365 Days Of Trying - Day 40
King For A Day
The thing I love about London more than anything else in the world, is how she makes you feel special when you need it the most.
With nothing more than a £20 note in my pocket today, I was treated like a superstar. Tom Cruise wouldn’t have been treated any better (and I crossed paths with his cousin this afternoon, so I should know).
Sunday lunch is my one major food treat of the week. It Guarantees I get vegetables and hot food and least once in seven days and sometimes, just sometimes, like today, the exceptional service I’ve become accustomed to since moving to Britain’s capital.
On Upper Street in Islington I spot a sign that offers the not so ubiquitous Sunday Lunch. It’s for a venue that in recent months has turned into a membership club, but my Cocktail friends will recall it as The Dolls House. However on a Sunday it is once again open to the public for its traditional roast.
It normally doesn’t take cash, but quick as a flash the matire de said he’d put it on his card if I wanted to try their wares and could give him the exact money, when I’d asked.
It being February and their Sunday Roast not yet established in the local environs calendar. I was seated in the restaurant, as a lone diner. I felt like a megastar insisting they clear the room for me. Not only that I was being treated as if I’d spent a fortune rather than the minimum there. It was something I’ve much missed in the City.
With a gratuity now expected and included in the bill, service levels have plummeted across the Capital, but this experience was wonderfully different.
It reminded me of The Ivy in its Corbyn & King heyday and Chris’s mannerisms though Italian not French, were the spit of the greatest hospitality man I’ve encountered in London and now a dear friend, Thierry Tomasin, who I met on Good Food Live when he was Britain's leading Sommelier at Le Gavroche and now runs Gordon Ramsay’s Grill at The Savoy Hotel.
In between those two major milestones he ran Aubergine and then L’Oranger, before he set up on his own. I held my Birthday party at his fabulous restaurant Angelus (named after the bell that called him in from playing in the French fields of his mother’s home) just by Hyde Park Stables. Fay Mascheler coined the term Gastronomique Pub for the venue in her review and the Creme Brulee was legendary.
After that I head to Christie's Auction House to see the Barry Humphries Collection before it’s sold next week. On the walls a quote from Clive James. Clive was a neighbour of mine in Shad Thames, and he and I speaking at the Hay Festival is one of the reasons you’ll always see me in a hat - you need to ask me for the full story which also involved Bob Geldoff, Nick Broomfield & an MP.
It was a fabulous eclectic mix of his art collection, his book collection, which included a first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which he wrote in the London Library, where I of course was an emerging writer 2021/22.
The evening ends with Mario Van Peebles at The BFI watching the first screening in Britain of his latest film Outlaw Posse. I spot John Caroll Lynch was not only in it as an actor but also gained a producer credit - so, as he and I had a fun night out in Soho when my writer friend Logan Sparks brought his fabulous film and Harry Dean-Stanton’s last, Lucky, which Lynch had directed, to the 2017 London Film Festival. I asked the first question about his contribution to the film.
As myself and host Elizabeth Jones were leaving we bumped into my fellow Colourful Radio, Meet The Critics presenter, Pauline Harris German who I’d not seen for a few years - we’d both done two seasons of the show together across 2014-2016, discovering she was clearly one of the organisers for the evening.
No house. No money. Yet still King of London!