I am fretting about this restaurant column’s election coverage and then I alight on something superficially grand and lovely, which has been hollowed out and is now useless and barely able to function: a shell. It is the Wolseley 2 – the Wolseley City – and this is perfect.
I name it the election restaurant, and Tories should eat here while they still have their shirts
Few restaurants are important, though I treasure Martha Gellhorn’s description of an operating theatre for the wounded of the Spanish Civil War which was once a restaurant in a grand hotel. But was it any good? Tales of society folk eating are self-serving: real history happens nowhere near them, says the Marxist in me – and PR is, well, PR. But the Wolseley, which opened in a former car showroom by the Ritz in 2003, expressed London’s confidence, though in retrospect this confidence was mostly based on stolen Russian money, paid for with our pride. That Lamborghini? It’s a power station in the Urals, miniaturised, spray-painted orange and driving down the Cromwell Road to nowhere special.
Even so, it was fine: a grand café that sold bacon sandwiches and coffee cake to Lucian Freud and people who knew themselves to be normal, and that was its secret. For all its frontage it knew there is no life without variety, and because the staff were joyful the restaurant was too, and there’s a lesson here. I ate here very late, in a sympathetic rainstorm, the night Elizabeth II died, and it felt magical, even if – or perhaps because – it is named for an Edwardian motor company that hasn’t built a car for 49 years. Magic cannot be replicated by whim or greed. It doesn’t work like that.
The Wolseley changed ownership in 2020, and now belongs to Minor Hotels, a name whose irony I don’t have space to do justice to, because they are in the expansion business like McDonald’s. They opened this second branch near the monument to disaster in Pudding Lane, in another tall Edwardian building with a bronze ticking clock and Portland stone: Ozymandias speaks to Ozymandias near All Bar One.
The ceilings are lower than in the original Wolseley and the decoration is weirder: more gilded and self-conscious. This building was a bank, and then a department store, and at some point someone decided to decorate it in homage to ancient Egypt, but Art Deco, and the effect is to summon the fictional mid-century House of Fraser Hercule Poirot would visit for socks. That is, it’s fantastical and lonely, and as such, I name it the general election restaurant, and Tories should eat here while they still have their shirts.
It’s quiet on a weekend early evening, and perhaps this is the problem. The Wolseley needs all kind of people, and the City lacks that. The few full tables seem to be tourists who are marooned by fate. The menu is, as ever, a piece of everything. I have a delicate chicken soup but, as I have said before, you cannot buy good chicken soup because good chicken soup cannot be bought. My companion has the chicken schnitzel which, again, is fine: no better or worse than at the real – I mean other – Wolseley, which teaches me that this was never about food, but a hope that money cannot summon by itself. A grand salon without people is just the set of The Shining, and though I am not consumed with terror, that’s the closest description I can give.
The Wolseley City, 68 King William Street, London EC4N 7HR; tel 020 3772 0600
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