Why do people go to restaurants? It’s not about the food

By Henry Hitchings

The Wolseley sits handsomely on Piccadilly, a stone’s throw from The Ritz. Behind its baroque ironwork entrance is a grand café of a type long familiar to residents of Paris and Vienna, yet rare in London. The interior is inspired by the columns and round arches of the Basilica Santo Spirito in Florence, but dressed with black-and-gold Japanese lacquer. A cosmopolitan space, it’s the jewel in the crown of the city’s pre-eminent restaurateurs, Chris Corbin and Jeremy King.

On a grey Wednesday in February, a month before the outbreak of covid-19 forced the British government to close all restaurants, I sit near the bronze-clad entrance to The Wolseley and watch the morning service unfurl. Longstanding maître d’, Matthew Silcock, a bonhomous Liverpudlian, greets each new patron with equal warmth. People pause on arrival to imbibe the ambiance and a troika of staff swoop into action to avert a crush by the door. Jackets are shrugged off. Scarves are whisked away. This is dining as theatre, a minutely choreographed performance. And the customer is the star.

The suited business types arrive early. Solo breakfasters leaf through newspapers or peck at mobile phones. Staff in crisp white aprons take orders for coffee: the menu lists 14 different kinds, including one spiked with mandarin liqueur. By 8am the room has begun to buzz. By 10am public-relations and media executives are ordering tea in formidable silver pots. Pastries are addressed. Manicured tourists breeze in, along with expectant shoppers and art-lovers fortifying themselves ahead of gallery visits. Two tweedy day-trippers manage to sweet-talk their way to a table (“We promise we’ll only be half an hour”). Earnest conversation mingles with tiny balloons of gossip and the tinkle of laughter.

This highly polished space was once a car showroom, and the long u-shaped counter that runs around the interior is a relic of its 72 years as a branch of Barclays Bank. Yet in its current guise The Wolseley has the patina of deep history. This restaurant epitomises the vision of Corbin and King. Over the past 40 years the pair have brought both fizz and elegance to London’s restaurant scene, refreshing sites that are tired but well-located, creating hotspots of glamour. Their most successful ventures have had the charisma of august institutions– The Wolseley, Le Caprice and The Ivy – yet achieved an air of vitality and fun.

In the space of a few months the covid-19 pandemic has brought the hospitality industry to the brink of ruin. Although many restaurants have now reopened, the future of dining out is as uncertain in Britain as it is elsewhere in the world. Even as doors reopen, social-distancing rules are in place; threats of future lockdowns loom. It’s natural to feel a pang of nostalgia for the well-appointed world of a few months ago. The crisis has shown us how precarious that era was. But it has also prompted us to ponder what we’ve been missing. Why do restaurants matter? Why, after all, do we choose to spend large sums of money to dine among strangers?

It’s natural to feel a pang of nostalgia for the well-appointed world of a few months ago. The crisis has shown us how precarious that era was

The very word “restaurant” hints at the restorative effects of dining out. Before it came to mean a place where people go to eat, it denoted a reviving cordial or broth. Today the term suggests the potential for therapy of other kinds. Restaurants, not exactly public and not exactly private, function as sites of social exchange. Consuming food alongside other people makes us think about what we share: tastes and space, customs and attitudes.

Corbin and King understand this. Though food is important to them, it’s not the main event. They serve schnitzels and strudels, choucroute and coupes – high-end comfort dishes, lip-smacking rather than delicately tweezered into Instagram-friendly displays. The photogenic tableaux are more likely to be on the walls than the plates.

The restaurants are neither temples of gastronomy nor troughs for a quick nosebag. Corbin and King have won no Michelin stars; in an age when chefs are routinely feted as magicians, theirs are far from being household names. But they create beautiful spaces and a sense of enchantment. They conjure atmosphere. As Marina O’Loughlin, restaurant critic of the Sunday Times, puts it, “they create cocoons and a sense of timelessness.”

When I canvass opinions from fellow punters, I hear a lot about such pleasures. One diner, perched in The Wolseley’s central horseshoe of seating, speaks of being sent into a reverie. To step inside this room, she says, is to enter a world far away from her own, to be transported to a place where one’s great-grandparents might have dined: “It’s a kind of fabulous time travel.” We think of restaurants as places to enjoy food. They also sell a grand fantasy.

When I interview Jeremy King at his comparatively cramped and bland office, no more than 30 seconds’ walk from my table at The Wolseley, the conversation soon turns to the thoughts and feelings that shape a visit to a restaurant. King talks of being attuned to the little clues that disclose diners’ emotions. Warming to the theme, he mentions several classic studies of behaviour and the brain, chief among them David Brooks’s “The Social Animal”. Subtitled “The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement”, the book is a blend of sociology and allegory in which Brooks argues that success – in life and for society at large – is grounded in an understanding of “intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, character traits and social norms”. That, says King, is what he is trying to achieve.

King is a shy man who taught himself to be an extrovert. He spent much of his childhood in the Somerset town of Burnham-on-Sea. In his teens he was a bartender’s assistant at a local holiday village and also manned the ice-cream counter at the Seaspray Café on the high street. Both experiences forced him to be more outgoing. Eventually he would become the archetypal restaurant “greeter”. But it doesn’t take long to see that he regards the role less as a performance of bonhomie than as an opportunity to tap into the customer’s unconscious. Now 66, he reveals that in another life he might have been an architect, seeking to invigorate previously cheerless locations, or a doctor, “a notion that came in my late 20s when I discovered the knack of reading people and their ailments”. He has brought to the restaurant business elements of both these unpursued vocations: an appreciation of how spaces affect those who inhabit them and of which spaces different people need to inhabit.

It has become the norm for restaurateurs to tell stories about their food. Some go for the high-end tasting menu, which spins a yarn to draw a diner into a gustatory journey. But over the past decade another kind of narrative has come to dominate the business: chefs have celebrated the provenance of their food, its authenticity and seasonality. The trend for talking up local sourcing and traditions has solid ethical underpinnings, but often comes across as crushingly earnest.

Corbin and King don’t subscribe to these enthusiasms. The duo are unmoved by voguish talk of foraging, clean food, artisanal produce and “farm to fork”. Instead they purvey soigné internationalism. Each of their restaurants takes on a specific character, and whenever they plan a new venture King crafts a picturesque back-story, tersely explained on the company’s website but abundantly particularised in his mind and in his designers’ brief.

Take Fischer’s, a Viennese café on Marylebone High Street, an upmarket thoroughfare in central London populated by small, often intimate shops. In King’s elaborate fiction, Fischer’s is the domain of a married couple, refugees from Nazi Austria. Otto and Maria – one Jewish, the other Catholic – have created in London a homage to a past that the Third Reich obliterated. It is a restaurant with hinterland. At the very back hangs a large portrait of Richard Tauber, an Austrian tenor. Its presence is personal: according to King, the Fischers “would have been friends with Tauber”. But it’s symbolic, too: Tauber was a silky yet agile performer who managed to blur the traditional boundary between the classical and the popular.

King has a taste for the Mitteleuropean. When talking about Viennese institutions such as Café Central and Zum Schwarzen Kameel, he becomes fervent. “There’s a buzz and a glow and a sense of warmth and belonging,” he says. Stefan Zweig, a writer and native of Vienna who was driven far from home by the upheavals of the early 20th century, pictured the cafés of his youth as democratic clubs, conducive to lively and intelligent discussion, for which the price of admission was no more than the cost of a cup of coffee. For art’s modernist trail-blazers, cafés were what the Athenian agora had once been for Socrates. Zweig evokes their atmosphere in his memoir, “The World of Yesterday”, which he posted to his publisher shortly before he killed himself in 1942. The mention of this lament for a lost world elicits a knowing smile from King. He is drawn to the idea of exile – the dreams and longings it begets, and the possibility of looking forward by looking back.

At Colbert on Sloane Square the restaurant’s story is less freighted yet still vivid. The imaginary owner is Pierre, who’s had to decamp from Paris after dallying with his boss’s daughter. Walls are crowded with his memorabilia. French films of the 1940s and 1950s are to the fore; according to King, the restaurant’s name is Pierre’s tribute both to Le Grand Colbert, a Parisian landmark steeped in fin-de-siècle grandeur, and to his favourite actress, throaty sophisticate Claudette Colbert.

The restaurant’s story gives you discipline, says King. “By confining yourself, you have to use your imagination. The result is not a museum, but you have something to stay faithful to. Everything is defined by it.” Each room fuses art and history. Ruth Rogers, owner of The River Café in west London, is lauded for her authentically rustic Italian food: she’s in love with ingredients, not anecdote and myth. But she enthuses about the way that Corbin and King frame the experience of eating by conjuring up “a place of detail”.

The opportunity to savour this seamless fusion doesn’t come cheap. At Colbert, a dozen oysters will cost you £42 ($52) or £51, depending on whether you choose Jersey Rocks or Gillardeau. Unlike at some fancier restaurants, however, you can navigate your way to a less pricey meal – there’s a three-course menu for £24 – and there’s no taboo about arriving just for dessert (profiteroles with hot chocolate sauce at £7.25). Here, as in the other affluent neighbourhoods where Corbin and King have sites, the prices are cheaper than many competitors.

The restaurants manage to be elegant and glamorous without being inaccessible. It’s a feat of alchemy born of a relationship that began in 1979. King was working as maître d’ at Joe Allen, a restaurant in Covent Garden with the atmosphere of a speakeasy, and got to know Chris Corbin, who at 27 was two years his senior. Corbin had also stumbled into the business. When I meet him for coffee at Brasserie Zédel, the pair’s largest restaurant, he recalls with affection their instant rapport. It’s a rare interview. In 1990 he was diagnosed with leukaemia, and had a life-saving bone-marrow transplant in 1994. Since his return to health he has stepped back somewhat, not least to raise funds for research into leukaemia.

As in a Jane Austen novel, society comes together in order to observe the ways in which society comes together

King is the driving force now, but originally the two men were yin and yang, dividing their labours “without discussion”, says Corbin. King is a born salesman who nevertheless says “I don’t like selling.” Corbin comes across as both doctorly and ecclesiastical: he upholds the industry’s ideas of correctness. Both were “from quite dysfunctional families and from coastal towns”, says Corbin. He grew up in Bournemouth, and after an aborted apprenticeship as an aircraft engineer, worked in bars and hotels, where he learned to treat each party of customers “like they’re the only people in the room”. He enjoyed the life of a “weekend hippie” – Cream, Jimi Hendrix – but soon sensed how narrow his opportunities were. He began to feel, as he puts it, “under-educated”.

Corbin moved to London to work in a rib restaurant in Knightsbridge. He took a management course at Westminster College, and after spells in banqueting and as a night chef he became a waiter at Langan’s Brasserie in Mayfair, a partnership between Peter Langan, a flamboyant Irishman, and Michael Caine, an actor. Adorned with pictures by David Hockney, the restaurant quickly became a haven for artists and dressy celebrities. Langan was forever spilling drinks on his white suit, crawling under tables and insulting customers. But Corbin refers to him as a philosopher and a visionary who served simultaneously as an inspiration and a caution, “an incredibly difficult and imperious guy, constantly drunk, but with an extraordinary ability to get people to flock to him”. It was Langan who prompted Corbin to think about what he calls “the social need to eat, as a herd almost”, about restaurants as an entertainment business.

Corbin soon became manager of Langan’s. But he quickly started hatching plans with King to set up their own place. So began the long process of working out exactly what made them happy and how to turn it into a business. Their first venture was Le Caprice, in 1981. They were backed by the fashion designer Joseph Ettedgui, but within weeks it became clear that their ideas were at odds: Ettedgui was intent on having harsh monochrome decor and fluorescent lights. After several lean months the partnership ended; King’s parents remortgaged their house to enable him to buy the site’s lease.

In the early days King ran the business and Corbin took charge of floor service. Both hoped to see every customer who came through the door. Some of their innovations now sound unremarkable, but they were attention-grabbing at a time when London was in thrall to the meticulous opulence of haute cuisine. They served uncomplicated fare such as Caesar salad, Eggs Benedict and bang-bang chicken, which didn’t fit what King says was then the “class structure of finer dining”. No less unusual was the decision to ask customers whether they wanted coffee before, after or simply with their desserts. Dishes could be served either as a starter or a main course: “No one was doing that then.”

The proprietors of most successful restaurants are individuals. They also tend to be chefs. Corbin and King diverge from such norms. Theirs is an equal and harmonious partnership, and both learnt the trade by working front of house. This explains the collaborative attitude they encourage in those who work for them. It also illuminates their attitude to their patrons.

Le Caprice was meant to feel like a club: it was all about the people. You could order food that you really wanted, rather than being at the mercy of a chef’s whims. Mark Hix, who ran the kitchen, remembers regular customers using it “like a canteen”. “A lot of business was done there,” he says, and, as Corbin and King’s philosophy crystallised, one principle guiding the menu was that dishes shouldn’t require fiddly deconstruction by diners. Salmon fishcakes with sorrel sauce were a favourite: “The idea was that you could eat the dish with a fork, so your eyes could always be on your guest.”

In 1981 Britain was known for its dismal cuisine and limited range of restaurants. Pasta was still seen as exotic and the country was in recession. But after deregulation boosted London’s status as a financial centre, it took off as a glossy global city and culinary playground for an increasingly aspirational and diverse population. Over the past 40 years the capital has remained Corbin and King’s heartland, as they have catered to trendsetters, gourmets and budget-conscious foodies. They have happily ridden the wave of change, as well as pushing it onwards themselves.

This is dining as theatre, a minutely choreographed performance

The first decade was challenging. The pair acquired a second site, The Ivy, in 1990, after six years of negotiations. Located in the heart of London’s theatreland, it had once been a hot spot frequented by Marlene Dietrich and Noël Coward but was now, in Corbin’s phrase, “pretty knackered”. To give it contemporary artistic zing, they commissioned works by Howard Hodgkin, Bridget Riley and Patrick Caulfield to hang on the walls. To restore its lustre, they reconditioned the famous harlequin stained-glass windows (which cost 12 times more than expected). The night before The Ivy opened, the IRA bombed the Carlton Club, half a mile away, a harbinger of further terrorist threats to come. A week later, Corbin told King that he had leukaemia.

This inauspicious start didn’t prevent The Ivy re-establishing itself as London’s leading theatreland restaurant. As A.A. Gill, a restaurant critic, observed, “It was the hot heart of fomo, long before anyone had ever acronymed it,” and “brought together all the dissonant strands of the pre-Facebook world — arty, theatre, film, publishing, journalism”. The restaurant is no longer Corbin and King’s, but under their stewardship it was a magnet for performers: table-hoppers, networkers, power-brokers cutting mighty deals, fashionable mischief-makers and a-listers at least half-serious about not being gawked at. Paparazzi loitered outside while their targets stayed late, had fun and ate shepherd’s pie.

It’s a good business principle to appeal to a wide range of customers. King paints this as a philosophy. “A restaurant exclusively full of rich people lacks texture,” he says, adding, with a twinkle, that “a playwright might be pleased to be next to a table of footballers, but not three tables of footballers.” He’s alert to the presence of regulars – “a good memory helps in this business” – but doesn’t want first-timers to feel second-class. Diners may be in the mood to effervesce, but they have licence to be unsociable. “People do difficult things in restaurants. They can be the setting for business meetings, interviews, first dates and break-ups, and we need to be mindful of that.”

Hix, who spent 17 years working for Corbin and King before launching his own venture, says that he learnt from them the importance of understanding what the customer wanted, and how they liked to be served. For Fay Maschler, a restaurant critic at the Evening Standard, there’s an element of role play in how they manage their scenes: “They cast themselves in the role of customer.” She cites their use of expensive acoustic engineers to ensure that diners’ conversations aren’t muffled or drowned.

Some restaurants impose a certain kind of experience on the diner. Both King and Corbin speak of the need not to be prescriptive. They make a spectacle not of the individual, but of the ensemble. Curved banquettes and circular tables allow customers to survey what’s going on around them, a form of set-dressing that creates pockets of intimacy yet also an air of communality and camaraderie. As in a Jane Austen novel, society comes together in order to observe the ways in which society comes together.

On a damp March morning, I visit Corbin and King’s Piccadilly office. The day is full of chilling news – the spectre of covid-19 dominates the media – but King presides with warm efficiency over a design meeting. The main topic is Manzi’s, a seafood restaurant with a nautical theme, which will occupy a previously unloved stretch of the pedestrian-only Bateman’s Buildings, just south of Soho Square. With 268 covers, 66 of them on an outside terrace, it’s the second-biggest restaurant that Corbin and King have created.

The planned launch is two months away (it has now been moved to October), and the conversation is predicated on the premise of “business as usual”. The 8.30am briefing begins with Shayne Brady, a designer, explaining the past week’s progress. Brady, an effusive 30-something Irishman in a tightly fastened double-breasted blazer and black rollneck, launches into an update about the latest version of the drip trays that will sit on the bar.

King immediately questions the way that Manzi’s logo appears on the trays. Exactly which shade of blue is it and what will the profile of the logo be? Once the minutiae have been clinched, discussion moves on to samples of acoustic ceiling material, the fish-scale detail for the menu box outside the restaurant, the durability of different brands of leather upholstery. Will a particular design of etched-glass panel be easy to clean? What are the virtues of using a certain kind of tough resin flooring around the dumb waiters, and from which angles, if any, will it be visible to diners?

The passion for design is something King and Corbin have shared since first meeting. Corbin unabashedly describes himself as “anal”, and traces his interest to his father, who was a cabinet-maker before gravitating into “making caravans at a time when caravans were a luxury product”.

Even the menus, which pass through ten drafts before being finalised, are minor works of art. At some of their restaurants they exist in as many as 20 different versions, and the company uses three different printing firms. “Decision-making is not swift,” explains Helen Smith, the long-serving administrator, “and that goes for everything from buying a restaurant to choosing a teaspoon.” She says this not in tones of horror, but with hushed reverence. The slow rigour of a project’s conception translates into sleekness in the finished product.

Business as usual was not to be. Ten days after our meeting Corbin and King closed all their sites, as restaurants were doing in much of the rest of the world. Diners retreated to their own kitchens, their own ovens, their own daily bread. Food prepared by others, enjoyed in the company of strangers, was a symbol of all that had been left behind. Lockdown may not be the exile familiar to the imagined heroes of Corbin and King’s restaurants, but the sense of life being snatched from our grasp is one that now resonates with many of us.

No wonder we were so keen to regain it, even if that world is a little more distant, a little less carefree, than we remember. On the evening of July 4th, across England, pubs and restaurants were finally allowed to open their doors again. Corbin and King opened four of their six restaurants.

A couple of days later I visit Fischer’s. The atmosphere is reassuringly unchanged. As soon as I step inside, it feels as though I’m preparing to board the Orient Express; the giant clock in its octagonal case could have been transplanted from some railway terminus in deepest Mitteleuropa. There are, of course, innovations. On arrival my temperature is taken by a machine that flashes green and gives a reading of 36.3°C – a solid pass mark – and I’m escorted further in. The tables are newly spaced out. On each napkin sits a pouch of hand sanitiser the size of a sugar sachet. The menus are now wipe-clean; patrons who don’t want to touch one can consult the bill of fare on their phone. When a group leaves, a waiter uses an odourless spray and disposable towels to sanitise the tables, bentwood chairs and banquettes they have occupied.

The room is emptier and this new spaciousness will hurt profits even if it fills up. Yet the tone is tactfully upbeat rather than antiseptic and solemn. Staff aren’t masked or gloved, and there isn’t a visor or perspex screen in sight. There’s a discreet buzz. The nearest table may be two metres away, but I can see that its occupants, as if in thrall to their surroundings, have chosen Wiener schnitzel, which they slice up with what look like Tyrolean hunting knives; their cheesy noodles, known as Käsespätzle, are suggestive of alpine Gemütlichkeit.

I think again of Stefan Zweig, a casualty of an age in which barbarism and chaos banished elegance and order. For a time it looked as though all restaurants might become shuttered relics of “the world of yesterday”. Now there are grounds for hope and cheer.

The restaurant remains a symbol of freedom. It enshrines the idea of choice – the existence of choice, that is, and our capacity to make choices. Fourteen different kinds of coffee, including one spiked with mandarin liqueur, and the possibility of having a milkshake or a Calvados instead. As Chris Corbin muses in a sunnier moment, speaking for himself and the business as much as for those who pass through the restaurant doors: “We’re not artists or musicians. But still, a restaurant is an extension of yourself, or a vehicle to express yourself. Why shouldn’t everything in it give pleasure?”■

Illustrations Vince McIndoe