Julie's restaurant stays the course

10 April 2012

This review was first published in May 1999

'Every famous person you can think of has been to Julie's,' says Johnny Ekperigin, flicking dust from his gleaming tangerine-backed waistcoat. 'Raquel Welch, Princess Margaret, the Rolling Stones, Sean Connery, Paul McCartney, all those people. I cooked for them in the Seventies and I'm still cooking for them now. And I'm cooking for their children, too, that's the amazing thing. Mick Jagger's daughter, Jade, this is her local. Raquel Welch's son comes, Roger Moore's children, Sean Connery's children, they all have parties here.'

The managing partner of Julie's restaurant and wine bar leans back on his pavement seat in Portland Road, waves to a passing workman and contemplates the sunlit shopfronts on the other side of the quiet Notting Hill street: David Black Oriental Carpets, Fired Earth, Stephen Ryan Design & Decoration, and, beyond, a tiny, dusty post office. English villages don't come sleepier, or more gentrified, than this. Yet the names that continue to drip from his lips fizz with urban chic.

'Oasis come here - we're their favourite restaurant. Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss have frequently said that Julie's is their favourite place and they have all their parties here, as do all the fashion designers. In London Fashion Week it's full of models, and, of course, Stella McCartney comes, and pretty much every night I'm doing a party for one of the record labels, because all the music companies are in this area. U2 come here, and Annie Lennox, and George Michael. And Bryan Ferry and Michael Caine and Nicole Kidman and Ruby Wax, and Richard Branson did a deal with Mike Oldfield here, and Princess Diana used to come, and Sophie Rhys-Jones. And nobody makes a big thing about it because, to be honest, I don't even notice. I may have been a bit star-struck in the Seventies, but now I don't even see them.'

If you don't know Julie's, it's conceivable you've yet to achieve A-list celebrity.

But even if you are a regular, you might still be a nobody, because three patrons out of four are just ordinary, semi-bohemian Notting Hill dwellers. Julie's, in marked contrast to most Nineties venues-of-the-moment, has always felt more comfortable with the 'out' crowd than the 'in' crowd. And that, presumably, is what keeps it in.

It opened in 1969, in the days when Notting Hill was widely considered a no-go area for respectable Londoners. Clarendon Cross - the junction at the Julie's end of Portland Road - saw some of the worst fighting of the 1958 race riots, and ten years later the area was still known as The Piggeries, to be avoided by all who could afford to do so. The main local trade was in scrap metal. 'It was an extremely rough area,' says David Black, who opened his carpet shop across the road - to widespread bemusement - a few years before Julie's appeared. 'More people left the pubs through the windows than through the doors. When I locked up at night I was always terrified of getting whacked over the head.'

Outsiders who ventured into the area were as likely as not to be visiting the hippie magazine Oz, or the drugs charity Release, or the slightly rackety pub, the Prince of Wales, all of which lurked in neighbouring Princedale Road - and it's debatable which lot were least desirable. 'It was definitely dodgy,' says Ekperigin, 'and you could buy a house for about 2p, whereas now it would cost £1 million.'

But for Julie Hodgess, the interior designer who founded Julie's, the dodginess was part of the appeal. 'It was cheap, so the area was peppered with fascinating people: artists, writers, photographers, students. Yes, it was a bit rough, but it had terrific charisma.' The same thought had struck budding entrepreneur Tim Herring, who bought the freehold of the old builders yard that was to become Julie's with a view to turning it into a complex of artists' studios. Hodgess, who lived in a bedsit round the corner, leased the first studio, fell in love with the building and persuaded Herring to let her create a restaurant downstairs.

It was an odd idea: the downstairs was divided into half a dozen different rooms, with any number of odd alcoves and hidden corners, and, as Hodgess says, 'Every room had a function, from the old forge, where they did their metalwork, to what's now the party room at the back, which used to be a glass-cutting shop.' But that was the key to Hodgess's vision. For six months, she crammed every recess with bits and pieces collected 'from secondhand shops, totters' carts, church clearances and the remains of St Paul's School in Hammersmith', and then opened an extraordinary restaurant in which each room had its own distinct feel but the whole nonetheless had an eccentric character of its own: bric-a-braccy but unfussy, Dickensian but not gloomy, and somehow ecclesiastical and Moorish at the same time - a look that has, despite the vagaries of fashion, remained unchanged, and that is, remarkably, right back in vogue once more.

'It became very trendy almost overnight,' says Hodgess. 'I don't know why, but it absolutely hit the nail on the head. Every night it was packed with music people, film people, writers, and we had all these beautiful out-of-work actresses as waitresses. Peter Sellers wanted to buy it. It was so Sixties.'

Within two years, the partners had expanded into the building next door and opened the wine bar, one of London's first. At weekends, to add to the buzz, they began to host what Ekperigin describes as 'poetry evenings, cello evenings, the sort of things people did in the Sixties'. (According to one regular from those days ? now too respectable to be identified ? that also included 'getting out of our heads on Mandrax and shagging in the alcoves'. And it was that aspect Martin Amis investigated for a 'hip and happening' London feature he was asked to write for Lui, a French version of Playboy.) Gradually the buzz converted to profit: an identifiable Notting Hill set was now colonising the area, with more money to spend, much of it earned from the new record companies - Island Records, Chrysalis, Sony - that were putting down roots there. Julie's became a recognised oasis for Londoners who found the respectability of nicer neighbourhoods and the turgidity of pubs stifling. 'It was a magical time,' says Hodgess. 'We were all so young, and so innocent.' But gradually the grind began to pall, and in 1973 she sold out her stake to Herring. Herring knew nothing about catering, but decided to try to make a go of Julie's himself. He hired Johnny Ekperigin, then a 17-year-old cook at the De Vere hotel, to be his head chef. He also bought, at around the same time, the Portobello Hotel, now London's best-known rock hotel. Ekperigin proved an inspired choice, and has since become managing partner of wine bar, restaurant and hotel (in which Herring and his wife are the other partners).

The rest of the Julie's story can be found scattered through three decades of gossip columns. A compressed version can be gleaned from a half-hour tour with Johnny Ekperigin. 'Julie's is a bit like the Tardis,' he explains. 'You see it from the outside and you think, yes, that's a nice little restaurant. But once you go inside - as you may remember when the Doctor went into his phone box - it's enormous. There's another world in there, because we have all these different rooms and alcoves.'

He guides me through a selection. 'This [a table in the Gothic Room] is where Princess Margaret ate with Mick Jagger, I think it was in 1976, after he'd played Wembley Stadium. They had scrambled egg on toast with smoked salmon. And this is where Mark Phillips had his stag night.' He shows me the banqueting room with its magnificent 24-seater oval table (bought by Hodgess from a secondhand shop) on which Princess Anne's husband-to-be downed a bottle of Mumm champagne in three minutes (mercifully, Ekperigin doesn't mention the hoary old story with Phillips's dropped trousers, an exposed penis and a salt cellar). 'So,' he adds, 'did Will Carling. This [a table in the garden-room looking out on to a leafy back terrace] is where Sean Connery and Roger Moore always sit. And this [an alcove in the Gothic Room] is where Sylvester Stallone likes to sit, and this is where he puts his bodyguards. But you don't need bodyguards in Julie's because no one cares.'

Wander into Julie's on a weekday evening and you're as likely to be struck by the trustafarians and Sloanes as by the stars of disc and screen. But that, according to Ekperigin, is the whole point. 'We don't want to make a display of people. We want them to feel relaxed and secure. And that's the great thing about this layout: there's room for everybody. If we were Langan's bistro there might be tension between the Goldman Sachs lot and the celebrities and the younger, wilder ones in the bar, but we can have Tom Cruise in one room and Madonna in another and they don't even know the other's there - and nor does anyone else. But then on another occasion they might want to be seen, in which case we can sit them out here. It all depends what kind of mood someone's in. Restaurateurs,' he adds, 'are great diplomats. We should be running the world.'

It's arguable that the nature of the diplomacy required has changed slightly over the years. According to the comedienne Louise Rennison, who rented a flat round the corner for much of the Seventies and spent much of that time in Julie's, 'People used to behave very, very badly indeed. I went back there the other day and I realised it was the first time I'd ever been there sober. I can't remember it all, but I remember all those alcoves - people used to go missing for hours. But half the staff were just as out of it as we were. It wasn't full of smartypants celebrities then, it was more like people who were starting Spare Rib - people like Rosie Boycott. Now, it's a little bit more respectable - though that may just be the restaurant.'

Somehow, though, the ageing process that long ago overtook such dated contemporaries as Joe Allen's and San Lorenzo has passed Julie's by. Although the Establishment has been muscling in on the action for years - Mark Phillips's stag night was in 1973 - that Tardis-like interior has prevented it from smothering the wine bar's wild side. And today, with Notting Hill fever reaching epidemic levels, the place is buzzing as loudly as it has for years, not least because, as Ekperigin puts it: 'Hugh Grant's often been here, with Liz Hurley, and of course the guy who wrote it, Richard Curtis, has been using us for years.' And the connection with the Portobello Hotel - where Johnny Depp and Kate Moss had their notorious champagne bath - has helped keep Julie's young. Badly behaved rock stars stay there in droves and, as Ekperigin notes: 'Once they're there, they're here.'

When they get here, they clearly feel comfortable with the laid-back, unsycophantic confidence of Ekperigin himself - another key to Julie's enduring appeal. Born in Paddington, to a Nigerian father and an Austrian mother, Ekperigin has spent most of his life living in or around Notting Hill, and he shares the district's easygoing charm. A faintly dandyish martial arts enthusiast with an interest in all things Oriental, he's equally relaxed with Sloanes and supermodels, royals and Rastafarians; and that inclusiveness makes him - and Julie's - comfortable to be around.

'Julie's is a very eclectic place,' he reflects. 'It's comfortable and homely, like a worn armchair. And we're consistent - that's why we're still here. We've been consistent for 30 years.'

If Julie's can continue to be all things to all people, it could have decades more life left in it, and this seems to be the current strategy. At one level, it's seen as a nice family local, where a new generation of Julie's-goers is already being trained. 'On Sundays we have a cr?che, that's run by my sister,' says Ekperigin, 'so Lenny Henry brings his children, and Annie Lennox, and all sorts of local people who want a nice lunch without worrying about the screaming children.'

But at another level, there's also reason to believe that the tradition of bad behaviour hasn't entirely died out. Sylvester Stallone's favourite table, G3, is in a little curtained alcove in an out-of-the-way corner. It's known as 'the G-spot' - and it's booked solid for weeks ahead.