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Everything must change, Lampedusa's Tancredi tells his uncle in The Leopard, if everything is to stay the same. At Rules restaurant, which has served London since 1798, it has taken a change of landlord to keep the steak and kidney pudding exactly where it is. This month, the building at 34-35 Maiden Lane in Covent Garden was given to the National Trust, making it the first time the Trust has acquired a historic restaurant that remains open for business.
It’s a gloomy grey day in London when I step into the warm, carpeted reception of Rules. The wall-to-wall carpet and plush velvet seating swallow the sound of the outside world. Diners have settled into cosy banquettes and the walls of the softly lit room are populated with gilded plaques and hunting trophies in the way only Victorian maximalism can master.
How much does it matter that we keep places like this alive? Do we need to sit at the tables that Dickens, Thackeray and H. G. Wells dined at? Or sit in the private dining room named after Graham Greene, who wrote a scene in The End of The Affair – in which Maurice Bendix and Sarah Miles fall in love over a dish of onions – set at Rules?
J-P Mayhew, who has owned the freehold for 40 years, says there are ‘few restaurants in the world that have endured the test of time’ like Rules. It has survived redevelopment plans, changing tastes and the Blitz, through hard work and ‘some extraordinary strokes of luck’. The freehold, valued at around £11 million, comes with the restaurant's archive of menus, visitor books, caricatures, photographs and stained glass, and the rent Rules pays will go towards the National Trust's conservation work.
This isn’t the first time the old place been rescued. In 1971, when plans to widen the nearby Strand threatened to take Rules with it, John Betjeman defended the restaurant in a speech that helped save it, proclaiming it ‘a place which has constantly been used by actors, managers and famous people’. He described it as having ‘an invisible atmosphere, just as a church frequented by praying people acquires an atmosphere. We can sense it, and it will not photograph.’ Betjeman was honoured by Rules with a room in his name.
Ricky McMenemy, who has worked at Rules since 1989 and became its owner in 2022, is now the Trust's tenant. He has described the restaurant as a surrogate child. When he first arrived, it was run-down and needed serious investment, and he says the answer was a gradual evolution rather than a makeover. ‘We never wanted it to be fossilised, or set in aspic,’ he told CNN this summer. On the donation, he said the business looks forward to ‘another two centuries in this, our home’.
A handful of other historic restaurants come to mind where Betjeman’s ‘invisible atmosphere’ exists – and Rules may not be the first place I’d choose to go if I was looking for a good dinner in such a setting, although the bar does serve an excellent martini.
The Quality Chop House on Farringdon Road has fed Londoners since 1869, when it opened as a ‘Progressive Working Class Caterer’. When Will Lander and Dan Morgenthau took it on in 2012, it reopened with its Victorian interior intact, including the wrought iron pew-like benches (which are listed so they had to keep them), and it is now one of the best-known restaurants in London, serving some one of the finest Belted Galloway T-bones I’ve eaten recently.
Wiltons, which began in 1742 as a shellfish stall near the Haymarket and now occupies a prime site on Jermyn Street, has been owned by the Hambro (banking) family since 1942, when Olaf Hambro purchased it for £1,200. It still serves oysters and game – I recently had a superb meal of roast grouse there – to a room that behaves as if none of that upheaval ever happened. The plush interiors give you a sense of reassurance and comfort: a place I’d want to be if war was raging outside. If a restaurant can change address that often and remain Wiltons, then what we value is not so much the bricks and mortar, it is a way of running a room – and the diner's experience of it.
Simpson's Tavern, down an alley off Cornhill in the City, shows what happens when the walls survive and the thing inside them doesn't. Founded in 1757, it was long known as London's oldest chophouse, and famous for its stewed cheese. It has recently reopened as Cloth Cornhill, run by the team behind Cloth in Smithfield (whose townhouse was, as it happens, once Betjeman's home). The historic interior has been carefully restored, but the menu is new, British but updated – oysters come with apple and lovage and pies with venison and prunes. ‘We can modernise the offering,’ says co owner Ben Butterworth, ‘but it’s the community that has gathered here for generations that truly makes the place.’
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Then there's Simpson's in the Strand, not to be confused with the Tavern (this is the grand version). It opened in 1828 as a chess club and coffee house, and was reopened under Jeremy King after a major refurbishment, as a ‘big-theatre brasserie’ with two restaurants and two bars. The carving trolleys are back.
Each of these was saved by a restaurateur with taste, capital and a landlord's goodwill – which is to say, partly by luck. That is what makes the rescue of Rules unusual. The Trust has not stepped in to run a restaurant, or to decide what it ought to be. It has taken the one thing a restaurant cannot easily control – the building – and left the kitchen to the people who know what to do with it. Hilary McGrady, the Trust's director-general, calls Rules ‘an outstanding piece of living history’. It is a generous phrase, and this time it comes with a deed.
Tancredi's line was meant cynically, change as a trick to hold on to privilege. At Rules, the change is the opposite – a sincere one, made so that the golden syrup sponge stays on the menu. Whether that’s where you would choose to eat such a dessert is a question each diner answers for themselves. But when the people who own the buildings and the people who love the rooms finally agree, it seems worth noticing.
