The second of Jeremy King’s trio of new London restaurants – Arlington launched in March 2024; Simpsons in the Strand will follow in early 2025 – The Park is a departure for the veteran restaurateur who made Le Caprice, The Ivy and The Wolseley the seminal restaurants of the 1980s, 1990s and noughties. Not only is The Park King’s first contemporary restaurant in a new building, but it is also his first focused on American cuisine and his first in west London, opposite the northern entrance to Kensington Gardens by Queensway Tube.
The Mood: Mid-century Midtown
The American equivalent of a Wolseley-style, Mitteleuropean grand café is… the diner? But while King has taken the classic diner tropes of wood-panelling and orange booths, he has filtered them through a mid-century, Midtown sensibility. King has said his inspiration was The Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, which opened in 1959, and architecture is a motif throughout, with walls hung with illustrations by Le Corbusier and photos by Ti Foster, son of Sir Norman. It’s dog-friendly in the daytime, if you’ve been for a walk in the park.
The Food: Stateside breakfasts and Cal-Ital suppers
King has got all the diner details right at breakfast and brunch: mugs on the tables for refillable filter coffee, stacks of fluffy pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Lunch and dinner, meanwhile, reflect the Californian-Italian cuisine pioneered by chefs such as Alice Waters. Mains like zucchini and ricotta rollatini are billed as entrees, salads are very much a thing, and because it wouldn’t be a Jeremy King restaurant without some sort of schnitzel, here there’s a chicken Milanese. An exclusively Italian-American wine list includes bottles from Oregon and Washington State as well as Californian big-hitters.
The Park is located at 2 Queensway, London
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