Jeremy King has done it again: The Park, reviewed

The Park is the new restaurant from Jeremy King, and it sits in a golden building to the north of Hyde Park, just off Queensway. This is an interesting district compared with Knightsbridge – it is still capable of reality – but isn’t every-where interesting compared with Knightsbridge? The Park is Art Deco of course: the presiding aesthetic of familiarity, snatched joy and inevitable doom.

King is a specialist in grand cafés. He opened the Wolseley in Piccadilly and the Delaunay on the Aldwych, though he lost them to his feckless backers in 2022, and has begun again with Arlington by the Ritz, Simpson’s on the Strand, pending, and this. Queensway has a grand café now, and I am pleased for it. King’s restaurants do not gentrify sobbing London districts: they are more interesting, and better priced, than that. To idiots who ask ‘Who will go to Queensway for food?’, King says the River Café is in Hammersmith and that is an immutable truth for you.