London’s oldest restaurant owns a moor, serves things that were recently flying, and has outlasted everything
Rules opened on Maiden Lane in 1798 and has served food every year since. There is no serious competitor for the title of London’s oldest restaurant. It is not close.
It has three and a half thousand reviews and a 4.6, and it has been receiving customers continuously since before Nelson died, and it has never, at any point, considered doing anything differently.
The estate
Rules owns land. An actual estate, in the High Pennines, from which it takes its own game – grouse, snipe, woodcock, ptarmigan, partridge, deer.
Consider what this means. In an era in which every restaurant in London has a chalkboard listing the names of its suppliers as a form of moral display, Rules skipped the whole exercise by simply buying a moor.
The Prat’s supply chain desk notes that this is, technically, the most vertically integrated food operation in the West End, and that it was set up by people who had never heard the phrase “farm to table” and would have found it puzzling.
The room
Red. Overwhelmingly red. Plush banquettes, antlers, oil paintings, cartoons, taxidermy, and every square inch of wall covered in something. It is the interior equivalent of a Victorian gentleman’s coat pockets emptied onto a table.
It should be oppressive. It is not. It is warm, and it is dim, and the staff move through it with the specific unhurried competence of people who know the building will still be here regardless.
What it has outlived
The Napoleonic Wars. The Regency. Every single monarch since George III. The invention of the railway, the photograph, the telephone, the aeroplane, the antibiotic and the internet.
It survived the Blitz. It survived the 1970s, which closed more good London restaurants than the Luftwaffe. It survived nouvelle cuisine, molecular gastronomy, the small plate, the sharing concept, the tasting menu, the pop-up, and the deconstructed anything.
It did this by ignoring all of them, completely, on the grounds that they would pass. They did.
The game
Order it. That is the whole instruction. If you go to Rules in season and order a steak you have made a category error of the most fundamental kind, and the waiter will not say anything, and that will be worse.
The grouse is the thing. It is strong, it is not for everybody, and it tastes of a hillside. This is the food that this building was constructed to serve and it has been doing it for two hundred and twenty-eight years and it is not going to start apologising now.
The regulars
Rules has, over two hundred and twenty-eight years, accumulated a guest list that no marketing team could manufacture: Dickens, Thackeray, Graham Greene, John Betjeman, and – inevitably, in a private upstairs room – Edward VII and Lillie Langtry.
The restaurant mentions this. It does not labour it. There is a difference between a place that has a history and a place that is selling a history, and the tell is volume: the Sherlock Holmes has a stuffed hound in the bar, and Rules has a room upstairs and will not tell you which one.
Verdict
Expensive, magnificent, entirely unbothered by you. Book. Wear a collar. Order the bird. And understand that you are a passing detail in the history of a room that has watched everything and been impressed by none of it.
Official site: rules.co.uk
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
In British comedy, the prat is the character who makes us laugh because they remind us of ourselves at our most foolish and most human.
My therapist said I use humor as defense. I showed her this and she approved the strategy entirely.