At certain hours of the weekday, just before 9 a.m, and for a while after 5 p.m., there aren’t many more crowded thoroughfares in London than the intersection of King William Street and London Bridge. The location is unofficially known as the Gateway to the City, London’s financial hub, and an excellent viewpoint for anyone who wants to see thousands of people in suits and zippered vests rush from trains to their desks—and then do the reverse hours later.
Overlooking the mass movement of humanity is the Wolseley City at 68 King William St., the sister restaurant to the Wolseley on Piccadilly and one of London’s biggest-deal restaurant openings of 2023.
The restaurant threw open its doors Wednesday morning, bringing new competition for City favorites like 1 Lombard Street and M Threadneedle Street. It cost about £10 million ($12.2 million) to renovate the space—a former, dour House of Fraser department store—installing a cream and black interior that might put some diners in mind of being in a giant, waterless swimming pool.
The opening, which has been in the works for more than a year, will be a test for Wolseley Hospitality Group, which split with founding co-owner Jeremy King in a highly publicized battle in April 2022. Parent company Minor International PCL then pointedly changed the group’s name from Corbin & King. (To add to the drama, in early September, King announced that he had taken over the lease at a former London institution, Le Caprice, which is around the corner from the original Wolseley.)
The Wolseley’s name recognition will help attract fans of the original, 20-year-old grand cafe, where food is served all day and the reservation list is stocked with names attached to celebrity and high positions of government power.
Regulars at the original Wolseley will tell you that food isn’t the point; it’s the crowd. But at a dinner on opening night, the food at the new location is, actually, quite good.
One dish created for the new location is steamed short rib pie. It’s a tidy pastry-wrapped package stocked with beef that’s more tender than you would expect, with some greens and wild mushrooms thrown in, sitting in a shallow pool of bone marrow sauce to lap it up; at £26, it represents one of the better deals you’ll find for a main course at a nice City restaurant. The £24 Monument Fish Pie is another decently priced new entry, with a calorie count that would be obscene if it were printed on the menu: an elaborately rich mix of smoky chunks of cod, salmon and shrimp in creamy sauce under a well-browned potato crust.
Management has also added a “Chops” section to this menu that features an alluring treacle-cured bacon with a double-fried egg—one not being enough—and a grilled veal chop with sage and butter.
Classics from the Piccadilly location’s European cafe menu have made the leap to the City. Escargots have a glorious hit of pastis that acts like an exclamation point to the herby butter they’re swimming in. They go for £16. That’s £1.50 cheaper than the location on Piccadilly, for the time being at least. Another export from Mayfair is soufflé Suisse, a dense, cheesy cake the size of a hockey puck, which comes in a sauce that brings more fromage to the party and has the lovely surprise of wild mushrooms hidden underneath.
Less successful is the new to the Wolseley City chopped liver as an hors d’oeuvre: New Yorkers like me will find it underwhelming, a coarsely chopped and dry-ish mound that doesn’t make friends with the sweet pickle slices it’s served with.
Also problematic at the outset are a few of the new cocktails, specifically a Hibiscus Negroni and a King William Old Fashioned. The drinks themselves are well mixed— the negroni is a heady blast of bittersweet barolo chinato; and the old fashioned gets warm spiciness from a splash of armagnac and allspice— but the glass is filled with a mountain of dinky ice cubes that smack you in the face when you try to take a sip.
And that’s not ideal for a place that wants to be a destination bar for people on the way home via London Bridge station, or even on their way in to work. Baton Berisha, chief executive officer of the Wolseley Hospitality Group, notes that the bar program at the City location is an expansion of the original, with a host of new cocktails, including the two above, and 10% more wines. In fact, there are three separate bars here, compared with holding-pen styled one at Piccadilly. Drinks, which start at £13.50 here, should be a priority right out of the gate. (A spokesperson for the restaurant said the drink preparations are a work in progress.)
On opening night, the Wolseley was packed at 7 p.m. Some 70% of tables were occupied by suited-up office workers; almost every group had a person with a tie slung over his shoulder. By 10 p.m., there was a higher concentration of well dressed couples on dates, though a few six-tops with tables crowded with glassware remained. Berisha, who anticipates serving at least 500 people daily, predicts that the holidays will be a very big deal: Wolseley City is already 70% booked for spaces including some reservations for the whole restaurant and the 24-seat private dining room.
He also is betting that the all-day hangout aspect, another hallmark of the original Wolseley, will be a draw. Almost all City restaurants are open for specific meals: lunch, dinner and, increasingly, breakfast. The Wolseley City will stay open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Friday, and for more limited hours on the weekends. (To emphasize the all day aspect, when you sit down to a table at Wolseley City, there are a minimum of four menus strewn across the table, including all day; lunch and dinner; cocktails; and wine.) If even a small fraction of the people standing in line at nearby Borough Market for a bowl of Humble Crumble, the deconstructed fruit dessert that is a social media sensation, or cheese-dripping raclette from Kappacasein dairy decide to defect across the bridge, the Wolseley City will be in good shape.
After that, Berisha, who also oversaw the national expansion of the Ivy restaurant, plans to announce Wolseley locations outside the UK. “I’m in discussions with people in NY, in Hong Kong, Singapore,” he says. “Those are the locations I’m concentrating on.”
He also has Miami on his wish list. “Lots of our clients are from the US. We’d be recognized,” he says. New location announcements will come in the first half of next year, he says.
Separately, he’s scouting locations for the group’s more casual line, Cafe Wolseley. (Last summer, the location in Oxfordshire closed following a dispute with the landlord.) Now, the company is looking at locations in European cities like Amsterdam and Lisbon. But even as he seeks to expand the cafe concept, it’s secondary to the main brand. “Right now, my concentration is the Wolseley,” Berisha says. “That’s where I see demand.”