Everyone round to Guy Ritchie's place

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10 April 2012

Last month it was Justin Timberlake, and shortly before that, Leonardo DiCaprio.

More recently, there was Mickey Rourke presiding over a corner table in inimitable Mickey Rourke fashion, and it would be remiss not to mention the night princes William and Harry shored up, only to nip behind the bar and play at pulling pints like ordinary folk.

Who else? Well, a Sophie Dahl here, a Robert Downey Jr there, an occasional stray Girl Aloud. Jude Law, Kevin Spacey, Cilla Black even. And then there are the youngsters, the Coco Sumners, the Peaches Geldofs. And when the youngsters adopt a watering hole, all inevitably goes nuclear.

So, celebrities every one of them, and every one of them gravitating helplessly towards The Punch Bowl, a traditional London pub, of all things, but right now, the celebrity hangout du jour.

The landlord is a certain Guy Ritchie, once a promising film director, and now famous for other, more prurient reasons. Though much was made recently of his divorce settlement from Madonna — purported to be somewhere in the region of £50 million — it was made clear, and with far greater satisfaction, that another part of the settlement was this, the old London boozer, once theirs together (this the place where, by all accounts, Madge discovered a hitherto unknown appreciation of bitter), now his alone.

Tucked into the kind of discreet mews street in Mayfair even an iPhone app can have trouble locating, The Punch Bowl looks little like your average den of dazzle and, with apparent determination, has none of the bling and glitz of the nearby Met Bar or The Ivy.

The street on which it is located, Farm Street, is tiny, hardly one you would wander down by mistake, and from the outside it looks so traditional you might well think that to request an alcopop here could result in a restraining order. No, this is a posh pub, and has been for centuries now (two, at least), catering exclusively, until recently, to high-end businessmen and women for whom Mayfair is both stomping ground and playground.

But now Ritchie is about to change all that. You get more celebrity traffic here than you do on an average This Morning, and of a higher calibre too.
"Look, the fact of the matter is that any American, particularly an American celebrity, is still a sucker for everything that is a cliché about London life," says Mark Borkowski, a longstanding PR and author of The Fame Formula.

"And one of the enduring clichés of London, one that goes along with the idea of Big Ben and jolly policemen, is the cockney pub, or in this case, a mockney pub. Guy Ritchie is Guy Ritchie, he has a pile of celebrity friends, and sooner or later those celebrity friends will congregate and do him the favour of frequenting his establishment."

And it's not just celebrity friends either. Since his divorce, Ritchie virtually regards the place as a second home. As such, he has been known, if the mood so takes him, to close it to the public altogether to entertain close and personal friends in private. Earlier this week, he kept it open and took a date there, a polished brunette with whom he'd previously been photographed in Malibu.

Here, he plied her with warm beer and exposed her to an enthusiastic traditional Irish jig, while onlookers looked on, thrilled by the unadvertised entertainment. You would expect, then, for its patronage the following night to be full of rubberneckers hoping for more of the same, but Ritchie is nothing if not sparing in the giving of his presence. If this is inevitably to become just another celebrity hangout, then right now it is carefully biding its time.

Tuesday night at The Punch Bowl, and though business is brisk at both bar and restaurant nook, it remains a celebrity-free zone, with not even a lowly Hollyoaker in sight. At 7pm on what is a balmy summer evening, its well-heeled customers spill out onto the quiet street outside while the discreetly placed muscle — former Army-looking types, nattily dressed and placed on either corner to keep the paparazzi and, presumably, the DiCaprio fans at bay — watch on impassively.

This is the after-work crowd, mostly, suited and booted, alongside the occasional twin set and pearls of the super-rich, their sports cars cooling down at nearby Permit Only parking spaces. A group of young women talk enthusiastically about the renaissance of the cocktail, while some very robust men speak of rugby at the weekend, only they call it rugger in deference to a boarding-school past.

Inside, a framed oil painting of Winston Churchill glowers over proceedings, and the dark wooden panelling competes with the heavy oak frame to give the pleasingly snug — if occasionally claustrophobic — air of a pub that, by rights, should still be filled with the smoke of Cuban cigars. Though there are as many women here as there are men, this is nevertheless a masculine place, for chaps who work hard to play hard, then shoot pheasant at the weekend.

In other words, it attempts to perpetuate a vision — Mr Ritchie's vision — of a now marginalised England. The restaurant menu is similarly traditional, and isn't cheap: a slight morsel of roasted and poached chicken perched on a cloud of potato something-or-other can, and will, set you back £17, a bottle of average plonk even more than that. But then this is the pub that, last year, hit the headlines when staff reportedly charged more for pints if they didn't recognise the customer; their way, perhaps, of keeping the clientele appropriately rarefied, and the riffraff out. They don't do that any more.

The bar staff are pretty and professional, and don't suffer fools gladly. They've heard all the Material Girl jokes, while queries as to whether the landlord is going to show his face tonight are received with the same kind of glower Churchill offers from the wall. And, much like the bouncers outside, they apply a strict code of conduct.

At one point in the evening, a large George Dawes lookalike, dressed in Leigh Bowery finery, enters, two heavily tattooed women trailing in his wake. Each is wearing a cocked black Victorian-style hat. They are informed by the nearest pint puller that hats are not permitted at the bar, and after a brief but thin-lipped conversation, they agree to leave. As they do, a woman who must surely be the next emergent supermodel arrives, bra-less, with her boyfriend for a little food and a lot of champagne.

Their driver waits dutifully by the Mercedes outside, safe in the knowledge that they won't re-emerge any time soon. A loitering paparazzo, who clearly has no idea who she is, seems crestfallen.
With a number of high-profile films being shot in the capital right now, including those starring the aforementioned DiCaprio and Rourke, the Punch Bowl looks set to maintain its A-list reputation well into the autumn, at least.

But surely it will soon become a victim of its own success, a mockney pub, that is, in fact just another Met Bar, only dressed up in tweed. Surely this is the last thing Ritchie wants?

"Yes, but every celebrity talks from both sides of his mouth," suggests Mark Borkowski. "They want what they say they don't want, and don't want what they say they do. It's one of the great laws of CelebrityVille: say one thing, mean the other. At the end of the day, Guy Ritchie is a businessman, and we are in a time of recession.

He has an investment here and he needs the business. Besides, an establishment of this kind thrives on who comes in through the door. But ultimately, yes, it's all about how long he can hold out before it goes properly high street."
Shortly after 10pm, eight women, none of whom look like Mayfair locals, come in and order a bottle of wine between them.

"So this is Guy's place, yeah?" one of them remarks, peering into the gloom. "Bit dark."
"Seen anyone yet?" says another. Clearly disappointed, the women agree to come back another time, the weekend perhaps.

Tonight, at least, is a quiet night at the Punch Bowl. Come closing time, the supermodel-to-be and her boyfriend retreat back into their black Mercedes, the bodyguards unclench, and the lurking lens caps are screwed back on. But they'll be back tomorrow night, because tomorrow night — well, you never know, do you?

Everyone round to Guy Ritchie's place

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