Some restaurants safeguard part of a city’s soul.
New Yorkers have Sardi’s, the theater district mainstay where Broadway types have long hobnobbed over stirred martinis. In Paris, the honor for a time belonged to Les Deux Magots, where generations of writers scribbled, fretted and gossiped.
As for London? One could make a case for Rules, a 228-year-old institution with a game-forward menu, a hearty wine list and antlers on seemingly every wall. Founded by Thomas Rule as an oyster bar in 1798, it has as good a claim as any to being the oldest restaurant in London; its patrons have included Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Ava Gardner and Liza Minnelli.
Now, it plans to keep serving its English fare into perpetuity.
The National Trust, a British charity that protects and preserves the country’s heritage, announced Wednesday that it is the new owner of 34-35 Maiden Lane, the building in Covent Garden that houses Rules, and of the restaurant’s uniquely ornate interior.
The Trust has been given the site by its owner, John “J-P” Mayhew, who said in a statement that he wanted to ensure the restaurant “and two centuries worth of stories” would be protected forever. The property value of the gift is over £11 million (or about $14.6 million), the Trust said, and the terms of the lease dictate that it can only be used as a restaurant.
The restaurant’s proprietor, Rick McMenemy, who has worked there for over 30 years, said the thinking was simple. The restaurant industry faces crisis after crisis. London rents are punishing. And while Mr. Mayhew is committed to Rules, a future owner might not have the same vision, said Mr. McMenemy, who will operate the restaurant as a commercial tenant.
“There would be nothing necessarily to stop them from turning the building into apartments,” he said. But now, the restaurant is protected as a living, breathing thing: “Not fossilized, not kept in aspic,” he said, but preserved. The Trust, he said, shares “the same care and attention to detail to want the building to remain at its best.”
In the centuries since it opened in the heart of Covent Garden, the restaurant has served London’s wealthy and wordy, its royals and its regulars.
King Edward VII, who reigned from 1901 until his death in 1910, frequented its storied tables. As a young man, when he was still the Prince of Wales, he wooed his mistress Lillie Langtry within its walls. (“Yes indeed,” Mr. McMenemy confirmed.) In fact, Rules was so important to Langtry that she commissioned, signed and donated a painting that still hangs over its cocktail bar.
Dickens was a regular. Graham Greene, who wrote a century later, stopped by for every birthday, the National Trust said. (Rules has named one of its private dining rooms in his honor.)
Greene featured the restaurant in “The End of the Affair,” published in 1951. The tortured couple at the heart of the postwar novel share their first kiss after a dinner there. “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 narrator, Maurice Bendrix, muses.
Many other fictional Brits have come to visit: M., played by Ralph Fiennes, dines there in the James Bond film “Spectre,” and the show “Downton Abbey” shot several scenes here. (John Le Carré used to drop by; Rules features briefly in his novel “The Russia House.”)
In 1971, the poet John Betjeman defended Rules from plans to raze it to widen a nearby road.
In a speech at a planning meeting, he compared the restaurant to a site of worship: “A place which has constantly been used by actors, managers and famous people, as Rules has, acquires an invisible atmosphere just as a church frequented by praying people acquires an atmosphere.”
Not everyone was a fan.
The novelist Kingsley Amis skewered the restaurant in a review that Rules for a time reproduced on its website. (That review, and all others, have been removed.)
The wine was a joy, Amis admitted. The coffee excellent. He could stomach the veal escalope and get through the whitebait.
“Everything else,” though, “was disgraceful.”
It still prompts strong reactions.
When I asked a British friend, a born-and-raised Londoner, for his thoughts, he told me he’d never been and had no interest in doing so. “The reasons to go are: 1) you are posh and you like the food 2) you are not posh but want to observe the culture.”
Sent a screenshot of a note at the bottom of the Rules’ menu — “Game birds may contain shot” — he warned, “You actually do need to watch out for that.”
The building on Maiden Lane is painted a cheerful mustard yellow, with gold lettering on the windows. Inside, I immediately noticed the details that the critic Jay Rayner feted in The Financial Times last year.
Below, the ironed tablecloth. Above, the just-so lighting (bright enough for patrons, but dim enough for mood.) To start, a perfectly portioned and perfectly warmed dish of potted shrimps, not as dreary as the name might suggest.
The menu features British classics like steak and kidney pie and a salad of Dorset crab. But this is a restaurant where game meat is the star. So I ordered the grouse. It arrived with glossy green cabbage and a handful of impossibly crisp “game chips” — thinly sliced, deep-fried potatoes — and feathers on its little tucked feet. Very obviously recently alive.
This fowl tasted nothing like chicken. The meat was full-throated and ancient, with browned skin and lean-but-not-tough muscles.
The grouse at Rules tasted like eating history.
Game has long been an elite food. Until 2007, anyone who wanted to shoot it in England or Wales needed a special license. “There’s this crazy hierarchy of meat in Britain,” said Pen Vogler, a British food historian. “Game, historically, is right at the top.”
It was largely the pursuit of the wealthy, who needed both the land for game to roam and the leisure time to hunt. (The exception were poachers, who sneaked onto private land.)
“For ordinary folks, you keep a pig in a pen, because then you don’t have to chase it,” said Marc Meltonville, a food historian and consultant on historical menus. But grouse? Venison? “It’s only people with nothing to do who can chase after a deer,” he said.
For the National Trust, a restaurant is a first. It does own 39 pubs, but the charity is most well-known for its care of stately manors. Those historic houses, though, function largely as museums — most are no longer homes, and their on-site cafes, famous for their scones, are modern additions.
It’s rare that those sorts of heritage places are still used as they once were, said Lucy Porten, a National Trust curator.
Rules is different. Its doors are open from noon to 10 p.m. The kitchen still pumps out meals and each day, diners in sport coats and pearls dig in under the antlers.
“This is a place of extraordinary living heritage,” she said. “It continues to do what it was designed to do — which is be a restaurant.”
The post London’s Oldest Restaurant, a Haunt of Dickens, Is Protected for the Future appeared first on New York Times.
