The army of waiters descending on our table makes me choke on my very dry, very dirty vodka martini. Hundreds of them are marching in arm-tucked formation just to fillet a Dover sole. One splinters off to portion the carrots and peas. Another tilts a napkin-draped silver boat until its dill-flecked contents forms a little puddle on my plate.
I’m at Oslo Court, St John’s Wood institution and flag bearer for a bygone age of silver-service, where lunch is a state visit and nobody asks you to scan a QR code. By contemporary standards, its hospitality ought to have atrophied – antiquated at best and Last Night of the Proms at worst. But as another spotless waiter refills a glass I had barely noticed finishing, I can’t lie – I’m having a fabulous time.
Not that Oslo Court gives a toss about how anyone thinks a dining room should operate. When Tony and José Sánchez took over the cream-drenched dining room of an art deco tower block in 1982, they dug their heels into the plush pink carpet and declined every invitation into “the future”. Even as London’s restaurants cycled through competing ideas of modernity, Oslo Court’s dessert trolley trundled on, past the chic River Café of the 1990s, the communal-table Ottolenghi-ism of the noughties and the post-recession Jamie Oliverfication of the waiter-diner relationship. Eventually it was the city that made a U-turn, returning to Oslo Court in a dinner jacket to be asked, “Would sir like another martini?”
Now the hallmarks of what you might call “formal” service are so ubiquitous that I keep having to check the dress code before a night out. White tablecloths are back. So too are sommeliers, whom the job search website Reed recently listed among the country’s “roles on the rise”. At 45 Jermyn St, caviar and beef Wellington arrive on wheels; at Maison François, diners went so feral for the pudding trolley that it now has a steak-tartare sibling. And then, inevitably, there’s Simpson’s in the Strand where the return of its much-vaunted master carvers has been met with critical fanfare.
The chatterati’s precipitous embrace of yesteryear’s service is more than a little about-face. In 2014 one story declared the era of “haughty waiters, hushed rooms and starched tablecloths” over, relics of a time restaurants would be wise to forget. Jay Rayner even asked why anyone would waste money on “battalions of waiters”, before signing off, “It’s called progress.”
And who’s not for progress? Especially when core tenets of formal British hospitality are inexorably linked to a shameful past of empire and exclusion. Simpson’s, lest we forget, barred women from the Grand Divan until 1984. But I’m less keen on the critics who once proclaimed “modernity!” only to return to the past in their droves, swooning over the “properness and regalness” of a passing beef chariot. Their oscillation is, however, reflective of British culture’s dysfunctional relationship with nostalgia, and of a much deeper failure to reconcile the pleasure of service with the society that created it. But instead of a real reckoning, we lurch between the simpler – and impermanent – moral positions of repudiation and restoration. We strip off the tablecloth for the sins of everything that happened above it, then lay it back out with a cheeky wink to a bygone world.
It occurred to me, squeezed into a booth on East 60th Street in New York, that there may be a third way through this impasse. Le Veau d’Or reopened in 2024 after Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr – the men behind Frenchette and Le Rock – took over the nearly century-old bistro. Like the Sánchez brothers, they talk about ownership as stewardship and as such have resisted the restaurateur’s urge to transform everything within reach, from the lipstick-red banquettes and offal-led menu to the gleaming Upper East Side service.
Almost preposterously present, it’s the kind of unabashed hospitality that could only belong to a culture in which the question of service is all but settled. Which is not to say that the American restaurant has a spotless past; quite the opposite. It has grown out of a labour system riven by inequality, traces of which remain visible in who serves whom. But because the US at its best has always believed that the circumstances of one’s birth ought not to define your place in the world, its restaurants have proven more adept at prising apart the art of service from the class hierarchy it once reinforced. There is less guilt and more enjoyment, which is why tremendous care will be lavished upon you – from Bucksnort, Tennessee to Park Avenue – without any pretence that it makes you superior. Because, as one waiter put it to me, “the pursuit of hospitality is a commendable one.”
It’s a simple statement, but in the context of London’s neurotic relationship with service, a rather prescient one. Instead of treating each new fashion as an absolute moral correction of everything that came before, New York suggests that the cycle can be broken. That you can reckon with a complicated history, then decide once and for all what’s worth carrying forward. To me, that’s closer to progress.
Ben Drinkwater is a culture, food and travel writer and editor based in London. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
Further reading:
– Five classic restaurants proving that great food, service and tradition never go out of style
– In an industry with a novelty addiction, restaurants need to stick to the recipe
– It’s time to bring the literary café back to the heart of European society
