The Park: step inside Jeremy King’s mid-century diner

The second of Jeremy King’s trio of recent London eating places – Arlington launched in March 2024; Simpsons within the Strand will observe in early 2025 – The Park is a departure for the veteran restaurateur who made Le Caprice, The Ivy and The Wolseley the seminal eating places of the Eighties, Nineteen Nineties and noughties. Not solely is The Park King’s first up to date restaurant in a brand new constructing, however it’s also his first centered on American delicacies and his first in west London, reverse the northern entrance to Kensington Gardens by Queensway Tube.

The Temper: Mid-century Midtown

The American equal of a Wolseley-style, Mitteleuropean grand café is… the diner? However whereas King has taken the basic diner tropes of wood-panelling and orange cubicles, he has filtered them by way of a mid-century, Midtown sensibility. King has mentioned his inspiration was The 4 Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Constructing, which opened in 1959, and structure is a motif all through, with partitions hung with illustrations by Le Corbusier and images by Ti Foster, son of Sir Norman. It’s dog-friendly within the daytime, when you’ve been for a stroll within the park.

The Meals: Stateside breakfasts and Cal-Ital suppers

King has acquired all of the diner particulars proper at breakfast and brunch: mugs on the tables for refillable filter espresso, stacks of fluffy pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Lunch and dinner, in the meantime, mirror the Californian-Italian delicacies pioneered by cooks akin to Alice Waters. Mains like zucchini and ricotta rollatini are billed as entrees, salads are very a lot a factor, and since it wouldn’t be a Jeremy King restaurant with out some form of schnitzel, right here there’s a rooster Milanese. An solely Italian-American wine record contains bottles from Oregon and Washington State in addition to Californian big-hitters.