This food needs a little less grandeur, and a little more love: Simpson’s in the Strand reviewed

Simpson’s in the Strand stopped serving breakfast in 2017, after it had been renovated to stop it smelling of cabbage. Fat men wept, but worse things have happened here. Simpson’s is built on the site of John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, in which Geoffrey Chaucer, Gaunt’s brother-in-law, wrote part of The Canterbury Tales. The palace was destroyed during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; it is all detailed in Anya Seton’s romance novel Katherine. Of the palace’s successor, Henry VII’s Savoy Hospital, only a small chapel remains. It looks deeply oppressed.

Instead we have the Savoy hotel, created by Richard D’Oyly Carte. This is the hotel The Mikado built; and beside it is Simpson’s in the Strand — formerly Samuel Reiss’s Grand Cigar Divan, a club named in homage to its sofas, which sometimes contained Benjamin Disraeli. I like to imagine that, being near to Charing Cross station, it was more multicultural than White’s.