Where fusty meets fashionable

10 April 2012

The West End has just moved about half-a-mile further west. Well, OK, it hasn't just moved, it has been more of a gradual shift over the last couple of years.

But, at the end of last year, as the scaffolding came down around the latest multi-million pound restaurant to have moved into this area, the street acquired its very own eponymous restaurant: Just St James.

Naming your restaurant after the area in which it is located is all the rage: look at the Bush Bar and Grill in Shepherd's Bush - easily the trendiest opening of last year. However, while the Bush is all about trustafarian chic; Just St James, is a former banking hall remade into a mega-restaurant.

"I think St James's is up and coming for restaurants," says restaurateur Peter Gladwin, proprietor of Just St James, who has so far ploughed "about £3.5 million" into the venture situated in an old Lloyds bank.

Gladwin has a restaurant in the City and another near the wobbly Millennium Bridge, but he felt something was missing from his portfolio. "It has long been my ambition to have a flagship West-End restaurant and to be a major player on the restaurant scene," he says. "Ten years ago I might have looked at Wardour street, or 15 years ago, Covent Garden," but instead he chose St James's Street. He was not alone in his choice. "There are something like nine restaurants in or off St James's Street now, which is incredible."

However, what is significant about Gladwin's arrival is that his is an unashamedly mainstream operation. "I don't think one needs to be too trendy."

Gladwin offers "special occasion" dining. It may be a little too Ferrero Rocher for some tastes; nevertheless it is a symptom of the area's development that Gladwin, and his investors, feel the locale can support a mainstream restaurant. Certainly, the eastern side of the Street is now an almost uninterrupted row of restaurants: Petrus, Che, Just St James, The Avenue and L'Oranger.

St James's Street has not seen anything like it since the early 19th century, when an enterprising fishmonger called William Crockford opened Crockford's, London's swankiest casino. It had superb cellars and a kitchen to match; the latter run by Eustache Ude, the Marco Pierre White of the day.

Crockford's made St James's the most talked-about street in the world; it also made Crock-ford hugely rich and bankrupted many of his club's habitués, a substantial portion of aristocracy, in the process. Crock-ford's death and the crippling respectability of Victorian England ensured that the street would never be so lively, until today. The site of the old Crock-ford's is once again a sumptuous casino, 50 St James's, and the street is bustling.

The area around St James's Street has proved fertile ground for classic restaurants: Le Caprice to the west, and Wilton's and Simon Parker Bowles's Greens to the east, and, tucked away at the bottom of St James's Street, Suntory, on the site of Prunier's.

Otherwise, until relatively recently, the only reason to stray on to the main part of St James's Street was to visit one's club - Whites, Boodles, Brooks's or the Carlton; Lock, one's hatter; Lobb, one's boot-maker; Berry Bros or Justerini and Brooks, one's wine merchant; pick up a box of cigars at Davidoff, and, of course, cash a cheque.

"The architecture of St James is magnificent, it lends itself to restaurants with grand spaces," says ex-banker Chris Bodker, who opened The Avenue in 1995. "A lot was banking and, of course, high street banks went off the high street and onto the information superhighway."

"I liked the building," says Bodker of the glass-fronted, cavernous space that is now the Avenue. "It had been a bank at one point or another; but it had been empty for seven years. It was a magnificent space in a rather tired part of St James's."

To open a fashionable restaurant in a fusty part of town, at a time when London was emerging from the recession of the early Nineties, was a gamble, but it paid off. Bodker now has a group that also includes Circus, Kensington Place and Launceston Place. Moreover, the Avenue drew a younger crowd to St James's: it has been the venue of The Face magazine's party, fashion shows by Chanel and private parties for Gucci's Tom Ford, and Madonna.

Nor is it just the architecture that appeals to the new generation. "I had been looking for many years for a site," says Hani Farsi, proprietor of Che, located in the Economist Plaza, into which he has invested £4.3 million. "But why I fell in love with this one is its location.

"It is home to all that is most civilised in London." Some of his first memories of London as a child, are of being taken into Davidoff.

Farsi's customers are a heterogeneous bunch: from gallerists and business types at lunch to a pre-Tramp crowd in the evening. Indeed, Tramp is one of the area's landmarks.

Before Johnny Gold owned Tramp, he had a club down the road near the junction with St James's Street called Dolly's. It is now a nightclub called 57 Jermyn Street where, in pleasing symmetry, Gold's son Nick works. The club at number 57 was opened a couple of years ago by Matthew du Cann. Du Cann has a restaurant in Notting

Hill, but saw an opportunity in St James's. "It is one of London's oldest and most untampered-with neighbourhoods.

"It has always been an area where gentlemen have come to get their cigars, shirts and so on. Because of the neighbourhood, people have completely different attitudes than when they are in an area like Soho. They would never behave the same way in St James's," says du Cann. "But it is an area more and more people are discovering."

Long term, St James's resident Simon Khachadourian, proprietor of the Pullman Gallery, agrees. "This used to be the forgotten part of central London, and now St James is heaving." Things have certainly changed since the Eighties. Back then if Khachadourian wanted a bite to eat, "it was either the Red Lion in Crown Passage or the Ritz".

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