Rules Rules

It’s not possible to say one’s favorite restaurant in big cities because such things depend on your cast of mind at a particular moment, but you can say those of which you are most fond and, for me in London, it’s Rules. The place opened on Maiden Lane in 1789 as an oyster bar and the owner, Thomas Rule, was later committed to a psychiatric hospital for the murder of his wife, Isabella, and daughter, Elsie. Then, as now, it has its own estate in the countryside for game. The eatery has appeared in novels by Graham Green, Dick Francis, Dorothy L Sayers and Evelyn Waugh and Sir John Betjeman, the former British Poet Laureate, complained vociferously to the Greater London Council when Rules was under threat of demolition. The original features of the restaurant and the cocktail bar are carefully maintained, though the reasons for my fondness may surprise you.