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.
It looks like an exquisitely appointed cruise ship of the mid-20th century
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.
Normally King fits himself into an existing building and builds a restaurant from that. The Park, though, is as new and welcome as a baby: a curling edifice on the park with the restaurant on the ground floor and flats above. It smells not of fresh paint, which is predictable, but of fresh wood. At teatime on Wednesday the staff teem amid wood, tan leather and glowing lighting. It is large but divided into smaller parts, as the Wolseley is, and is still intimate. Paintings are of trees, or happy women.
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