Le Caprice is a monochrome patch of the 1980s behind the Ritz Hotel, in the part of St James’s that looks like Monaco. (There is a car park.) It was, along with Langham’s and the Ivy, the most fashionable restaurant of the Thatcher years, beloved of media slags and wankers; also of Princess Diana (the night after she died, her table was kept empty, which is a unique elegy), Princess Margaret, Mick Jagger and Jeffrey Archer, who ate his first meal here after he left prison, because he too is unique.
Even so, Le Caprice, now 35, the age at which the pragmatic woman becomes a feminist, cannot compete with the monstrous exhibitionism of the new super-restaurants, specifically Novikov and Sexy Fish, which is, in a restaurant-themed retelling of the Cain-and-Abel myth (the Bible, not the Jeffrey Archer novel) also owned by Richard Caring. It’s too subtle, and look around: this is not a subtle age. But should it clad itself in gold, and buy taps made of diamonds, and employ a hot nude sous chef who is then photographed for ES magazine, it would lose its identity. (A good restaurant is like a good newspaper; it knows who it is.) So what can it do, this restaurant of naff ghosts?
It can, for instance, embark on a journey of self-mythology. (Four years ago it introduced brunch, which was not so dramatic.) And so, to celebrate its 35th birthday, and to evoke ‘those hazy, lazy, crazy days… bang-bang chicken, eggs Arlington, that salmon fishcake’, it has created a £35 Classic Caprice Menu, with a glass of champagne for £3.50, which was the price in 1981. I think I remember that crisps were 7p then; but I grew up in Norbiton.
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