Several months after being ousted from the company behind the Wolseley, restaurateur Jeremy King recalls driving down Piccadilly past the gold-flecked arches of the London eatery for the first time.
To his wife Lauren Gurvich’s surprise, King did not even glance at the building next to the Ritz he had reinvented from a former car showroom into one of London’s most famous restaurants — before he lost control following a bitter boardroom battle early last year.
“I said: ‘No, [I did not look] because I’ve moved on, I have to move on’,” insisted King, adding: “There’s no room for recrimination or any of those things in life.”
The first concrete sign of 69-year-old King moving on dropped into the email inboxes of his most loyal customers on Monday morning last week. He announced plans to launch The Park, a 215-capacity restaurant serving modern European cuisine just across the road from the redesigned entrance to plush Kensington Gardens, in April next year.
King also plans to return to London’s West End next year with the launch of two further restaurants in the upmarket district, which has been home to most of his restaurants. He has viewed the Grade II-listed former NatWest bank on Piccadilly — just across the road from the Wolseley — according to three people familiar with the matter. King did not disclose the West End location but said the plans are at an “advanced” stage.
“It’s like a rebirth,” added King, remarking on his longest exile from London’s exclusive dining scene since he stopped running Caprice Holdings, the company behind the Ivy restaurant, in 2000. “I think it was [French author] André Gide who said every man should have three careers . . . I actually feel like I’m having three careers within hospitality, and I’m a different person now.”
Few restaurateurs have had a greater influence over the high-end London dining scene than King. His first venture Le Caprice was a favoured haunt of Princess Diana throughout the 1980s; then he revitalised the Ivy after buying it in 1990, making it synonymous with glamorous snaps of A-listers leaving its stained-glass entrance; and finally he launched nine restaurants under the Corbin & King umbrella starting with the Wolseley in 2003.
“If a standard bearer of your industry goes down, it makes you feel quite nervous about what it says about the industry in general,” said Will Beckett, chief executive of steak restaurant Hawksmoor. “Jeremy’s strength, where he may be stronger than anyone else, is creating wonderful, buzzy, big restaurants that people just want to spend time with.”
But despite his acumen for hospitality, King has often had a tricky relationship with financial backers.
He is now tapping investors for close to £7mn of funding for The Park. The majority of the investment will be channelled through an Enterprise Investment Scheme, which offers tax relief to UK investors and limits individual shareholdings to no more than 30 per cent.
Among those in discussions with King about investing are New York-based Knighthead Capital Management, the investment firm that financed his failed bid to keep Corbin & King. King said he wanted to avoid having a “dominant partner”, stressing that he wishes to work with a wide pool of investors, as many as 20 in total, “in a very independent way”.
The restaurateur is still bruised from the boardroom saga that resulted in him being ousted in April last year from the Wolseley and Delaunay owner Corbin & King, which he co-founded in 2003, adding that he would not dine at the Wolseley as it would be “uncomfortable for everybody”.
Thai hotel conglomerate Minor International, which already owned 74 per cent of Corbin & King, pushed the restaurant group into administration, citing unpaid loans of £34mn. A bidding war ensued for the whole business, and King lost.
All of King’s business relationships have been “painstakingly” created to ensure he maintains control. “But that doesn’t mean that people don’t think they have control and of course all too often in this world money rules,” he added.
There have been other bust-ups. Minor originally took the stake in 2017 to replace private equity group Graphite Capital, with whom King had a difficult relationship. The Grosvenor Estate decided to part ways with Corbin & King in 2018 when they put the lease of the Beaumont hotel back on the market as the business struggled with slow trading and high rents. Less than a year into his first venture, Le Caprice, with business partner Chris Corbin in 1981, King had to swap his original investors for his parents.
“Jeremy has never particularly enjoyed having investors, whether it’s been multiple or single,” observed another restaurateur. “Despite all of the incredible things that he has done for restaurants and in restaurants, I wouldn’t say he’s loved sort of being the CEO of a business.”
King defended his record running businesses but conceded he and Minor had struggled with competing visions. “The lesson learned is that we didn’t . . . agree on what the future of the company was close enough . . . so we were slightly at cross purposes,” he said, adding that the pandemic “drove us apart rather than brought us together”.
His success is based on a knack for picking the right locations and creating a buzz around them that draws in everyone from chief executives to celebrities to bankers. Ruth Rogers, owner of the River Café, said King makes venues that “you simply want to go — whether it’s to sit for five minutes or five hours”.
King is now spending most of his time working on the interior design plan for The Park, searching for a head chef for the project and starting to draft its menu. The 6,100 sq ft ground floor venue in the glassy new-build, constructed by property developer Fenton Whelan, will be a “21st century” take on the grand café style with which King is associated.
He is optimistic that food and drink inflation, which has bedevilled the restaurant industry over the past year, is “coming down” and that demand for upscale dining remained.
“The restaurant trade will transcend these problems,” he added. “Restaurants are so important in the culture: there is no literary, artistic, revolutionary movement that has not started in a restaurant or grand café. I think the industry will always resist whatever attacks are made on it.”
In his email to customers last week, King described his exit from Corbin & King as “more of a beginning” than an ending. “Oh how I have missed you,” he wrote. “It has been a long time but hopefully you will experience the benefits of my enforced sojourn and what I have learnt in my time away. I am determined to be a better restaurateur, employer and friend — and I look forward to seeing you.”
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