Restaurant and dog years are similar, and so the Wolseley, which is 20 this year, seems as if it has always been here. Other restaurants fall so swiftly you have only fragments of impressions. Breakfast on Bond Street in what feels like a one-bedroom flat belonging to Patrick Bateman. Pasta in a cellar with art, and they only care about the art. Salad at an Aslan-style stone table without mice. Nudity and berries.
The original Wolseley was so good it spawned a slew of bad impersonators
It was opened by Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, the best restaurateurs of the age, in the old Wolseley building at 160 Piccadilly, between Caviar House and the Ritz hotel. Wolseley is a forgotten brand of motorcar, and this was its preening showroom. Nothing beside remains, but hubris is my favourite sin.
Corbin and King lost the Wolseley after the pandemic, and I deprived it of my custom for a while. But I passed it often, peeked in at the still-functioning interior, and eventually I went back, like a character in one of those irritating novels about memory to be found in the windows of bookshops, specifically in Hampstead.
The original Wolseley was a joy-maker. It was so good it spawned a slew of bad impersonators that cover Britain even now. It is the reason why your bum is welded to a banquette and tables have tiny lamps, like in the Kit Kat Club but oblivious to what that really means. It is also – and no one will thank me for reminding them – why Café Rouge shrivelled up.
It was a marvellous pastiche of a European grand café but better. I have been to La Coupole in Paris. It is every shade of brown, is less conscious of its past than strangled by it, and the food is only adequate.
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