Why do people go to restaurants? There is no one answer to this question. We go to different restaurants at different times for different reasons. Sometimes we go because we have heard that the food is very good. Sometimes it is because the restaurant is hot and happening. Sometimes it is because we want to enjoy cuisines we can’t easily enjoy at home (high quality Japanese, for instance).
As the restaurant scene has exploded, we have been given many more opportunities to enjoy restaurants for all of these reasons. The quality of food has gone up, so have the cuisine options available and many restaurants draw their clientele by becoming places to be seen at.
And yet, there is one kind of restaurant I rarely find in India. My needs are quite specific: it must be comfortably appointed; the service should be outstanding; the room should have character; and the food must be consistently good without being Michelin star-quality.
In the UK and New York, there are places that fit this description. In New York, Danny Meyer’s Union Square Café set a trend when it opened decades ago: Warm service, reliable food quality and lots of character. In the UK, this kind of restaurant has been associated for decades with the team of Jeremy King and Chris Corbin. Though nearly all of their early restaurants ended up becoming hot places, I doubt if that was part of the original plan. And the list of restaurants they have opened (or turned around) before selling them off, is impressive: Le Caprice, the Ivy, The Wolseley, J Sheekey and many others.
I last interviewed Jeremy King for Brunch in 2018 and found it fascinating how he regarded his restaurants as living spaces, not just rooms where food was served. King also thought it important that his restaurants should not become places where only the rich congregated. As he said in that interview, “we give people the opportunities to spend but never make it mandatory.”
You could order caviar and lobster at a Corbin and King restaurant but you did not have to. You could just have an omelette, a sandwich or a soup. The staff would treat you with the same respect as they treated the millionaire at the next table who was ordering Chateau Lafite to go with his double lamb chop.
I don’t know if we have anything like that in India. In my young days, hotel coffee shops served that purpose. In Mumbai you could go to the Sea Lounge, just order an ice cream and stare at the Gateway of India from a window table; the whole Taj Mahal Hotel experience for much under a hundred rupees. In Delhi, my friends could not afford to eat at five-star hotels so they would go to say, Cafe Espresso at the Oberoi Intercontinental (as it was then) for a late-night coffee. They would be treated with the same care and deference as the fat cats who were regulars here.
I may be romanticising it but I seem to remember that when I was a small boy and my parents went to such Mumbai restaurants as Gaylord and Bombelli, they went for the same kind of experience. Yes, the food was fine, but they went mainly because they wanted to go somewhere pleasant and welcoming.
Integral to the appeal of all of these places was that they did not define their cuisine too narrowly. At Gaylord you could have chicken Kiev or chicken curry. It would all be good but none of the dishes would become gourmet classics. And yet you would have film stars and local celebrities at the table next to you (the music director Jaikishan was a Gaylord regular) and they would attract no attention to themselves.
These places don’t exist any longer. Most hotel restaurants are now very high priced and not particularly relaxing. Even at the Sea Lounge, I doubt if they would look kindly at a guy who blocked one of the coveted window tables for three hours while pondering a single coffee as I used to do in my youth because that was all I could afford.
And the standalones that were so wonderful in the old days now seem frayed around the edges; restaurants that have seen better days.
I was reminded of what we have lost in India when I went to the new Bangkok outpost of The Wolseley, which is called The Wolseley Cafe and is located in the Anantara Siam Hotel where I nearly always stay when I am in Bangkok. It had everything I remembered about the original Wolseley except perhaps for the buzz that came from knowing that Kate Moss was at one table and the Beckhams were entertaining friends at the other end of the restaurant.
Since I interviewed Jeremy King in 2018, the Corbin and King group has had it ups and downs. When I interviewed Jeremy, he had just sold a controlling interest in the company to the Minor group, run out of Bangkok by the Thai-American billionaire Bill Heinecke.
Heinecke understands hospitality. The Minor group also owns the international Anantara chain of hotels plus Europe’s NH hotels and the Thai restaurant chain Patara as well as several hotels run by the Four Seasons. So, Minor had its own ideas about the future direction of Corbin and King. (Mainly: opening restaurants outside of the UK.) Jeremy did not agree. A battle ensued and Jeremy and Chris Corbin were bought out. Minor took executive control and many Wolesley regulars feared that Minor would destroy the Corbin and King tradition of hospitality.
That hasn’t happened. The London Wolseley still dazzles: All the regulars are back. And the new Bangkok Wolseley was wonderful. It is superbly managed by Bear Chainikom, a Thai who grew up in the UK and spent five years working for Corbin and King in London. When Bear realised that his new employers were a Thai company, he asked for a post in Bangkok should the opportunity ever arise. And soon Bear was sent to the Anantara Siam where he has superbly recreated the high-service quality, warmth and ambience of the London Wolseley.
I ordered a classic Wolseley style meal, and the food was cooked by Thais who had been trained by the Wolseley’s chef. I had six oysters, steak tartare and a souffle suisse (a cheese souffle). All of the food was very good (though the soufflé was marginally stodgier than the London original) without aiming for Michelin star quality. But what made it work was the ambience: Guests felt pampered and looked after, regardless of how much money they were spending.
It would easily have gone wrong. The first lot of Corbin and King restaurants (The Ivy, Le Caprice etc.) was sold in 2003 and has since had various owners including currently, the garment tycoon Richard Caring who now wants to sell those restaurants for a billion pounds.(Let’s see...)
Caring’s restaurants have had mixed fortunes, and the Ivy name is now a joke because Caring decided to open horrible little Ivy offshoots all over the UK (and presumably, the world) none of which is any good and this has caused a drop in the perceived value of the original Ivy’s reputation.
The second Corbin and King empire, of which The Wolseley is the best-known restaurant, is now owned by Minor and I imagine that they have learned from the example of the Ivy. They will expand but they recognise that the key to the Corbin and King style is the hospitality.
It is a difficult feat to pull off though I imagine that Bill Heinecke with his decades of experience in hospitality understands the Corbin and King trademark style better than rag traders and the rest. Judging by the Bangkok outpost, Minor has preserved everything that made the Wolseley great.
I guess the best parallels come from the hotel industry. No matter where in the world you are, a Four Seasons hotel will always feel like a Four Seasons. When you are at an Oberoi hotel, it is always a distinctive experience. When you eat at one of ITC’s Dum Pukhts all over India, you get the same experience as the Delhi original.
It is not easy, of course. It is much simpler , I imagine, to clone a restaurant that depends solely on the menu like Nobu. But to get the ambience right, you need to hire the best people, train them well and closely watch their performance. Bear told me that his training at the London Wolseley included classroom classes on hospitality.
So yes, people go to restaurants for many reasons. But to go for the hospitality is the best reason of all.
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