This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

Bikini season may be over, but Arlington isn’t so much a restaurant as what the Sidebar of Shame calls a “revenge body”.

In case anybody missed it, in 1981, Jeremy King and Christopher Corbin opened a restaurant on Arlington Street. Le Caprice served a mixture of polished gents’ club classics alongside dishes that riffed brilliantly between things smart people only ate in private, and spritzy innovations such as the “legendary” bang bang chicken, a Home Counties take on satay.

At the time, it was audacious to the point of being revolutionary — a fashionable restaurant that was relaxed, informal and unchallengingly delicious. Everybody went there, and everybody who couldn’t read about it in another Eighties innovation: the lifestyle pages of the colour supplements.

Then, in 2005, it was bought by the panto villain of the hospitality world, Richard Caring. Over the next 20 years, Corbin and King went on to found all the best restaurants in London, including the Wolseley, the Delaunay, Colbert and Brasserie Zédel.

In 2022 they too vanished into the corporate maw, but the faithful stayed true. One day, the king would come into his own again, descending in a nephele of Giorgio Beverly Hills and crumpled pap shots of Princess Di.

And thus, it came to pass …

Purple, yes, but nothing to the gush of nostalgia with which Arlington was greeted when it opened on the Caprice’s original site earlier this year. One reviewer had a long-lost regular clutching Mr King’s hand “like a congregant seeking benediction”.

Another reported breathlessly that on arrival “you are escorted to your table”. I’m told that often happens in restaurants. Lots more guff about the “storied” salmon fishcakes working like Proust’s madeleine, transporting ecstatic diners to those halcyon days of Filofaxes and shoulder pads.

The madeleine-citers should really get round to reading the end, as the terminus of Proust’s exegesis of memory is not love but its opposite, indifference. Which was pretty much how I felt about Arlington.

Not that the food isn’t perfect in its way. The fishcakes with their charming personal jug of sorrel sauce are everything one wants from a fishcake. Dressed crab with celeriac remoulade was crisp and creamy, the banged-on-about chicken was gooey, chewy and cheeky, steak tartare smooth and sexy. Arlington’s lobster thermidor soufflé might be my deathbed dish.

Puddings include another trusty old-timer, frozen Scandi berries in white chocolate sauce or two sleek quenelles of unctuous chocolate mousse. The flavours aren’t big or surprising, but they don’t need to be; dinner is a gentle, polished experience.

Brunch choices are equally judicious, the potato pancakes with smoked bacon and maple syrup or blueberry cheesecake waffles are both worth crossing town for. In a lovely gesture, the nubbly, spiky Caesar salad has been renamed for the late Russell Norman, who managed Caprice Holdings before founding Polpo.

Given the clientele, Arlington’s prices are admirably restrained and considerably more reasonable than most of the restaurants in the area. One could have an impeccable lunch for about £40 per head. Wines are similarly democratic, beyond a few heavy hitters at the bottom of the list.

A sprightly Bourgogne Aligoté at £60 and two glasses of a more adventurous Patagonian pinot noir at £18.25 apiece were a deft mid-point from a choice which offers plenty of options below £50. So what’s not to love?

The problem with Arlington is that like the menu, the owners have nothing to prove. Corbin and King radically changed the way London thought about and ate in restaurants. Arlington’s only job is to show they’ve still got it, right down to the impudent slash of blue neon over the door which could pass for the original Caprice sign if you squint a bit.

The space has had a remix: mirrors behind the bar to obviate the need for sleb rubbernecking (these days a move presumably beyond most of those “long-lost regulars”), there’s some nasty track lighting in the ceiling and the rattan chairs came straight out of Princess Margaret’s Mustique skip.

Overall, the effect is — ouch — parochial. The restaurant claims to reflect the “appetites of creative London”, but creative London has long since moved to Tbilisi or Margate.

The capital hasn’t swung since the Nineties, so perhaps it isn’t an accident that the original David Bailey photos on the walls, now edited and rehung, reference the Sixties, from which we are now as chronologically distant as the Beatles were from Queen Victoria. Literally, no one still cares.

Except, apparently, Richard Caring, who has churlishly splashed the opening of a new Caprice on the site of the former US Embassy, scheduled to open in summer 2025. Mr King commented gracefully that Mayfair is big enough for both of them and that there is no need for a “napkin war”, so perhaps Arlington signals his retirement from the field.

Nothing is more annoying to a rival than a refusal to compete, but I’m not sure I want to have dinner in the objective correlative of an elderly feud.

Arlington is absolutely not a disaster, but it is a museum. Without the Caprice context, it’s just a slightly off-looking room serving excellent fish and chips.

---

Arlington: 20 Arlington Street London SW1A 1RG