The reek of the past lingers still behind its Dickensian frontage.
Almost every inch of the plush, cosy interiors carries some tantalising echo of bygone days, a place where romance and intrigue were as much a part of the menu as the steak and kidney pies and treacle pudding served up by its black bow-tied waiters.
With the news that Rules, London’s oldest restaurant, has been preserved for posterity after being donated to the National Trust, imagine what tales it could tell if its walls festooned with playbills, paintings, cartoons and bric-a-brac, could talk.
It was there that King Edward VII, whose gluttony was matched only by his hunger for seducing other men’s wives, entertained his mistress, Lillie Langtry. A curtain was installed to ensure their privacy and a door cut into the panelled walls so he could enter unseen by other patrons.
Miss Langtry gave a signed portrait of herself to the owner as thanks for this discreet arrangement and the painting still hangs as part of the restaurant’s collection. An upstairs room named after the libidinous Bertie remains to this day.
Another frequent diner, the author Graham Greene, is similarly honoured. It was at Rules that the Roman Catholic Greene wined and dined the married Catherine Walston, an American beauty with whom he began a scandalous affair.
London’s oldest restaurant, Rules, has been preserved for posterity after being donated to the National Trust
She was his goddaughter and inspiration for his 1951 novel, The End Of The Affair, and of whom it was said her ‘zeal for Catholicism was matched only by her insatiable lust’.
They first kissed on the pavement outside the restaurant on Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. That scene and their real-life meal of steak and onions were included in the book. The narrator recalls: ‘Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions? It seems improbable and yet I could swear it was just then that I fell in love.’
The 1999 film of the book starred Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore as the writer and bored housewife who become infatuated. The dish, however, is no longer on the Rules menu but 16 years later in an apparent nod to his earlier movie, Fiennes returned to the restaurant as M in the James Bond film Spectre.
For an establishment founded in 1798, Rules has remained stubbornly fashionable. Dining trends, from nouvelle cuisine to fusion food, have been loftily ignored. Rules has remained much the same since it opened for the sale of porter, pies and oysters.
In Queen Victoria’s days, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and John Tenniel, illustrator of Alice In Wonderland were all diners. A later generation of writers including HG Wells, Evelyn Waugh, John le Carre and the Poet Laureate John Betjeman, who in the 1960s led a campaign to save it from demolition, were regulars on the velvet banquettes.
Golden age movie stars came, too: Charlie Chaplin, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Clark Gable and John Wayne as well as British actors Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, drawn by its stained-glass windows as much as its famous potted shrimps and sticky toffee pudding. It was also, coincidentally, known as the ‘home of the most beautiful barmaids in the world’.
King Edward VII entertained his mistress, Lillie Langtry, at Rules, where a curtain was installed to ensure their privacy
In more recent times, it has attracted the likes of Madonna, David Bowie and Harrison Ford. The twice divorced Mrs Simpson for whom the Duke of Windsor abandoned the throne, was said to have missed its reliable kitchen after their exile to France.
Aesthete and diarist James Lees-Milne recalled a 1972 Rules dinner attended by Prince Charles and Princess Margaret after the premiere of a John Betjeman film on Australia. ‘I hardly spoke a word to the royals, but watched them closely,’ he noted in his journal.
‘Prince Charles is very charming, and very polite, shook hands with us all and smiles. PM (Margaret) is far from charming, is cross, exacting, too sophisticated and sharp. She is physically very attractive in a bun-like way, with trussed-up bosom, and hair like two cottage loaves, one balancing on the other... she smoked continuously and did not talk to John (Betjeman) once.’
On a subsequent visit, Charles presented a very different demeanour from the ‘charming’ Prince of Wales of 13 years earlier. It was December 1985, long before news of his unhappy marriage with Diana emerged, and he hosted a highly confidential lunch with a group of parliamentary lobby correspondents.
None of the journalists knew why they had been summoned as they gathered in the prince’s great great grandfather Edward’s eponymous dining room. It was not until the main course – chicken in a white wine sauce – that the reason emerged.
Charles was newly back from a visit to the US and ‘bristling with irritation’ at the media obsession with his wife. He complained that the American Press had praised her style while criticising him for being a dull dresser.
Adopting an American accent, he said: ‘They asked, “Chuck, why are you so boring.’’ What did they expect me to do – wear a gold lame jockstrap?’
He then got on to some favourite hobby horses – the lack of black soldiers in the Brigade of guards and the awful state of council housing. Only then did he raise the subject he was really interested in – the plans for the Channel Tunnel. The prince announced he was thinking of making a speech in which he would call for a referendum on the subject and wanted to know what the company round the table thought.
He was warned such an intervention would be reputational suicide. The tunnel was the pet project of then prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Calling for a referendum would put the Crown in direct conflict with the government creating a political crisis, he was told.
Those present said his agitation increased as he indicated his real objection to the scheme. ‘Britain will no longer be an island,’ he declared while apparently invoking Shakespeare’s description of the country as a ‘precious stone set in a silver sea’.
The hacks said they doubted Mrs Thatcher would be grateful to be reminded of the Bard’s lines about ‘This Sceptered Isle’ and he would be walking a constitutional tightrope if he called for a referendum. Charles never made the speech and nor did he invite lobby reporters to lunch again.
His love for Rules, however, was undimmed. As was Rules for Lady Thatcher. A portrait of the Iron Lady depicting her as Joan of Arc celebrating victory in the Falklands long had pride of place staring down at diners.
Her presence did not put off those from the other of the political divide. The Labour Party’s 1,000 club had a fundraiser there and Bob Crow, the late Left-wing rail union leader, was so familiar with the menu he barely bothered to look at it before ordering – he was partial to the crab salad and halibut.
One time Labour deputy prime minister John Prescott – another trencherman – was also a fan. Or at least he was until the day the maitre d’ mistook him for Tory grandee Ken Clarke. ‘After that,’ said Ricky McMenemy, who will continue as restaurant boss, ‘he stopped coming.’
Over the many decades the restaurant survived the threat of corporate greed when planners suggested turning The Strand into a dual carriageway and tearing down much of Covent Garden – including Rules – in the process.
It shrugged off a savage review in the 1977 Good Food Guide which described its service as ‘sometimes brusque, sometimes flippant’. And stayed open when a former head chef plunged down the stairs to the kitchen only to die from his injuries.
It eschewed credit cards when they first came in, in the 1970s, and recovered from parliamentary scorn in 1948 after it was reported to operate a colour bar on patrons.
Announcing their acquisition, the National Trust described Rules as an ‘outstanding piece of living history where kings dined and writers and politicians plotted’. As it begins life under only its fourth owner in 228 years, there is every chance all that will be continuing.