Can London’s favourite restaurateur save Simpson’s?
When you think about Simpson’s in the Strand (never Simpson’s on the Strand), it is impossible to consider the 198-year-old restaurant without remembering its literary antecedents. P.G. Wodehouse praised it as ‘a restful temple of food’ in his 1910 novel Psmith in the City. It has popped up in everything from Sherlock Holmes to Howards End and, when that epitome of thespian Britishness David Niven wished, in the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone, to speak wistfully about a golden idyll to a dying friend, Simpson’s was the idyll he chose. Yet all good things decline at some point. Before Simpson’s closed in 2020, another victim of the pandemic, it
