Jeremy King is a devotee of the dice. The restaurateur behind the Wolseley and the Delaunay gave up his place at Cambridge University in the 1970s on a throw of the dice after reading George Cockcroft’s cult novel The Dice Man.
“It was something I did casually about deciding where I should go for dinner,” King said in a speech about his career last year. “[But] then I ended up throwing the dice on my life.”
When the envelope from Cambridge dropped through the letterbox of the family home in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, he threw the dice. The throw said: “If you become a manager within a month of your 21st birthday then you will stay in this business for the rest of your life.”
He had part-time job at Charco’s wine bar, a celebrity haunt off Kings Road in Chelsea. Within a month of his 21st birthday he was appointed the manager.
The dice kept calling, though, sending him off to become a merchant banker. His careers adviser at school had told him he would make a “a really brilliant accountant”. But in reality he found it terribly boring and described working in the City as “hell”.
Then it was back to restaurants, this time at New York-style brasserie Joe Allen in Covent Garden. After work he would hang out at Langan’s Brasserie where he struck up a firm friendship with then general manager Chris Corbin. The pair, then 26 and 28, decided they should open their own restaurant.
Within a year they had taken over Le Caprice in 1981, but almost immediately fell out with their financial backers as they couldn’t agree how to run a modern restaurant. King persuaded his mum and dad to back him instead. “My parents mortgaged their house and we bought the lease. We were young with 100% control. No one could tell us what to do,” he said.
Over the past 40 years Corbin and King have been described as “near deities on the London restaurant scene”, the “Rodgers and Hammerstein of relaxed eating” and “the Rolls and Royce of London gastronomy”.
But now their Corbin & King empire – which includes the Wolseley next to the Ritz on Piccadilly, Delaunay on Aldwych, Brasserie Zédel by Piccadilly Circus, Fischer’s in Marylebone, Café Wolseley at Bicester Village, and Bellanger in Islington – is under fire from American-born Thai billionaire William Heinecke.
Heinecke’s Minor International hospitality investment fund bought a 74% stake in Corbin & King for £58m in 2017 and on Tuesday forced the company into administration warning it was “unable to meet its financial obligations” and claiming King, who serves as Corbin & King’s chief executive, had repeatedly rejected “proposals to recapitalise the company”.
King accuses Heinecke of making a “power play” for full control of the company, and said that post-lockdown the restaurants were “trading extremely well” and there was “absolutely no need to go into administration”.
Quoting 18th-century Soho poet William Blake to the Financial Times, he said: “A truth that is told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.”
While he has mostly worked running restaurants, King has always considered himself a literary man and has admitted to “secretly wishing I had been in the theatre”.
“But of course restaurateuring is, in a funny way, theatre,” he told the Association of Jewish Refugees in a speech last year (King isn’t Jewish, but his children from his first marriage to theatre producer-turned therapist Debra Hauer are.) “You learn your lines, you practise, you rehearse and then suddenly it’s makeup, costumes and the curtain’s up and you’re performing.”
Contrary to expectations, King says “deep down I am an extremely shy person” but he is transformed “in the context of a restaurant’s stage”.
King’s Rolodex must rate as one of London’s most extensive, as his restaurants have been – and still are – popular with both FTSE 100 chief executives having power breakfasts as well as members of royalty and celebrities enjoying themselves.
He describes one night at Le Caprice in the 1980s when Norma Heyman, the producer of films including Dangerous Liaisons, came in requesting a table for eight without a reservation. “Suddenly the table [at which] Laurence Olivier was celebrating his birthday at got up earlier than expected, thank God,” he told the Jewish refugee association. “Then I saw flashlights … and Liz Taylor promptly sat down on the same seat that Olivier had just vacated”.
Princess Diana was a regular at Le Caprice in the 1980s, always sitting at the most coveted “table nine”. The same table at which Jeffrey Archer – who named checked Le Caprice in his fateful 1986 alibi – ate his first meal after being freed from jail for perjury.
Madonna famously ate sticky toffee pudding with Harold Pinter and Tom Cruise at the Ivy, while the Beckhams prefer the Delaunay. Lucian Freud dined at the Wolseley most nights up until his death in 2011.
King sat for Freud, becoming one of the artist’s last subjects. King also owns a Freud, which sits alongside an Andy Warhol print of Goethe in the main living room of his five-storey Grade II-listed Belgravia home. Also in his collection are works by Damien Hirst and Robert Longo.
His second wife, American interior designer Lauren Gurvich King, says King’s love of art “stems from curating and collecting works for the original Ivy, which helped with the careers of many YBAs”.
The Angel of the North sculptor Antony Gormley, a friend of King’s who made an “inhabitable sculpture” for the Beaumont Hotel, said: “They [Corbin & King] have always understood art as an integral part of the way an environment makes you feel. Their restaurants have never been just about food but the curating of an experience.”
The Hauer-King children have inherited their parents’ love of the arts. Jonah Hauer-King is an actor who starred in the acclaimed BBC drama series World on Fire, Hannah Hauer-King is a producer for the all-female Damsels in Distress theatre company, and Margot Hauer-King is an advertising executive in New York.
• This article was amended on 28 January 2022. Corbin & King no longer owns The Beaumont in Mayfair.
