The Sunday Times
Giles Coren became the first of national restaurant critic to review Jeremy King’s “huge. Mahusive” ‘New World Grand Café’, set in an “empty concrete box the size of Slovenia” on a “not very promising corner of town, between the arse-end of Oxford Street and the main road through Notting Hill Gate. Embassies and brothels mainly.”
The interior mixes “mid-century California drawing room chic” with New York diner; the menu, King classics with New World surprises. But as is usually the case with Jeremy King restaurants, from the old Ivy and Caprice days via the Wolseley to the recent Arlington, it is the ambience and the crowd that really count.
“There are literally no bad tables. It’s a miracle: everything is a corner or a den or a snug. The light is beatific. Favourite faces from previous restaurants float welcomingly along the aisles. It is truly Heaven’s refectory.”
OK, Giles, so who were the faces? Well, for Jeremy’s 70th birthday bash the place was “teeming with quality: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Charles Dance, Brian Cox, Jonathan Pryce, Zoe Wanamaker, Clive Owen, Damian Lewis, Nigella Lawson, Ruthie Rogers, Claudia Winkelman, Trevor Eve… I went back the next day for the all-important, paying-my-own-way visit, and it was a more regular crowd. But Jamie Theakston was in. So there’s that.”
Giles Coren - 2024-07-07
