The Park is the new restaurant from Jeremy King, and it sits in a golden building to the north of Hyde Park, just off Queensway. This is an interesting district compared with Knightsbridge – it is still capable of reality – but isn’t every-where interesting compared with Knightsbridge? The Park is Art Deco of course: the presiding aesthetic of familiarity, snatched joy and inevitable doom.
It looks like an exquisitely appointed cruise ship of the mid-20th century
King is a specialist in grand cafés. He opened the Wolseley in Piccadilly and the Delaunay on the Aldwych, though he lost them to his feckless backers in 2022, and has begun again with Arlington by the Ritz, Simpson’s on the Strand, pending, and this. Queensway has a grand café now, and I am pleased for it. King’s restaurants do not gentrify sobbing London districts: they are more interesting, and better priced, than that. To idiots who ask ‘Who will go to Queensway for food?’, King says the River Café is in Hammersmith and that is an immutable truth for you.
Normally King fits himself into an existing building and builds a restaurant from that. The Park, though, is as new and welcome as a baby: a curling edifice on the park with the restaurant on the ground floor and flats above. It smells not of fresh paint, which is predictable, but of fresh wood. At teatime on Wednesday the staff teem amid wood, tan leather and glowing lighting. It is large but divided into smaller parts, as the Wolseley is, and is still intimate. Paintings are of trees, or happy women. King says it has the air of a diner but to me it looks like an exquisitely appointed cruise ship of the mid-20th century, and it feels like a wholly coherent but transient dreamworld. This is King’s specific gift, and the reason he has never opened a bad restaurant, even in Islington. Some restaurants connect themselves to place or time, some feel like cruise ships and offer infinite possibilities of their own. It’s hard to describe, but a great restaurant is something intangible: something you sense rather than know, and what you sense is potential. A great restaurant is an idea, and that’s quite something to conjure when selling chocolate ‘mud’ pie. I have a hunch that if King has a favourite restaurant not his own, it’s Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca. All his restaurants – the Austrian–style grand café Fischer’s in Marylebone particularly – sense danger and decline beyond the door, and this one too feels like a plush refuge. I love it for this.
The Park is American-themed, and it sells two types of hotdogs, lobster roll, baked New York cheesecake and cheeseburgers. There are salads, sandwiches, pasta of many kinds, fish, the inevitable chicken Milanese and fat rib-eye. If this reads like glut, I don’t experience it like that: it feels airier and less emotionally loaded than mere will to obesity. It is open 17 hours a day and its ideal fictional customer is Jay Gatsby but redeemed.
We eat swiss chard and ricotta tortellini; tagliatelle bolognese; a heritage tomato and basil salad; mixed pea and pistachio salad; pistachio tiramisu; the baked New York cheesecake. It is all superb, particularly the puddings, but food is barely the point of a restaurant like this. It is, rather, a source of comfort of which food is just a part: parental love in wood.
King has done it again: another perfect restaurant, and this time for the Starmer age. I never doubted it. Next, Simpson’s.
The Park, Queensway, London W2; 020 3959 9000.
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