Diary says that we went out quite a bit midweek that week.
Tuesday 29 May – dinner at Jim Thompson’s at 617 King’s Road. A Thai brasserie type place. With Kim, Micky, Anthea and Mitchell. I think we were far more impressed with our company than we were with the place, which was crowded and noisy.
Thursday 31 May – Marie Logan’s leaving do (from Z/Yen) at The Dive in James Street. Another crowded place, if I remember correctly.
Yogi Berra famously said (although almost certainly did not originate the quip):
“Nobody ever goes there anymore — it’s too crowded.”
That quip certainly seems to have applied to both of these venues, which both closed down not long after our May 2001 visits.
We didn’t often go to seriously fashionable restaurants with Kim & Micky. Kim is vegetarian and tends to order “plain” more or less wherever we go. But Kim is partial to Indian food and this Chelsea place, under big name chef Vineet Bhatia, was making media waves by gaining a Michelin Star.
Just imagine – an Indian restaurant with a Michelin Star! Well, in 2001, it was unusual – indeed I think a first.
In those days Zaika was in Chelsea – so all those readers who are screaming at their screens that Kensington and Chelsea are not the same place…stop screaming. Zaika moved to Kensington a year or so after our visit.
This was, actually, a very memorable meal and memorable evening. The food was exceptionally good, as was the ambiance and everything about the experience.
All four of us were on good form. Whether that was down to Vineet’s skills or not I cannot say. We could all four be on good form without eating at a place of Zaika’s quality.
Here’s a review of the place from the Observer a few weeks before our visit. Reading it has made me feel hungry!
I needed to do some electronic archaeology to ascertain that John White & I ate at Cigala that night. But I do remember the evening and the restaurant well. A great meal and, at that time, a rare opportunity to meet up.
Work was at full pelt at that time for both of us, plus John was up to his elbows in little ones. Here’s a quote from our e-mail exchange arranging this one:
We must get something in the diary. Call me at the office. Here all day Friday. Home is usually not good because I am either in the middle of cooking, eating or controlling children. When you rang on Monday I was literally up to my elbows in vomit. Joy. Don’t ever have children.
Cigala was a new opening at that time and had been getting rave reviews. Here’s Jay Rayner, for example.
I ate “well posh” all day that day. I had spent the morning running a Fishy Bourse game at St James’s Palace for delegates at a Marine Stewardship Council event. I got Prince Charles to hand out fluffy fish in the prize-giving, which I thought was pretty cool and His Royal Highness didn’t seem to mind.
The Daily Telegraph was strangely silent about the fluffy fish.
Lunch included the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) as well as the MSC (coincidentally, John White was soon to move on to the timber trade and encounter FSC certification a lot).
Fortunately for we guests, the St James’s Palace chefs cooked MSC product rather than FSC product. Even more fortunately, at that time, Western Australian rock lobster was one of the few species MSC certified, so that’s what we ate. It was delicious. I mean, someone has to eat that sort of thing.
I subsequently discovered that my mum called Linda at our office several times to ask for more copies of the photograph below – she must have sent the darned thing to everyone she knew…and maybe even some people she didn’t know.
Oh mum!
Prince Charles, John Gummer and me, with the fluffy fish cunningly hidden about my person
…informed by the fact that Janie and I were constantly unavailable on Saturdays because we were going to the theatre.
Why don’t we all go and see…
…I can almost hear Kim suggesting to Janie.
Why not? I can imagine all of us agreeing to this with ease. This production soon became one of the hottest tickets in town, not least because model and celebrity Kelly Brook was playing the role of a pole/table dancer. Janie sorted out the tickets – presumably ahead of the reviews and brouhaha, £16.50 x 4 according to her diary…
…plus some very specific timings to get all of us from The Riverside to the Thai Bistro for supper after the show…
…as if we would need the heat of Tom Yum after the hot totty on show at The Riverside.
But who would have possibly imagined, at that time, that Janie would, a mere 17 years later, decide to give pole dancing a go herself, with considerable (albeit, mercifully, private) success.
Why a picture of me eating wonton soup? Because our diary notes for Hil & Chris’s weekend visit are light on detail, other than Janie’s “menu”:
Wonton soup;
Shin of veal;
Triffle [sic].
Despite the trifling spelling mistake, I expect the desert was just as enticing as the other courses. The wonton soup will have been my contribution and it will have been excellent.
I have even less intelligence on the first seasonal Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinner. It was a Cafe Rogues [spelling mistake intentional] in Maida Vale. But the soon-to-be traditional sounding of the alarms and post mortem e-mails from John Random were not forthcoming back then…
…or if they were forthcoming, they self-destructed in five seconds or something like that.
I don’t think the tradition of quizzing and trophy awarding got started as early as that first Christmas, but I might be wrong.
I’m leaving it to Random to do whatever archaeology he can, be it excavation of ancient scrolls, old computers or his own brain, to see if any further information survives.
No pressure, John, but this one is all down to you.
Pauline, The Duchess of Castlebar, was partial to a youth orchestra concert at the Proms. We always used to book at least one of those for her per season.
This one also had a fair smattering of her favourite type of English composers (Elgar, Walton) plus some family favourites. The royal theme to the first half of the concert was because that very day was The Queen Mother’s 100th birthday.
Unknown – National Anthem (arr. William Walton)
William Walton – Coronation March ‘Crown Imperial’
George Frideric Handel – Music for the Royal Fireworks
Edward Elgar – Overture ‘Cockaigne (In London Town)’
Article from 7 Aug 2000 The Daily Telegraph (London, Greater London, England)
After the concert, we went to a new restaurant in Ealing named Parade, which Janie and I had wanted to try. I don’t think Pauline was as keen on this idea – I have a scribbled note in my diary “Pauline will try”. I think she preferred familiar food and guaranteed fawning waiters by that stage of her life.
This note in my diary reminds me of one of the occasions when Abe nevertheless invited me back to play doubles with him and his pals. Not on that wintery-looking grass court, of course, but indoors on the carpet.
I don’t recall what happened tennis-wise – I suspect that I partnered the best of the four and that we had a decent game on the back of that.
I remember what happened afterwards more clearly. Abe was keen to see the progress (or lack thereof) in my Clanricarde Gardens flat, which had been a conversation piece over drinks. I think we also agreed all to dine at The Park Inn, my favourite Chinese restaurant, on Wellington Terrace just a few strides from the flat. So all four of us bundled over to my part of Kensington as it were, to see the flat.
It was very much still work in progress. I remember one of the guys questioning whether it would all be done before Christmas if, as I had described, Gavin was unable to retain a member of staff even for half a day so was effectively working alone on the job.
I also remember one of the guys (perhaps the same one) suggesting that the smell of solvents inside the flat was so great that it was making his eyes stream after five minutes and was surely so strong that anyone working in there for several hours would be “high as a kite” for much of the day.
Valid points, I sense.
Eventually it was all done and lovely…much to the relief of all of the then residents.
I don’t much recall the meal either. But at The Park Inn it will have been good.
Everyone who was anyone dined at Nobu back then…and so did we. I recall the meal being fabulous and I also realise that it was the first (but far from the last) time I tasted black cod in miso sauce. Exquisite.
Lammas – returning to the scene some years later
Back then we played tennis at Lammas Park Tennis Courts every weekend – much as we now play at Boston Manor. It was run by a chap named Larry and his belle, whose name escapes me. When things went awry between those two (not long after this party) things went rapidly downhill at Lammas Park until we had long since escaped and then the place got taken over by Will To Win (or initially one of its predecessors).
Anyway, this bank holiday party was billed as “party – bring wine”. Which we did. It was informal and fun I’m sure.
This was a memorable evening at Club Gascon in Smithfield. It was a new place (it had only opened a few months earlier) and all the rage when we visited it with The Mainellis in April 1999.
That was our first but certainly not our last visit.
I’m pretty sure the place became a reasonably regular haunt for Michael, at least for a while.
Janie was especially taken with their use of foie gras, which was celebrated in Club Gascon’s early incarnation. I too was taken with the food, but I am not partial to foie gras.
The restaurant gained a Michelin Star a couple of years after our first visit and still thrives at that location – here is a link to its website.
We went to the Dorcheter Hotel for lunch at the Oriental Restaurant. We had been dying to try the place and had been tipped off that the lunchtime offering was a much better deal than the evening meal.
![CLUB GASCON [2] CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Club_Gascon,_Farringdon,_EC1.jpg){kind=link}