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Until I moved to the Siberia that is Wimbledon, so much of my life had been spent in Kensington that I thought of myself as a villager there. I still plunder the Kensington Oxfam shops for books, still buy cheese, shoes and spectacles there and still, if I must take someone to lunch or dinner, choose one or other of two restaurants in the borough.
Of these, Launceston Place was perfect for the maiden aunt or the elderly politician and museum official who might wish not to be seen with me. Discreet and decorous, its clientele primarily local, it was much used for lunch by neighbours either habitually or giving themselves a treat, and for dinner after a bad day, as a means of escaping their own kitchens.
I cannot remember when it first opened - 20 years ago, perhaps - so slowly did it become part of my life, but on my very first visit I let the door slam behind me, heard a yelp, spun round to open it again, and found Princess Diana framed behind its glass. "Oh, it's you," she said with a grin. There I have heard many a secret and much mischief. There the Evening Standard celebrated my birthday a year or two ago, and it would have been there that I'd have chosen to observe the next of some numerical significance - except that it is no longer what it was.
This I learned by chance when an old friend asked me to lunch. When she made the reservation she was told that the restaurant had been refurbished, but not that the price of the fixed lunch had risen to £35. So there she was, entertaining two friends, not for £60 or so, but for nearly thrice that sum - not easily afforded.
There were as many waiters - glossy young men in spivvy suits - as missionaries at a Mormon prayer meeting, and we were subjected to a long, slow ritual in which enough food for the last breakfast of one sacrificial Chihuahua was presented to the three of us; never in the history of the menu maigre has so little food smirched a polished plate. Scallops, however, were served on slabs of green granite an inch thick - could the silly cook think of nothing edible on which to let them lie? I hoped for some mythological transmogrification to take place, granite into spinach, so consecrated seemed the atmosphere, but no miracle occurred.
After very nearly two hours I left without pudding. My companions waited a little longer but then left puddingless too. None of us had more time to waste on this absurd attempt to bring the pretentious sophistications of the Fat Duck - now so common all over London - to Middle Kensington. I was hungry, for my boiler had run out of fuel; I bought food in the staff canteen and cursed the restaurant. I have always thought progress a snare and delusion; I am with Lenin on the subject - "One step forward, two steps back". I shall not again set foot in that now very modern restaurant.
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As the designer of Launceston Place in 1985 for Nick Smallwood & Simon Slater - its success allowed them to open the trendy and noisy Kensington Place - and for its extension in 1990 - I share Brian Sewell's disappointment. Actually it replaced Casa Porelli which was Kensington residents' former 'canteen.' LP was conceived as a discreet, comfortable neighbourhood venue with paintings on the walls and low, intimate lighting where one could converse as if in one's own home and, as its prices were very reasonable, without having to do the cooking. Lord Snowdon, living nearby, was another devotee. If only current restaurants realised that such a formula guaranteed continuing success there would be fewer closures. Unlike Paris, with its numerous old-established restaurants, few seem to survive for very long in London, no surprise really.
- Michael Barker, Paris, France
