Boulestin is a pretty restaurant on St James’s Street, between the posh fag shop (Davidoff) and the old palace, which the Hanoverians thought so ghastly that they moved out to Kensington Gardens, a fresher hell full of squirrels. This is one of the more fascinating West End streets because it is 300 years old and is, as such, the only street in the West End in which the ancient nobility look safe, or even human; you pass tourists, rats and also dukes wafting towards White’s gentlemen’s club, which is duchess-free and where a grown man can be treated like a baby, and not in a perverted way.
So Boulestin, named for the famous French chef and photographer Xavier Marcel Boulestin, who looks, from my swift research, like Major Strasser from Casablanca, but fat. Perhaps I cannot see through the moustache? Boulestin became a chef due to dinner-party racism; he was in interior design and was introduced to a publisher, who assumed that because he was French he should write a cookery book. He did, and became a celebrity chef — the Restaurant Boulestin was open in London from 1927 to 1994; it outlived him by half a century. He was the first TV chef, father of a dynasty of monsters, although at least he didn’t lick the screen, sell Knorr stock cubes, or go on Strictly Come Dancing.
Boulestin has nothing to do with Marcel Boulestin, except it is French and it sells his book, Simple French Cooking for English Homes. It is owned by Joel Kissin, who was for many years Terence Conran’s partner, the specialist in 1980s chrome palaces who reopened Quaglino’s.
It is under a pretty Georgian house, all smiling windows and polished brass. It is a restaurant in the back and a café (named Marcel, which is a cat’s name) in the front.
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