DINE LIKE A KING

Britain’s greatest restaurateur Jeremy King he of The Ivy and Le Caprice fame is back with three new eateries, as he tells Richard Godwin how to create the perfect dining vibe

- Richard Godwin

I was on my way to meet the restaurateur Jeremy King at his latest venue, The Park a modern American diner on the north edge of Hyde Park. What had been a refreshing drizzle became a full-on downpour and I was a damp, sweaty mess. Then the windows of The Park came into view: an amber glow of civilisation, the ideal antidote to a crap London summer.

Inside, I was shown to a reassuringly expensive-feeling booth where I ordered a Cobb salad from a menu exclusively composed of things I wanted to eat: shrimp cocktail, chicken milanese, lobster rolls, pistachio tiramisu. It was delightful.

Everything was delightful, in fact. The weight of the cutlery, the tang of the tomato, the Le Corbusier lithographs on the walls – and the sight of King himself, ghosting into view in a dark grey suit with a dark blue paisley tie.

King inspires rare devotion for a restaurateur: Lucian Freud painted him; Harold Pinter based a character on him; Paul Smith personally designed his cufflinks. The Ivy, J Sheekey, The Wolseley, The Delaunay, Brasserie Zedel, Colbert were all instant institutions, at the centre of London social life. Dating back to Le Caprice in 1981, his restaurants are as close to perfect as restaurants can be.

King’s Who’s Who entry lists “solitude” among his hobbies. “I’m actually very shy and introverted. I’ve had to learn not to be,” he tells me, adding he only chose a career in hospitality on the roll of a dice in 1975, turning down a place at Cambridge to read economics. “I regret that every week, pretty much,” he smiles.

But it’s fair to say that no one else does. And now, at 70, King is gambling again with three new restaurants. In March, he opened Arlington on the site of the old Caprice. Next year, we will see what he has done with the venerable Simpsons in the Strand. And now we have The Park, already described by one critic as “heaven’s own refectory”.