You half expected to see a mountain of flowers blockading Piccadilly, or at the very least a skywriter in full Mach-5 mourning. The first Tweets and Instagram stories went out before breakfast. And by lunchtime, the panic was in full voice. Movie stars, restaurateurs, food critics, minor royals, influencers, socialites, millionaires, supermodels, hacks — everyone was falling over themselves to show their adoration for Jeremy King and their beloved Wolseley, which was under, it was rapidly becoming clear, some grave but vague threat.

My father texted me around elevenses. “The Wolseley’s in trouble. What are you doing about it?” He meant this in an editorial way (and has often tried to claim commission on my article ideas). But the call to action was universal. Where were you when the time came to stand up and be counted? What did you do to help? Your favourite corner table; your beloved veal holstein; your weekly dose of Billy Nighy. All were now endangered by the corrupting forces of corporate capitalism. And as the weeks have rolled on and the financial wranglings continue, London’s Café Society remains up in arms — voting, where it can, with its stomach and its tweets. Some things we can let slip. Governmental dishonesty. Skyrocketing energy prices. The return of 

 But the future of the Wolseley? Now that is a hill worth dying on.

First, the facts. The fracas in question focuses on a £38 million loan, which Corbin & King’s majority investors — the Thai hotel group Minor International — called in rapidly and unexpectedly last year amid a fiery dispute over management styles. King, your favourite-restaurateur-favourite-restaurateur

who, alongside partner Chris Corbin, has helmed the company for almost twenty years — believes in an altogether more 

When the pandemic hit, Minor demanded that King sack a good chunk of his staff, but King — who knows that excellent, experienced team members are the absolute lifeblood of any dining room — was having none of it. The financiers also wanted, it has been alleged, to slap the Wolseley name on all sorts of new locations internationally (chiefly, one hears, in the Middle East), and risk losing the personal touch and quality control that comes with Corbin & King’s closely curated crop.

Soon, they’d demanded the loan back in a ploy to pull the rug out from under the restaurateurs, and to seize control of this most priceless of assets. (King, they said, could stay on as a sort of puppet figure at the helm — the restaurant equivalent of gutting a stately townhouse, filling it with ghastly lounges and underground pools and panic rooms, but maintaining just the thinnest veneer of grandeur on the exterior to keep up with the neighbourhood.) Cue the wailing and flailing from London’s dining classes, and the righteous backlash against any sort of corporate takeover of this sacred ground. It would be like Exxon-Mobil enacting a leveraged buyout of Stonehenge, one felt.

An artist&#8217;s impression 160 Picadilly in 1921, when it housed the Wolseley car showroom


That’s the present, then. But what of the past? The Wolseley site — at 160 Piccadilly, on the corner just past the Ritz, but before you get to Fortnums — was built as the head office and showroom for the Wolseley Motor Company in 1921. Between 1927 and 1999 it housed a rather grand branch of Barclays Bank, clad in distinctive Japanese lacquerware, before reopening as a middling Chinese restaurant for a while. And then, in 2003, Corbin & King descended. The pair had been working together for decades, running the show at Le Caprice and J Sheekey and the original Ivy in Covent Garden. The Wolseley was different, however — London’s first Grand Café, which pivoted from the clubby, intimate feel of their previous joints to something altogether more evocative, romantic, and theatrical. The vaulted ceilings and towering pillars seemed more akin to a Parisian or Viennese confection than a St James’s bolthole. Londoners simply didn’t do restaurants at that scale or that pomp. (Consider Rules, say — London’s oldest eatery — or Wilton’s, just round the corner, which are both essentially extensions of Clubland itself: cosy, snoozy, leathery, carpeted.) And the international crowd — from Hollywood bigwigs to European aristocrats — dropped in accordingly, and always felt it was in some way theirs, from the very first day.

“It immediately felt special the minute I walked through the magnificent doors.”

The decor hit you in an awesome wave. “The room was so grand,” says Richard Young, the storied society photographer who most famously plied his trade at Langan’s, just across the way. “It immediately felt special the minute I walked through the magnificent doors.” Francesco Sersale, scion of the great clan behind Le Sirenuse in Positano, was equally overawed. “The ambience created in that large room, with the starred and chequered marble floors and high ceiling, was just amazing,” he says. AA Gill, who (quite literally) wrote the book on The Wolseley, and whose 2003

 review captured neatly the chattering hype about the place at its opening, put it thus: “The first thing to be said about the Wolseley is: ‘Wow! Bloody hell!’ It’s a beautiful room, built as the eponymous car showroom in a style that I think of as robber-baron imperial.” He went on: “It has been restored to look like a Hapsburg railway cafe, a Ruritanian patisserie and coffee house, a Bohemian grand-luxe bar and brothel. It’s quite unlike any other dining room in London, and apparently so authentically ancient, you’d think your grandfather ate there.” That sense of elongated heritage — a sort of optical illusion of history — is possibly down to the deep, rich, almost novelistic backstories that King gives to each location upon finding them. (Not to mention the meticulously-selected, period-perfect artwork on the walls.) Even when King’s restaurants are brand new, you’re almost sure that you’ve stopped by before, quite possibly in a past life. Imagine the Overlook Hotel with decent riesling.

There’s another clever trick at play as well. The Wolseley feels both special and egalitarian at once. Yes: it is grand. It is London-y. It is something to name-drop bashfully, with implications of long held intimacy. But there is no aloofness to the cooking; no sneering to the service. It is smiles and schnitzels, from morning till night. “The River Cafe is sometimes called London’s canteen, but really it’s the Wolsley,” says Will Woodhams, the CEO of Fitzdares. “They are considerably more egalitarian with their pricing, which creates a better mix of people and a joyous buzz 14 hours a day.” Giles Coren, the 

 restaurant critic, agrees. “The product is fully knowable, totally unscary, and yet fantastically well done,” he says. “It is like your local restaurant — but your local restaurant on Piccadilly.”

"It is like your local restaurant — but your local restaurant on Piccadilly.”

This is reflected neatly in the clientele, perhaps — who see themselves as members of some tacit club, or perhaps devoted acolytes of the most gentle cult imaginable. Membership commences on your first visit, and usually only ends at death. (Rudeness to the staff, however, is a pretty prompt way to pre-figure this.) And everyone who’s anyone — the stars on your screen, the business people in your wallets, the politicians in your contempt — has probably signed up, should they have ever been to central London for more than a day or so.

Nevertheless, some diners are more equal than others. Lucian Freud is perhaps the most famous of all Wolseley regulars, and would hold court in the centre of the restaurant’s central ‘horseshoe’ most nights of the week. Just after he died, in 2011, King asked staff to place a black table cloth over his regular spot, lit by a single candle, and there is an ice cream coupe named after him on the menu.

But this is an exercise in futility, and a full list of acolytes is prohibited by the word count. “I was having lunch recently and Jason Momoa, the incredibly handsome actor from Aquaman, was sitting just across from us with his family and friends. He spent some considerable time choosing some tea, which I thought was charming,” says Richard Young. “I was kicking myself as I didn’t have a camera on me, — it would have been a great shot. In the old days I would have taken the shot, in or out. Nowadays I’m a bit more well behaved!,” he says. “Jeremy trained me up!” King’s genius, however, is that there is no great divide between the gorkers and the gorked; no velvet rope behind which the great-and-good might disappear. “He manages to make all the rubber-neckers of the rich and famous feel almost as important as them,” says Coren.” It’s beautifully done.”

The &#8216;horseshoe&#8217;: a circle of much-prized banquettes in the centre of the Wolseley dining room — a bygone power setting


Which brings us, of course, to the great ringmaster himself. King has been described as ‘London’s Maitre d’’, but that only tells half the story. A Maitre d’ goes home after his shift, presumably, and removes the cummerbund. But King is never, as far as I have observed, ‘off’, so to speak. He is everywhere at once, defying physics and clocks. He replies to emails at midnight and then again at 5.30am. He is at Soutine in North London one moment, Colbert in Sloane Square the next. He materialises like a miracle in charcoal three-pieces, and speaks with a soft gravitas that belies his grandfather clock frame. He deploys the same soothing baritone on a Dame of the Realm as he might on a backpacker asking for directions. To King, hospitality is not so much a job as a sixth sense, an intuition.

“Some say it’s charm but really it’s his focus on what makes us happy,” says Woodhams. “That’s the sign of a true restaurateur. The last 20 years have been the age of the celebrity chef. But those that eat out a lot like a properly run restaurant, more than smears of jus on a plate.” A.A. Gill put it nicely when he said that King had made the Wolseley “from the front door in, not from the kitchen out.” Young describes how “Jeremy is a constant. He runs a tight ship and is always a reassuring presence.” And everyone, it seems, is terrified that this calming certainty — this final idyll of civility and care in an increasingly unfeeling world — may now be under threat. There were rumours a week or so ago that Richard Caring had been in talks with Minor International to take over the Corbin & King umbrella company, prompting palpitations over the idea of an Ivy-esque international roll out. (“The idea of turning it into Sexy Fish would be dreadful,” says Coren.) But the white-fanged hospitality honcho behind Annabel’s and the like seems to have been warded off by a volley of heartfelt protest from certain quarters. At the time of writing, it appears that Knighthead Capital, an American firm, might well swoop in and help out, with the minimum of fuss or meddling. But The Wolseley is by no means out of the woods yet. And until they are, London’s cheek-kissers will remain tremulous “His restaurants are incredibly important to me and the fabric of my London, and to us insanely privileged white media people,” concludes Coren. “I don’t know what we’d do without it: it’s our Nandos. The thought of it going is terrible.

"I don’t know what we’d do without it: it’s our Nandos..."

“So if I had £15 million, I’d give it to him to burn. And so long as I have the table next to Lucian Freud’s for a glass of riesling and a Schnitzel on a Thursday night, I’d be happy.” As the world crumbles around us and everything decent is lost, surely this is not too much to ask.

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