THE JOURNAL
Left: Romano’s at Simpson’s. Photograph by Helen Cathcart. Right: hors d’oeuvres at Romano’s. Photograph by David Loftus
“I never actually have lunch,” Jeremy King says when I ask him what his lunchtime order is. I should have done my research. For a man who doesn’t eat lunch, Jeremy King has perfected the art of serving it. Since his arrival on London’s restaurant scene in 1981 with Le Caprice, King (then partnered with longtime collaborator Chris Corbin) has shaped the way that the city socialises. With venues such as The Wolseley, Brasserie Zédel, The Delaunay and The Ivy, he became known for serving good food in spectacular rooms to a democratic clientele – City boys and Lucian Freud; families celebrating a big birthday and the Beckhams. It’s a recipe he’s returned to with his latest, and potentially most ambitious, venture to date: Simpson’s in The Strand.
It’s a sunny spring afternoon when I arrive outside the restaurant’s entrance, which sits in between The Savoy and Somerset House, a short walk from the river. The Strand can feel like a strange corner of London, teeming with tourists, but also somewhat cut off, five-star hotels rubbing up against shops selling faded magnets of Queen Elizabeth II’s face and Princess Diana memorial postcards. (The latter used to love table nine at Le Caprice, apparently.)
Romano’s. Photograph by Helen Cathcart
The original Simpson’s has a long and interesting history. It opened in 1828 and quickly became renowned as a place to play chess – its silver carving trollies were designed to glide across the carpeted floors to avoid disturbing players locked in focus. It has been demolished, rebuilt and moved across The Strand. Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and PG Wodehouse were regulars, the latter writing that it was a “restful temple of food”. So, too, was Winston Churchill, who allegedly liked to take important meetings over lunch in the Grand Divan downstairs.
“My job isn’t to reinvent this place,” King says of his stewardship. “It’s to protect it. To make sure that when someone sits here today, or in 50 years’ time, they feel the same thing people have always felt – calm, confidence and continuity.”
“My job isn’t to reinvent this place. It’s to protect it”
We make our way up to Romano’s, a “grand café”-style restaurant with high ceilings and cream and sage walls. Waiters in black and white move silently around the room, which is packed on a weekday afternoon. When I ask King about whether he’s interested in courting a business-lunch clientele, his answer is… not really.
“The good news is that we have less of the ‘power ordering’ that we suffered from more in the 1990s,” he says. “Whereby every self-regarding exec felt they had to make endless changes to dishes to mark them out as being special.”
The Grand Divan. Photograph by Helen Cathcart
The term “power lunch” was first coined by Lee Eisenberg, Esquire’s then editor in chief, in a 1979 story. Eisenberg observed the hierarchies at play during lunchtime at New York’s Four Seasons restaurant, on the ground floor of Manhattan’s Seagram Building. “Understand that it isn’t the head of the company who lunches in the Bar Room,” he wrote. “More likely, it is the head thinker of a shop. Editors, creative directors, designers, wine aficionados – these are the lords and ladies who lunch.”
It might no longer be the heyday of business expenses and client entertaining. Company-shaping decisions now mostly take place in meeting rooms with called-in catering and big screens that can show lots of graphs and performance metrics. But Simpson’s is still a great place to put on a suit and tie, order a martini and a steak and eavesdrop on fellow diners as they discuss Q1 performances and bonus woes. Somewhere to ignore your phone and feel like you’re in the kind of London that used to be built on handshakes and bottles of Le Montrachet.
I order another martini and strain my ear to catch a bit more gossip.