Some people simply have more energy than others. For restaurateur Jeremy King, juggling hot spots Arlington and the Park and their associated staff while also enjoying the spoils of a tightly knit family (including three grown children and a cockapoo named Teddy) is no big deal. In fact, perhaps it’s not quite challenging enough. Why not open a third spot? And, yes, write a book.
And so, on Tuesday night, there we were—a few hundred of King’s close friends, swarming a construction site that will soon be the new Simpson’s in the Strand. The occasion was the release of Without Reservation: Lessons from a Life in Restaurants, King’s memoir and general guide to good living.
“He’s simply built differently. He has two modes—on and off,” says his wife, Lauren Gurvich King, as Richard E. Grant, Simon Callow, and Steven Soderbergh stood against freshly restored frescoes of women eating grapes. “He doesn’t sleep more than four or five hours.”
Judging from the fact that he looks like a midcentury advertisement for the finer tailors of Savile Row, you’d never know it. “Sometimes people say I’m brave to take things on,” he says, taking a quick break to greet the writer Lady Antonia Fraser. “Bravery only exists if you feel there’s an alternative to what you’re about to do…. I suppose compulsion is what I have.”
It takes a special type to sign a lease on a crumbling Grade II–listed building where the authorities consider every floor and wall to be a little piece of English heritage. But it helps that King’s zen is one of his trademarks. “Why get upset about something that you’re going to forget within a day or a week, or even in a year?” he wonders.
Simpson’s in the Strand means an awful lot to a lot of people, and those in that room couldn’t imagine it in better hands. One of England’s oldest traditional restaurants, it opened as a smoking room in 1828, during the reign of King George IV, and soon became the only place in town to get great roast beef. At the end of the 19th century, it was acquired by the Savoy hotel, and today the two entities still share a service entrance.
Until 1984 women were not allowed to have lunch in the ground-floor dining room, so ladies nibbled their potted shrimp in a pastel salon directly above it. (King and his longtime design collaborator, Shayne Brady, have now lovingly restored that room’s moldings, too.) Simpson’s has been closed since 2020, and the Savoy auctioned off some of its contents, including its fetishized silver trolleys on which roast meats were carved. Can you guess who managed to save a few?
King has had his heart set on Simpson’s for decades. He originally tried to secure the lease in 2000 but did not succeed. He tried again in 2008 and once more in 2015. An agreement was finally reached in 2023, and while the renovations have been a process, he’s had no problem passing the time as the restaurant-loving world awaits its early-2026 opening. For now, they will have to make do with Without Reservation. It’s full of his philosophizing, along with plenty of juicy stories about the late, alcoholic restaurateur Peter Langan and the Princess of Wales (who was a regular at King’s Le Caprice). Like the diners at Arlington, readers may come for the people-watching, but they’ll stick around for the substance.
A few examples: “Never accept [an invitation] in the future if you wouldn’t be happy doing it this evening.” “Give a very quick no, and never explain. The old saying goes, your friends don’t need it. Your enemies won’t believe it.”
He does reveal a few weaknesses: he considers people-pleasing to be a cardinal sin. “It would seem to be an ideal psychological condition to [have] in the restaurant business, but that means you become sycophantic, and I’m no good at that,” he says with a smile. Guess you can’t have everything.
Ashley Baker is a Deputy Editor at AIR MAIL and a co-host of the Morning Meeting podcast
