Bibendum has been a London landmark for 30 years. Now, with its relaunch, it is up to chef Claude Bosi to bring the stars home
In the gutted upstairs room of Bibendum on London’s Fulham Road, I’m suddenly feeling my age. The flagship Conran restaurant is in the process of a makeover. Floors and walls have been stripped and the famous Michelin blue stained-glass windows and great arched conservatory glass roof look down on an interior of rubble and scaffold. The windowless kitchen behind the cathedral-like dining room has been half-removed by the contractors giving it the look of a medieval vault. I’m surveying its gloom with Claude Bosi, recently installed as the new head chef for the restaurant’s reopening in April. Bosi, who won his first Michelin star at 26, and still carries that forward-looking sense of exuberant possibility, points to the few tiles that still cling stubbornly to the kitchen walls, as if at a cave painting: “Most of this stuff is from 1987!” he suggests, marvelling at the antiquity.
Bibendum opened that year, the year I first moved to London, and since that obviously doesn’t seem much more than five minutes ago, it’s hard not to take his marvelling a bit personally. Squint and the dining room itself feels like a monument to those beginnings. 1987 was the first full year of Nigel Lawson’s Big Bang, when, for better and worse, London determinedly rehashed itself as an outward looking global city, at ease with foreign money and foreign culture. The deregulation was the starting gun of a different kind of confidence, one which wanted to adopt the lifestyle of European capitals. That openness was symbolised most clearly, perhaps, in a trio of new restaurants which opened almost simultaneously. Rowley Leigh’s Kensington Place, the inspirational River Café of Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, and Bibendum itself, which were united in celebrating a joie de vivre that had, up until then, most often seemed the preserve of life across the Channel.
Continue reading...