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 - 2024-07-07The Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell was disappointed by the food at the second of Jeremy King’s comeback launches, although the “grand” New York vibe and luxurious fit-out, all “golden African limba panels and large, funky art”, with service to match impressed him.
Too many dishes simply missed the mark, including a “scraggily chopped” Cobb salad and a ‘Gotham shrimp cocktail’ that came with a “red dip…[that] was a gutless, wet salsa of tomatoey nothingness. It was hard to get on to the shrimp. The shrimp didn’t dip, the dip didn’t cling.”
Other dishes were “decent”, if not exciting, and it was not much compensation that the ice-cream cookie sandwich was “magnificently Instagrammable”. William concluded that “A tighter, better executed menu and The Park would be a restaurant as great as its name evokes”.
William Sitwell - 2024-08-11
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