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Kettner's is back! Soho's party house returns following revamp

Sparkling new order: The revamped champagne bar at Kettner's
Sparkling new order: The revamped champagne bar at Kettner's

It's where Oscar Wilde went for illicit assignations, where Edward VII allegedly courted Lillie Langtry and where a curious Robert De Niro invited girlband Bananarama for a drink after they wrote a song about him.

Now Kettner’s, the Soho restaurant founded in 1867 by a man thought to be Napoleon III’s cook, is to be reborn as a hotel and restaurant as part of the Soho House group, reopening on Tuesday.

Its many listed features have been restored and enhanced and the upstairs “cabinets particulier” dining rooms, home to much naughtiness in the past, have been turned into bedrooms for — well, future naughtiness, I suppose.

Thus begins another chapter in the 151-year history of a Soho institution that brought French cuisine to London, passed through the hands of wartime profiteers and fast-food chains, but which even at its lowest ebb always had a raffish allure.

“It’s all about affordable glamour,” says Soho House’s founder Nick Jones of what will henceforth be known as Kettner’s Townhouse. “I showed Kirsty [Young, the broadcaster and Jones’s wife] around it and she said: ‘This is definitely the sort of place you’ll take people you want to sleep with rather than people you work with’.”

Jones says he dreamed of being a part of Kettner’s ever since the mid-Nineties. The restaurant was then owned by Peter Boizot and operated as an adjunct to the Pizza Express chain he founded. Jones had a restaurant called Over the Top in the building behind, which now houses Café Bohème and the original Soho House members’ club at 40 Greek Street.

“We shared a courtyard,” says Jones. “I thought it was mine and he thought it was his. He’d always get upset if I had my mop buckets out there, or if we both had our kitchen doors open. I always loved going there when Peter owned it, even when it was just serving pizza and lamb cutlets and chips. When we managed to buy Wheelers on Old Compton Street and could expand Soho House I celebrated with a lot of champagne in Kettner’s champagne bar.”

When Kettner’s was closed and put up for sale by then owners Gondola Holdings in 2016, Jones jumped. Buying it meant he could build on the aforementioned courtyard, expanding Soho House’s back rooms and roof terrace, and install lifts in both properties. “We initially thought: ‘Shall we just make it part of Soho House?’ but we binned that idea, because Soho loves Kettner’s,” says Jones.

The plans for its reincarnation as a sister to Jones’s Dean Street Townhouse were thrashed out with English Heritage, The Soho Society and the building’s freeholder, Soho Estates, the property empire founded by pornographer Paul Raymond and now run by his grand-daughters Fawn and India Rose James.

So the mosaic floor in the champagne bar and the listed moulding and mirrors in the dining room have been painstakingly restored. “Lost” drawings found behind the wallpaper — possibly drawn by Helen McKie, who painted Gallic murals on the walls when the restaurant was bought and renamed La Cigale in 1940 by Jean Pagès, a supporter of General De Gaulle who was later arrested for trading on the black market — have been reinterpreted in screenprints by artist Sara Beazley.

The champagne bar, which was an affordable but swanky haunt for me, my wife and pretty much everyone we knew in the days when we were all young and skint, will serve Ruinart Brut NV at £15 a glass, but there will still be magnums and jeroboams on offer for deeper pockets. Nothing stupidly expensive, though. “That’s never quite been our market,” says Jones.

The food in the dining room and the piano bar will be somewhat different to Auguste Kettner’s haute cuisine. “The original menus were quite creamy and fatty, so we have made a menu for now that winks at the past, with a Kettner’s omelette, terrines and things like that,” Jones says.

Chef Jackson Berg and general manager Conor Sheehan have between them worked at Hoi Polloi, Bistrotheque and Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen, and Berg’s menu will also include Bresse chicken cooked in hay and vol-au-vent of kidneys and sweetbreads.

Upstairs, the first-floor dining rooms and the offices above have been converted into bedrooms decorated in 1920s French boudoir style but have retained their original Georgian fireplaces and floorboards. There are downpour showers and Cowshed products in the ensuite bathrooms.

The magnificent Jacobean Suite overlooking both Romilly and Greek Streets was to have been a cinema but its Grade II-listed Edwardian panelling could not be soundproofed so it will instead be a master suite, with its own dedicated entrance from the street.

“I’ve been looking at the history of Kettner’s since we got it, and it’s so much fun bringing it back and putting something Auguste Kettner would be proud of in there,” says Jones. But it turns out the history of this venerable building can be misleading. As Soho House’s chief communications officer, Peter Chipchase, puts it, “image and reality tend to blur together” at Kettner’s.

Some facts can be established. The restaurant began in a single Georgian house and gradually expanded into six neighbouring properties. It had one of the first open kitchens and Kettner often invited guests behind the scenes to confirm its famed cleanliness.

In 1869, using the pseudonym A Beast at Feeding Time, Eneas Sweetland Dallas wrote a 2,000-word letter to The Times raving that this French restaurant in a filthy, dirty corner of London full of foreigners was the best (and cheapest) place to eat outside a gentleman’s club. In 1877, Dallas wrote Kettner’s Book of the Table, a Manual of Cookery which was reprinted three times in the 20th century.

Oscar Wilde certainly entertained sundry coachmen and grooms in the cabinets particulier. A signed note proposing an assignation exists, and Wilde was repeatedly quizzed about what he ate and drank and what else he got up to there during his three court trials. He even fostered Kettner’s reputation for affordable glamour, stating in court that it was “not so gorgeous in price” as rivals like Rules and Simpson’s.

There is proof of visits by Winston Churchill, Agatha Christie and Bing Crosby. Records by the house band, Geoffrey Gelder’s Kettner’s Five, were in the hit parade in the 1920s.

But there is no record of Auguste Kettner working in Napoleon III’s kitchens, or, as is also claimed, those of Prince Leopold of Belgium. Kettner was German: he Frenchified his name by adding the second “t”. His wife Barbe was Belgian and after Kettner’s death she married the Italian head waiter Sangiorgi and they ran the place together. So London’s first French restaurant had nothing French about it at all.

Edward VII may well have wined and dined Lillie Langtry in a cabinet particulier: society women, especially those having scandalous affairs, rarely dined in public until the opening of The Savoy in 1890. But rumours that he had a tunnel built between the restaurant and the nearby Palace Theatre to facilitate their secret meetings are untrue: the Palace was built 10 years after their relationship ended.

A degree of myth and mystery has always been part of Kettner’s charm and will play its part in luring a new generation. “It will attract people on dates and intimate dinners, rather than large tables or birthday parties,” says Jones, “and I hope all ages will go as it will be affordable for everyone.”

Maybe a latterday royal/actress couple, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, could be tempted to take a table, I say, or get a room. “You never know,” Jones winks.