurant will be cheaper than the ground floor restaurant. in the way that Zadel was cheaper than Wolsey. Yeah, amazing. So what's next then? If you stumbled upon a site this afternoon, you walked out and saw a beautiful site, and it took your imagination, would you be up for doing something else? Yeah, absolutely. Is there something already in the works then? No, I mean, I've looked at things, but one or two things which I really wanted.

50:27Jeremy King:One, I let go because the timing was so wrong. I just keep my eyes open for it. I've got wonderful people who deserve to have effectively their own restaurants. And it takes me back to myself working for Joe Allen in 79 to 81. And his model was that whilst it was the eponymous Joe Allen as a chain, he started opening other restaurants. for instance he had um i can't remember his name jack i think it was who was working in new york but was french wanted to go back to paris he said open a joe allen in paris and then richard polo who i worked with originally went to la with joe allen which wasn't particularly successful but then came over to london um i one of the pleasures i get is helping people develop their career and And whilst I still have the energy and the ability to walk around the room, I'll continue to do it.

51:32Okay, very good. The last question I want to ask you then is a slightly selfish one, I suppose, because you've written an amazing book which has got incredible reviews and is a thing of beauty in itself. As a writer, it sort of almost cheeses me off that you've managed to come out with such a flawless piece of work. What was that process like for you writing that book? both the actual physical pain of writing, which can sometimes be heavy lifting, but also delving so much into the past and into probably sometimes some difficult areas as much as lovely ones.

52:03Jeremy King:Well, thank you for the commendation. It was difficult for a variety of reasons. One is for me to even consider doing it was very hard. And Ed Victor, who is no longer with us as an agent, and subsequently Caroline Michel, who was my agent and very good friend, were persuading me to do it. And I said, the trouble is, is that a restaurateur memoir is probably the most boring genre of book you can find. I've got a whole library of restaurateurs, and they really, you know, names like Leone, who opened Quo Vadis, his title was I Shall Die on the Carpet. Right. And they're all sort of full of, there was a guy who had a place in Piccadilly and who would say it was my honor to serve the Begumar Gakan.

53:01I mean, it gets boring.