Le Caprice: the world’s neighbourhood restaurant
London's favourite restaurant, Gentleman's Journal visit Richard Caring's Piccadilly eatery
Words: Joseph Bullmore
Not many restaurants have revolving doors these days. But then again, not many restaurants these days are quite like Le Caprice. The advantage, of course, is that the door to the Grand Dame of St James’ is always open. At any time of the day or night you might spot Le Caprice’s faithful clientele – aged 25 or 105 – slinking back into the monochrome dining room like a wayward teenager retreating to a beloved and indulgent godfather.
Some come for cheese on toast at midnight, when the wine has taken hold and the wife has taken the Volvo. Others pop by for pudding at breakfast, or a sharpener at midday, or an up-bucking steak at the close of the markets, or a lovely combination of all three.
It’s this same clubby atmosphere that every restaurant opening today attempts to emulate with aproned waiters who call you by your first name and crouch down by your table like you’re six and have tattoos and don’t write the order down and say “no worries, guys” when their upsell for a hispi cabbage fritter fails to land. But you can’t fake this stuff.
The staff – from the Maitre d’ to the general manager to the barmen – make you feel like you’re on the right side of some wild and flattering inside joke, with knowing smiles and nods and snatches of gossip. The general effect is of being jostled lovingly into having a good time by an excellent country house host, who knows that you could do with some more red when you say “oh, I really shouldn’t”, and casts no judgement when you ask for a third(!) gravy boat of sauce bearnaise.
(At one point near the end of the party, wary of a looming deadline the next morning, I told the barman that I’d decided to forgo any pudding wine with my pain perdu. He looked at me with sweet and earnest Hungarian disapproval, pulled a bottle of vintage Yquem from a secret fridge, and said “nobody skips this one”, while filling up my glass like apple juice at a fifth birthday party.)
The glorious trickle-down of all this chummy and gracious service is that the patrons of Le Caprice feel utterly at home. Though the dining room is scattered with dignitaries and luminaries of every feather, it’s not uncommon for conversation to break out between tables, and diners to sashay across the floor to swap a forkful of runner beans for trade secrets, second wives, or a couple of chips.
(A note on the chips, by the way: Nicholas Coleridge – he of Condé Nast fame and a good barometer for “the done thing” in every sphere of life – always swaps the thin and rustling pommes allumettes on the menu for what he terms the “fat chips”. He’s right, actually.) The couple next to us at the famous dining bar slink in at some point near 11, red-faced and giggling like school children, and ask me how my steak is. I offer a piece to the wife, while the husband – a grand old boy twice my age with all the hallmarks of an offshore banking arrangement – says, sweetly, “careful, he looks a lot richer than me”.
The camaraderie here is tempered by a certain competition. The unmistakable top table at Le Caprice is table number seven, situated in the right-angle next to the windows in the first part of the dining room. From here, you get a fine view of the to-ings and fro-ings of the bar and entrance (and they can see you too, of course), and a vague sense of enclosed privacy to boot.
There is an understated hierarchy to table seven, as Nick Coleridge explains: “It used to have a very clear pecking order. Then the poor Princess of Wales died, then Jeffrey Archer disappeared off the scene for a couple of years, and Leslie Waddington [the art dealer] ate out less, so NC has got it.” After table seven comes table 10, which is two tables to the right down the banquette, and then table 15, which is sat slightly more in the thick of things. The alcove down in the further, dimmer corner of the dining room is also highly prized for larger groups and racier extramarital affairs.
Details, details. And anyway, the menu’s the same at every table. And at Le Caprice, it’s worth remembering that the customer is always wrong. Our first choice starters are rebuffed by Jesus Adorno (the distillation of Le Caprice in human form: a charcoal-tailored, 36-year veteran of the restaurant with a Little Black Book thicker than a large-print Bible) and replaced with a selection that he think would better suit our mood. These are the crispy duck salad, a minor institution that’s been updated, in the latest round of menu changes, with some sprightly watermelon. Most diners at Le Caprice order their food without ever glancing at the menu, confident that things will are largely the same as the first time they came here, sometime pre the 1991 recession.
But the bill of fare does change and adapt, piece-by-piece, almost imperceptibly, like a delicious Ship of Theseus. Alongside the duck comes the Isle of Mull scallops, delicate and charming, with a silken garlic butter. Then the steak – shareable with the neighbours, its deep golden fat rendered and charred triumphantly – and a serious chicken milanese (plus fat chips). Good wine spills forth like an Italian wedding, with a break only to apply the notorious frozen berries with hot white chocolate sauce.
It’s said that Richard Caring came to own Le Caprice by way of a joke. After he’d acquired Wentworth golf course in Surrey, the businessman approached the restaurant – his favourite in London – and asked them to help out with the clubhouse catering. “When they told me how much that would cost, I jokingly said – ‘maybe it would be cheaper if I just bought Caprice,’” he explains. “And I bought it six weeks later.”
London’s favourite restaurant, bought on a whim and a joke. That’s the spirit. For all the famous faces that have come through the revolving door (this was always Princess Diana’s preferred restaurant, while the David Bailey portraits on the wall are testament to its best-known patrons), Le Caprice knows that the biggest inside joke of all is that neither fame, nor royalty, nor money or standing mean very much at all, as long as everyone’s having a bloody good time.
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