It is a special, storied place, Simpson’s, not quite 200 years old but almost. What began as a smoking room soon bloomed into the English home of chess, with a fine, traditional restaurant that soon collected fine, traditional English customers: Arthur Conan Doyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Dickens, Wodehouse. Peter O’Toole used to dine there — those were surely endless lunches, and he lived till his eighties — and later, the King when he was Prince Charles. It has had everyone and seen it all. My favourite story is of a sixth-former who, having passed out at a party the night before, came to extremely late for lunch here with his parents. Running out of the house in a panic, dressing in the cab, he arrived at the restaurant and was met with the raised eyebrow of a maître d’ who eventually conceded the restaurant did, indeed, hold a reservation under his name. Having been shown the loo on the way to his table, the boy discovered with horror that his friends, likewise being schoolboys, had inked his face with a constellation of cocks. Freshly-scrubbed, he returned to the waiting maître d’. “Will sir be having the sausage today?”
Why a long lunch might just save your life
