Restaurateur Mr Jeremy King presents the renowned London establishment’s tableware collection, now available on MR PORTER.

It’s tea time at The Wolseley. For Mr Jeremy King, a creature of habit if ever there was one, this means a silver teapot of Afternoon Blend loose leaf with the traditional five o’clock accoutrements (finger sandwiches, tiny exquisite cakes, scones and clotted cream) at his favourite table. This is tucked away to the right as you enter the dining room, but it allows the proprietor a view of the whole tinkling, sparkling operation.

“There’s something about it, isn’t there?” he says, fondly surveying the restaurant he opened with his business partner, Mr Chris Corbin, in 2003. “You want to have somewhere in your life that just hits the spot.”

Messrs Corbin and King specialise in establishments that reliably do just that. The Wolseley, The Delaunay, Brasserie Zédel, Fischer’s and Colbert are timeless London variations on the grand cafés of Paris and Vienna that feel as if they’ve always been there. People sometimes tell him how nice it was to stay at his hotel The Beaumont because their parents used to stay there after WWII. It was a garage back then, and only became a hotel in 2014 – but who is Mr King to shatter their illusions?

At The Wolseley, a former car showroom on the grandest stretch of Piccadilly, the fiction is sustained by the little details as much as the grand, sweeping elegance of the place. Dainty little tea strainers rocking in their cradles. The brittle coolness of the water glass as it hits your lip. The gold-on-jet chinoise tea caddies. Right from the beginning, customers have asked him where they can source such items – and now, he and his wife, Ms Lauren Gurvich King, have supplied the answer, launching a Wolseley homeware line comprising of glassware, candles and, of course, tea. All now available on MR PORTER, incidentally.

Mr King is not one for the hard sell. One of the nice things about his restaurants is that you rarely feel pressured. But he does like to create “the opportunity” for spending.

“The maxim I have is that great design, like great writing, shouldn’t shout for attention, but it should withstand scrutiny,” says Mr King. “You don’t show the reader how clever you are. But if they go back and re-read a passage, the pleasure deepens.”

The same is true of teapots. “Most restaurants these days are opened by investors who are trying to sell the restaurant on before they’ve even opened it,” he says. “A private-equity person will say, ‘Why are you spending £100 on a silver teapot when you could have a china one for £15?’ It’s the sad way of the world. If you go into most restaurants, you’ll notice the glasses have rolled edges because they don’t chip so easily. Our ones are ground glass. They do chip, but they taste better when you’re drinking from them.”

Mr King himself has a distinguished mien: silvery whiskers, kind blue eyes, charcoal Timothy Everest suit and a Turnbull & Asser grey tie with white polka dots. He has the faint air of an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer. Conversation ranges amiably across classical music (he is a fan of the modernists, Messrs John Adams, Philip Glass and Steve Reich), vintage cars (he drives an old Bristol, just now experiencing a little engine trouble) and a few decades of London gossip.

As soon as it opened, The Wolseley became the place that journalists, politicians and actors came to see and be seen. And it’s not much different now. There a few nods to 21st-century eating habits on the menu – a smoothie here, a vegan option there – but it has remained firm. “I’ve recently had awful dishes that have been created for Instagram,” says Mr King. “You order dressed crab and it comes covered in nasturtium petals. It’s created for colour, not taste. I’m much more interested in doing what we do as well as we can. [Late restaurant critic] Adrian Gill [AA Gill] said, ‘Be careful of jumping on to bandwagons. If you’re not careful of your footing, you’ll fall flat on your face.’ There’s an element of classicism that people enjoy.”

Mr King and Mr Corbin met in the 1970s while working at Joe Allen, the favoured post-show haunt of West End casts and crews. They went on to success with Le Caprice (formerly a 1940s glamour haunt), The Ivy (the “It” restaurant of the 1990s) and J Sheekey, before selling up to British businessman Mr Richard Caring and beginning phase two of their career with The Wolseley.

What Mr King likes most in a restaurant is variety. It pleases him to see, on adjacent tables, bankers setting about some fruits de mer, a couple flirting over cocktails, a mother treating a daughter to post-exam afternoon tea and politicians wooing editors over champagne.

“Most restaurateurs home in on the big spenders,” says Mr King. “But actually, a lot of the most interesting people in any restaurant are the least affluent. The old Le Caprice used to give credit to young actors, but they would grow up to be famous film stars. The loyalty was always there.” He takes a particular pride in Brasserie Zédel, the cavernous all-day brasserie just off Piccadilly Circus, where three courses will set you back just £20, but the linen will still be of the best quality. “It can be a treat for a student, or a canteen for someone who works nearby,” he says. He has plans for something similar in Soho – he has his eye on a new site – but first, he will launch his next operation, Soutine, in St John’s Wood, next year.

You can expect the theatre there to play out on a much more subtle level, too. When Mr King won the auction for the Colbert site in Sloane Square (“Richard Caring was convinced he had it”), he resisted calls to create a “Wolseley Lite”. “That would have felt like the imperial West End was deigning to go to Chelsea,” he says.

“What we needed was something that felt truly Chelsea, as if it had been here for the past 80, 90 years.” So he fabricated an entire – and secret – history for what was essentially a concrete shell. He invented the character of Colbert, an old Parisian restaurant manager who had fled a place called Café Claude in Saint-Germain after having an affair with the owner’s daughter. The main room reflected the 1930s, but a second section was lined with 1960s film posters. “We put two different sets of panelling together, imagining that he had knocked through at different stages,” says Mr King. “Perhaps 95 per cent of people don’t really know what they’re walking into, and that’s OK. It’s subliminal. I think, even if only five per cent of people understand what we’ve done, it’s still worth it.”

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