The Reviews
Giles Coren, The Times
Arlington, London (9/10)
Jimi Famurewa, Evening Standard
Arlington, London (4 stars)
Jeremy King’s much-heralded comeback at Arlington (just like Buzzcocks, Bee Gees, Pixies and Dead Kennedys, there’s no ‘The’ in Arlington) has got off to a bit of a false start. The reviews are fine of course and we’ll get to those in a minute, but the ‘getting the old team back together for one last job’ narrative that had helped drive the hype about the launch has come to a sudden and unexpected denouement. King had successfully arranged the second coming of Jesus only for him to disappear again a week after the restaurant opened to the public.
Perhaps I should explain. The Jesus in question has the surname Adorno and was the original mâitre d’ of Le Caprice when Jeremy King and business partner Chris Corbin opened the celebrity-magnet restaurant back in 1981. He remained there until its closure in 2020. King persuaded Adorno back into the fold for the restaurant’s relaunch as Arlington early this month.
For London restaurant die-hards who remember the 80s and 90s as a golden age, it was a reunion that could only have been topped by the original line up of Queen announcing a comeback tour. Nigella Lawson posted on Instagram, ‘The room as mood-liftingly and glowingly lovely as ever, presided over, as of old, by @adorno_jesus and the Prime Mover @jeremyrbking. My heart is full’. Writing in the Evening Standard, Dylan Jones said, ‘legendary mâitre d’, Jesus Adorno . . . . is there, poached from Brown’s Hotel, where he was never given the freedom to create restaurant magic. And that’s what Arlington is — restaurant magic, a fabulous creation that manages to feel both timeless and contemporary.’
Except now Adorno is not there. ‘With great sorrow I handed my notice this morning to @jeremyrbking @arlingtonrestaurant , it wasn’t a good fit for me and I decided it wasn’t right, #familytime ❤️❤️’ was the short but sweet message he posted on Instagram on 18 March. A day later, Norman Fu, chef lecturer at Westminster Kingsway College and a prolific diner, posted on his Instagram account that he and his dining companion were told by a female restaurant manager at Arlington, ‘You don’t have time for dessert’ even though they had 25 minutes left of a 90 minute time slot. Fu described it as, ‘the most un-hospitable incident I have EVER encountered in a restaurant. None of the desserts in the menu would have necessitated anything more than putting it on a plate, adding a bit of garnish and sending it out.’ Fu copied Jeremy King into the post but at the time of writing there was no reply from him.
It’s not clear if Adorno was still working at the restaurant when the incident happened (Fu says he didn’t see him working the floor that day) and the reasons for his swift exit are yet to be made explicit. I’m not inferring in any way that the two are related. Industry gossip is that Adorno asked for more money, perhaps spurred on by the glowing press he had received, and was refused. Others say it was a clash of egos between King and Adorno, but no one really knows. Fu’s experience may have been an isolated incident (there are a couple of negative reviews on TripAdvisor but at least one of them is of dubious origin) but taken alongside Adorno’s exit, it’s an unfortunate start for a restaurant where the food is a secondary consideration to the experience as a whole, including the faultless service King’s restaurants are renowned for.
Adorno has subsequently said that he is considering ‘some interesting offers’. Richard Caring has plans to open a version of Le Caprice (he owns the rights to the name and refused to allow King to use it, hence Arlington) in 2025 at the new Chancery Rosewood Hotel in the old US Embassy Building on Grosvenor Square. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that one of those ‘interesting offers’ could have come from Caring. There is famously no love lost between Caring and King, so for Caring to not only have King’s restaurant name but also his mâitre d’ would be raising the middle finger in some style.
None of this has impacted on the restaurant’s bookings or early reviews. ‘I like Jeremy enormously and admire his work,’ says Giles Coren in his Times review. ‘I simply do not have the psychopathic genetic mutation that his dear friend and Le Caprice’s great champion, AA Gill, had, which allowed him to write hideous things about his friends’ restaurants if he felt they merited it.’
In Coren’s eyes, Arlington is ‘brilliant’ and the food, ‘a laid-back alternative to the try-hard, hyper-seasonal, super-local, home-fermented, story-of-my-life tasting menus and, well, extruded Michelin twaddle of today.’ That includes a crispy duck and watercress salad with a ‘splash of ketchup in the duck sauce that makes it special’, an ‘utterly bonkers’ bang bang chicken and a ‘plain and decent’ shepherd’s pie. I’m simply thrilled honey.
Perhaps more important than the food are the signature 80s-era ‘blinds and the David Bailey photographs, those black-framed rattan chairs’ and that Arlington can still attract ‘famous arts and media faces’. The current crop that includes film producer Kris Thykier, comedy producer Kenton Allen, Tom Parker Bowles, Sir Nicholas Coleridge and Charles Dance sound a little less impressive than the original crowd of ‘Princess Diana and Mick Jagger and Princess Margaret and Elton John’, but are apparently sufficient to give licence to 80s-style excessive behaviour. ‘My friend’s girlfriend knocked over our wine bucket — totally not her fault, it was far too close to her chair when she kicked back to dance on the table’. Totally understandable: accidently knocking over wine buckets is one the of the main reasons I gave up dancing on restaurant tables.
Jimi Famurewa didn’t dance on the tables but his meal did leave him ‘hoping that I get another chance soon to roll back the years, push aside any misgivings, and party like it’s 1989’. Those misgivings seem to amount to a treacle tart that was ‘maybe a little unrelenting in its richness’, the fact that ‘getting a table before 10pm is already a bit of an impossibility’ and ‘the sadness of Adorno’s short-lived second coming’.
Other than that, he appears to be fully on board for the ‘exercise in damp-cheeked, infantilising nostalgia’, ‘the discreet glinting razzmatazz of the famous room’ and ‘The feted salmon fish cake, messily dribbled in sorrel-flecked white sauce . . . . the essence of a perfect fish pie deconstructed and redescribed to the palate like a particularly juicy anecdote’. I’ve made those salmon fishcakes at home numerous times. They contain mashed potato, salmon, tomato ketchup, anchovy essence, mustard and some seasoning. The razzmatazz really was glinting that day wasn’t it?
How much impact Adordo’s departure will have on the success of Arlington only time will tell. If I had to guess, I’d say that no one outside a tiny elite London dining bubble will really care that Adorno’s stint at Arlington was shorter than Liz Truss’s premiership. Jeremy King has navigated some serious business storms in recent times and by comparison Adorono’s departure is a storm in a teacup. Maybe there isn’t a mâitre d’ out there quite like him, but there will be one enough like him, and you can be sure King will track them down.
Coren’s review
Best line: ‘It isn’t Le Caprice. It isn’t allowed to be, legally. When Richard Caring bought Le Caprice from Luke Johnson, who had bought it from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, who had bought it from someone else, who had bought it from someone else, going all the way back to the 1520s, when the roisterous young Henry VIII used to eat there with Anne Boleyn’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I don’t think I’m ready to commit to lunch at 2pm in two month’s time.
Famurewa’s review
Best line: ‘if, like me, you are of the generation that mostly know that restaurant as a set of mythical stories related to David Bailey photos, salmon fishcakes and Princess Diana looking out from a perma-reserved favourite table, then there is a chance that eating here might occasionally feel like you’ve gatecrashed a lavish and emotional reunion party’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: See above.
Tom Parker Bowles, Mail on Sunday
Camille, London
I did Camille in Smashed #16, twice (if you haven’t read #16, why not take the opportunity to do so now, it’s a particularly good one. Subscribe if you like too, I won’t mind). So let’s not go through it all again, suffice to say TPB doesn’t add a great deal to what we already know about the place. Have a gander at the website if you need to get up to speed.
Best line: ‘the menu here is unashamedly robust, no-nonsense, nose-to-tail stuff, a sort-of tour around France in an old Aston Martin’
Worst line: ‘Homemade boudin noir is equally rugged, a great thick slab of the stuff studded with alabaster chunks of fat, topped with raw egg yolk and a grating of fresh horseradish. It’s soft and mellow, although it does crave a little more acidity to cut through all that luscious richness’.
I’ll be honest with you. I haven’t been in the best of moods writing Smashed this week. You may have picked up on that. The newsletter is more snippy and pedantic and less humorous than usual. Normal service will be resumed once I’ve figured out what I want normal service to look like, but in the meantime, TPB has really rubbed me up the wrong way with his casual, yet brutal use of THE WORST CLICHÉ IN FOOD WRITING: ‘cuts through the richness’.
The sentence not only works perfectly well when you remove the words ‘to cut through all that luscious richness’ but you also have the massive bonus of not having to read a variation of THE WORST CLICHÉ IN FOOD WRITING. Richness is a horrible word. Say it out loud five times in a row. Now you hate it as much as I do. It’s also a very broad and inexact term. Like any cliché, THE WORST CLICHÉ IN FOOD WRITING is just lazy writing; it doesn’t describe anything specific or exact.
Why does the richness have to be cut through anyway? With fucking anything?! Why? Not everything has to be perfectly balanced. Maybe I want a plateful of cloying fatty stuff once in a while. Leave me alone with my ‘richness’ and go and ‘cut through’ something more worthwhile, like your word count.
‘It’s soft and mellow, although it does crave a little more balancing acidity’ - there, fixed it for you.
Did the review make me want to book a table: Maybe when I’ve calmed down.
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