At first glance, “Ivy” is not an ideal name for a restaurant. Ivy is impossible to kill. Rapidly expanding. Occasionally poisonous. But the Ivy has grown into at least part of its name. From a single site on the corner of West Street in Covent Garden, there are now dozens of spin-off brasseries and cafés and “Ivy Asias”—Asian-themed variants—up and down the United Kingdom. The empire’s reach is so great, in fact, that part owner Richard Caring is now floating his stake in the group at a gargantuan valuation of more than $1 billion. It’s enough to bring one out in a rash.
But let’s go back. In or around 1917, a small Italian café opened in Covent Garden to cater to theater-botherers, its name now lost to time. Run by owner Abele Giandolini and his maître d’, Mario Gallati, the place did a roaring trade early on among the local thespians, packaging up meals for them to eat in their dressing rooms. When Giandolini apologized to the actress Alice Delysia for some building work being done to the restaurant, she told him not to worry. “We will always come and see you,” she said. “We will cling together like the ivy.” The name stuck, and so did the glitzy clientele.
A golden period ensued. In the 1940s, at the nearby Ambassadors Theatre, a revue show ran for nearly six years featuring a salacious, gossipy section called “Poison Ivy,” all about the stars who frequented the nearby restaurant. Noël Coward put a dedication to Giandolini and his beloved dining room at the front of one of his books. It was that sort of place.
Gallati and Giandolini fell out, with Gallati going on to set up Le Caprice, and in 1950, the Ivy passed to new owners and began a period of slow decline. (The new proprietors did, however, install the mullioned, diamond-shaped, stained-glass windows that would later become the Ivy’s trademark—a protection against the paparazzi, and the diffuser of a famously forgiving light.)
Over the coming decades a host of new owners tried to re-stoke the embers, including Lady Grade, the wife of theater impresario Lew Grade, and the hotelier Forte family. But it wasn’t until Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, who’d had a riotous success rejuvenating Le Caprice, got their hands on the restaurant in 1989 that success was achieved again.
By the mid-90s, the waiting list literally spanned years. The paparazzi set up a semi-permanent encampment outside its doors. “Other restaurants may drop a handful of starry names of who eats in them,” wrote A. A. Gill. “At the Ivy, it would be easier to list the ones who don’t.”
When anyone over the age of 30 thinks of the Ivy, this is the one they’re referring to. The buzzy, glossy years. The post-cocaine and pre-smartphone years. The era when there were 50 celebrities worth knowing, and 20 of them were in for lunch.
“You’d see Madonna and Michael Jackson. Dustin Hoffman I once saw ordering an egg-white omelet,” says Giles Coren, the Times of London restaurant critic. “They don’t really eat, these people, and they just want to go somewhere where everybody goes and doesn’t eat, either.”
There were 50 celebrities worth knowing, and 20 of them were in for lunch.
Not that the food was bad. The food was good. And good, with this sort of restaurant, is better than excellent. “It wasn’t haute cuisine. It didn’t have any truck with all that posh food wank,” says Coren. The shepherd’s pie was particularly notable. A matronly staple—very boarding school, very country pub—it was the sort of thing that people simply didn’t see on high-end restaurant menus, but it was executed with the oomph and finesse of the French brasseries that Corbin and King adored.
“They invented this idea of smart casual, which sounds ridiculous to say now,” says the broadcaster and restaurant critic Loyd Grossman. “You could be a significant person and be pretty dressed up, and yet go there and have a burger. My God—people were very discombobulated by it at first.”
“At a time when restaurants were rather more serious, it was fun,” Grossman coninutes. “It marked that transition point between going to a restaurant for a very special occasion and going to a restaurant because it was entertaining and life-enhancing.”
The service was memorable and poised—friendly but never over-familiar, relaxed but rigorous, in a way that was more natural in Rome than in London. This was a trickle-down from the patrician charms of the owners themselves. “It was always Corbin and King’s style to seem to have seen every play, every film, read every book, looked at every painting of their customers,” wrote The Guardian in 2010. The Ivy’s maîtres d’hôtel in the 1990s would know the curtain times of every show in every theater nearby and be au fait with every coup and slight in the bitchy media maelstrom.
The chumocracy could grate, however. “I couldn’t get a table because I wasn’t famous and didn’t know people, and I was very angry about it,” says Coren. “I wrote about how I wanted to ‘throw a Molotov cocktail through its smug little mullioned windows,’ and I especially remember writing that phrase because Jeremy would quote that back to me all the time afterwards,” he laughs. “And as soon as they did give me a table, I stopped wanting to firebomb it almost instantly.”
The owners themselves thought the two-year waiting list had become slightly absurd, reasoning that, aside from the democratic considerations, the hype was in danger of sending the dining room off-kilter. You’d get people who were going there for all the wrong reasons—tourists, not diners. “Snobbery,” wrote Gill, was viewed at the Ivy “with the same distaste as cockroaches and wickerwork bottle holders.” Which is a neat little snobbery in itself.
In 2005, the Ivy was bought by Richard Caring, a man best known up until then as the lieutenant in Sir Philip Green’s vast high-street fashion empire. “He’d made great fortunes by manufacturing all the clothes for Topshop and Marks & Spencer,” says the author and media executive Nicholas Coleridge. “But he wasn’t someone anyone really knew about—he was just a mystery person. Then he bought the Mark Birley restaurants and then he started buying every single thing that’s going.”
You’d get people who were going there for all the wrong reasons—tourists, not diners.
Caring’s biggest tweak at the Ivy was to install a large seated bar at the center of the room. Regulars weren’t pleased. For one thing, the all-important is-that-who-I-think-it-is sight lines were disrupted. “And it definitely became blinger,” says Coleridge. “There’s no doubt about that.”
But the menu remained mostly unchanged, and the shepherd’s pie marched on unhindered. Fernando Peire, a media-savvy maître d’hôtel who worked with Corbin and King from 1990 to 1998, was brought back under Caring in 2007 as a nod to continuity. But times had changed from the restaurant’s pre-millennial pomp. People still went to the Ivy, but there were other, newer shows in town, too, such as Chiltern Firehouse and, perhaps most notably, Corbin and King’s the Wolseley, whose famous central “bullring” became just as starry as its forerunner. The rise of Soho House, meanwhile, sucked some of the media-bubble oxygen out of things.
Those who continued to go to the Ivy enjoyed it for its nostalgia value as much as anything else. “I’ve had some good meals there in recent years, but mostly just as a tourist of the past,” says the Telegraph food writer Ed Cumming. “You went to imagine Kate Moss having a shepherd’s pie, then rushing to the loo.” Then the explosion of new-wave private members’ clubs—which Caring himself partly oversaw—provided a simpler way for the rich and famous to avoid the paparazzi. So what do you do when your storied brand begins to fade? You forget the haut monde and go to the hoi polloi. Let them eat pie!
In 2015, the Ivy began to roll out Ivy Brasseries and Ivy Cafés across London and—shock, horror—even further afield. In fashion terms it was the diffusion line to the haute couture—little spin-off sites that had the appearance and bragging rights of the mother ship without any of the bothersome waiting lists. “You can go to Dior and spend 50,000 pounds on a ball gown, and you can also go to Dior and get a pair of sunglasses for 150 pounds,” says Grossman. “And I think that’s fine. No one’s in an existential crisis about that.” (Caring, it has sometimes been said, has long attempted to create an LVMH of hospitality.)
There are now more than 30 Ivy-adjacent properties around the U.K. and Ireland. “It’s fascinating,” says Coleridge, “the way he’s rolled it out to everywhere else. Even Tunbridge Wells—historically regarded as one of the dullest cities in England—has an Ivy now.”
“If you ever find yourself in York and you need a martini in a hurry, it’s very useful, the Ivy diffusion line,” says Cumming. “It’s almost like the bougie McDonald’s.”
This rapid rollout, and an apparently happy audience, seem to be the reason for the mooted $1 billion–plus valuation. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is among those rumored to have been approached. Last year, it took a 49 percent stake in Sir Rocco Forte’s luxury hotel chain.
And what of the original spot that spawned it all? The first seedling in this great cluster of grilled meats and global capital. Will its essence survive a venture-backed sale? “The Ivy was there before Jeremy King, and it’ll be there after Richard Caring,” says Coren. “But whether or not they can ever get the glamour-pusses all to walk in at the same time again—that’s a different question,” he concludes. “The world, I think it’s fair to say, has moved on.”
Joseph Bullmore is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the editor of Gentleman’s Journal in London