The restaurateur Jeremy King, co-founder of The Wolseley, Brasserie Zedel, and many other well-known London dining rooms, has announced he is getting back into the hospitality game after the sale of Corbin & King last year.
King announced on Monday (July 10) that he will open The Park, a restaurant in the style of a European grand café — the sort he and his former partner Chris Corbin specialised in previously — in west London in spring 2024.
The veteran restaurateur wrote in an email that he has now signed a lease for a space within the new Park Modern building by the property group Fenton Whelan. It sits on the corner of Bayswater Road and Queensway, opposite Kensington Palace Gardens.
King also said The Park won’t be his only forthcoming venture, hinting a second project in the West End. Details, however, remain sparse.
“I can confirm I am ‘getting back in the saddle’ – or perhaps more precisely getting the hacking jacket tailored and building the stable,” King said.
“It has been a fascinating year for me and anyone who has followed my tentative steps into Instagram will know that I have been alluding to the next chapter.
“At heart I am a restaurateur and hotelier so I have held off from troubling you until I had something confirmed and signed to talk about.”
King said he considered several options before deciding on The Park, acknowledging that London remains “in a state of flux” when it comes to hospitality.
He added that while The Park fits the upscale brasserie mould, it will be more modern than his past restaurants, which were old fashioned in style.
The new operation follows events last year which saw the takeover of Corbin & King by the Minor Hotel Group.
Minor later rebranded the restaurant business as The Wolseley Hospitality Group, and now owns a host London favourites such as Fischer’s, Colbert, The Delaunay, and the newly opened Manzi’s in Soho.
King left the group soon after the sale, with much speculation over what he would do next.
In his email, he touched on the events of last year: “While the last thing I wanted to do was lose the restaurants, and indeed walk away from my extraordinary staff and colleagues without so much as a goodbye, it might also have been, in retrospect, the best thing that could happen to me — although it was impossible to deduce that at the time.”
He finished by saying that he had greatly missed pacing the restaurant floor, talking to guests, and that he is “determined to be a better restaurateur, employer and friend.”
