Where better to raise a glass to the New Year than at Rules, London’s oldest restaurant. Opened in 1798 by noted failure Thomas Rule, his small oyster bar astonished his family by turning his fortunes around.
Defiantly unfashionable, its walls full of eccentric clutter – what could be more English?
Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene these are the ghosts of diners past that give Rules its ‘invisible atmosphere’ as the poet John Betjeman stressed – ‘we can sense it but it will not photograph’.
It’s the details, not the food, I love. The hooks from the curtain that screened Edward VII (the then Prince of Wales) and the actress Lillie Langtry from prying eyes. The Rules family even cut a door into the wall so they could enter and exit secretly, hiding their love affair (which everyone already knew about) from curious customers.
The setting for a scene in the James Bond film Spectre, it can still be relied on to provide intrigue.
