I have written before about the battle raging over the future of the Wolseley. I don’t think I had quite registered the enormity of what was at stake until I read that Jeremy King will no longer be allowed to enter the restaurants he co-founded: not just the Wolseley, but Zédel, the more democratic alternative, and Delaunay, where headhunters do business, and Fischers at the top end of Marylebone High Street, more truly Viennese. I’m sure they will carry on in some form, but they will have lost something of their character and family feel, which, as the accompanying article well describes, was owing to Jeremy King and Chris Corbin’s benign stewardship and sense that running a restaurant was about atmosphere and the quality of service, the greeting at the door, at least as much as the food, which they first taught London at the Ivy and Caprice, now sadly a part of folklore and restaurant history.
some of my favourite restaurants – how sad – let’s hope King can open another restaurant