Rules Restaurant

Rules was established by Thomas Rule in 1798 making it the oldest restaurant in London. It serves traditional British food, specialising in classic game.

Oldest restaurant in London. It serves traditional British food.

http://www.rules.co.uk

Playing by the Rules at London's Oldest Restaurant - Eater London

Rarely has a restaurant name encouraged the traditionally-spoofed bad writer’s opening, “the dictionary defines [insert the subject of the essay here],” more nakedly than Rules.

When under threat of demolition in the early seventies, it was another author, John Betjeman, who leapt to its lyrical defence in a letter to The Greater London Council: “A place which has been constantly used by actors, managers and famous people, as Rules has,” he wrote, “acquires an invisible atmosphere, just as a church frequented by praying people acquires an atmosphere.

David Bowie at Rules Bowie World It’s true that ‘atmosphere’ is hard to capture or define — as equally elusive for a London author as a visiting tourist, gazing up at the restaurant’s gold-and-red clad exterior.

Appropriately, Rules features in Spectre by Sam Mendes Sam Mendes Food and nostalgia intersect: 

“history, of a dense, richly flavoured kind,” writes critic John Walsh, “hangs around Rules like mayoral chains.”

“Through the written word,” he quips, “Rules Restaurant in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, makes an interesting impression: oysters, George III, porter, Dickens, steak and kidney pudding.

Rules Restaurant

Jay Rayner - Rules Restaurant

The signs for the old rooms are still there, but there is now one large space in red plush and dark mahogany with a real bar overseen by Brian Silva, a garrulous Bostonian who served for many years at the Connaught and who won’t mix you a traditional mojito.

And now it has that bar menu: oysters on the half shell, or Scotch quail egg with a soft oozing yolk, forest mushrooms on toast, game pie, or a plate of salmon smoked on the premises.

Rules has been owned by just three families over the two centuries and the current custodian, John Mayhew, continues its traditions, not least through ownership of Lartington, the game estate in the high Pennines that supplies so much of the kitchens needs.

Main courses are less about individual dishes than the partwork that arrives at the table: the serving dish of long-braised pork cheeks with black pudding, to be plated up as desired; a platter of sliced red deer – the same colour at its eye as the banquettes, with roasted beetroots and chanterelles – that is so gargantuan it is passed around the table and back again; the fully accessorised roast woodcock; here the dish of game jus, there the bread sauce, over there the parsnip crisps, underneath, the toast spread with its offal.

Well, while I was hiding in the woods to escape games sessions, my older brother, Adam, was in another part of the forest killing pheasants.

The Observer - Rules Restaurant

Rules, the great English game restaurant on London’s Maiden Lane, is more at risk than most, for it has more history than most.

Since then it has had just three owners: the family of its founder Thomas Rule until 1918, the Bell family until 1984 and now businessman John Mayhew, who bought it because he thought ‘London deserved a spectacular English restaurant”.

My mother, a writer, was in the process of writing a sequence of 12 novels that followed two London families from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, and because Rules was in existence throughout the period a scene in each book was set there.

Clearly the formula works: the kitchen brigade of 30 serves 500 meals a day and, each year, gets through 18,000 game birds, more than any other restaurant in Britain.

And when last year, Rules announced they were banning smoking from the general dining room they were flooded with letters of complaint from regulars, some of whom had been coming for half a century.

It's survived universal suffrage and two world wars: restaurant Rules ...

No matter, for we are in Rules, and nothing hurts in this tall Victorian house with its wonky rooms and faded staircases to unknowable attics.

Or rather, the worst has already happened, and Rules still stands and serves golden syrup pudding, which no one else does, because it kills with angina, and its companion psychological disorder, which is hubris.

Gold was the colour of the Edwardian age — gold for the money they made, and red for the blood it ended in — and Rules is gold too, and red, in homage: gold walls, gold lights, red seats and carpet swirls, now topped with the Christmas decoration collection of a blind giant who is very enthusiastic about Christmas.

Terence Wood, the former maître d’, used to deliver steak and kidney pudding to Elaine Paige’s dressing room at the Adelphi Theatre when she played Norma Desmond (who was never as fragile as she looked), and he has walked to Soho with trays of fish when Gay Pride made the streets impassable to taxis.

And I find, as I sit under the ludicrous Christmas decorations and the souvenirs of a lost empire, that I am not frightened of Arron Banks’s shouty-crackers Twitter account, and visions in which Nigel Farage is dressed as an elf.

Restaurant: Rules, London WC2 | Life and style | The Guardian

Rules tends to be a bit cagey about new chefs, never doing anything so vulgar as courting publicity.

David Stafford (ex Galvin, Le Café Anglais and River Café) knows there's no point battling against the forces of tradition, so his menu is liberally blessed with, yes, game (when in season), pies and puddings.

But he's added his own flourishes: turning pies into lavish pithiviers, or referencing Roman cooking in a glorious dish of outrageously gamey hare fillet served with a nutmeg-scented, single semolina gnocco.

Partridge for two, exquisitely juicy and with a whiff of mulchy earth and hedgerow from its ageing, is majestic: served on a silver charger with fruity, relish-like red cabbage and that pithivier, a dome of crisp pastry stuffed with the bird's innards and garlicky French sausage, it's a complex, memorable little number that shoots straight to the top of my list of deathbed dishes.

By dint of its unique heritage, Rules could pile 'em in while serving any old toss, but it doesn't.