In his new book Table Hopping, Dylan Jones revisits his assertion that part of the thrill of going out to eat at a restaurant is showing off. The book turns London’s restaurant scene into a kind of anthropology, charting the revolution in eating out from the 1970s to now, from food fashion to restaurant critics, to chef feuds.
The Power of the Right Table
Jones recalls that some say the London Power Restaurant died when Richard Caring closed Le Caprice. He used to entertain in the famous Art Deco dining room, situated behind the Ritz Hotel, at least three times a week, and where he sat was fundamental to the lunch’s success. There were seven tables it was acceptable to sit at, with three in particular being the very best. If you were in the corner, by the window, where Princess Diana used to sit, you knew you had made it, especially if there were serious bold face names in the room. As did everyone else in the room, which meant you received a lot of hate as well as a smidge of respect.
Now that there are so many great restaurants in London, and the West End media nexus is so diffuse, it has become more difficult to choose restaurants that still mean something in the way they used to. With most places it doesn’t really matter where you sit, which makes them little but glorified refuelling exercises, doing little for the power dynamic, and making it difficult to show off.
Five Restaurants Where Seating Still Matters
Jones says that right now there are five restaurants in London where it really matters where you sit: Scott’s, in Mount Street (if you’re not facing the door there’s little point being there); the River Café, in Hammersmith (if they try to seat you by the pizza oven, it’s best to feign death); The Wolseley (the four inner corner tables only); Colbert, in Sloane Square (the best seats are exactly the opposite of where you think they are); and Wiltons, in Jermyn Street (if you’re not sitting in a booth, you may as well be eating in Pret-a-Manger).
Wiltons is probably the best-kept secret in London, the venerable fish restaurant which claims to be the capital’s oldest (1742, they reckon, although some of their customers Jones thinks might be older), and which many people still think is a private members’ club. Jones first got taken there by S I Newhouse, the Manhattan genius who steered Condé Nast to glory, back when glossy magazines were really a thing. Newhouse knew more about the power dynamics of publishing than anyone Jones had ever met and made a point of taking his British editors to Wiltons on his annual trips to London because he thought it was what they deserved. To him it was the quintessential British experience, assuming all the other diners were either lords or ladies; Jones never contradicted him, even when he knew that most people in the room worked for Goldman Sachs.
A Tradition of Claret and Fizz
These days Jones goes to Wiltons six times a year, to have dinner with Tony Parsons, one of his oldest friends. They didn’t meet until the Eighties, although they soon worked out that they spent much of the Seventies squashed into the same dingy punk basements jumping up and down to the same electrified blitzkrieg, supping warm lager-style liquid and eating the same salmonella burgers. Wiltons couldn’t be more different, as it’s probably the most traditional, the most orthodox restaurant in the city. The last time Jones went he ate eel followed by kidneys, which is not the kind of thing you get in modern molecular restaurants. Here, you drink claret and fizz, and not much else. They also take great pride in not “keeping up”, while their dress code still encourages men to wear jackets and ties.
There is one booth in Wiltons that is better than all the others, of course, but Jones wouldn’t dare divulge it in case it irritated Tony. The last thing he’d want to do is rub an old punk rocker up the wrong way, because while they both wear Ralph Lauren these days, he’s fairly certain that Tony still has a safety pin secreted somewhere on his person.
Not that Jones has ever seen it, of course, not in Wiltons. Because in Wiltons you only see the world as they want you to see it. Even if you’re sitting at the wrong table.
