Success on a plate?

Today, the brains behind three of London's A-list restaurants, The Ivy, Le Caprice and J Sheekey, will open the doors to their new venture. The Wolseley's aim is to bring luxury to the masses. But, asks Christopher Hirst, has it got the right ingredients?

Until very recently, the cuisine at 160 Piccadilly consisted of bacon butties and Styrofoam beakers of tea consumed by electricians and air-conditioning contractors, but from today the place will be packed with food critics, restaurateurs, famous faces, anxious wannabes, journalists, star-spotters and other metropolitan types who like to see and be seen. Fashionable London will descend en masse to sample the fare and service offered in this handsome Twenties structure. Until a few months ago, it housed a grandiose, if customarily deserted restaurant called China House. Before that, from 1926 to 2000, it was the West End flagship of Barclays Bank, but it started life in 1921 as a Wolseley car showroom and this is the name to which it is returning. Now The Wolseley Café and Restaurant is opening its doors.

Redolent of pre-war luxury and style, Wolseley is a great name for an upmarket eatery. It perfectly characterises the high-gloss style of Jeremy King and Christopher Corbin, the restaurateurs whose ideas, money and flair are flowing into 160 Piccadilly. You may not know the names, but you will almost certainly have heard of the enterprises that they launched and owned until 1998. King and Corbin are the brains behind London's most glitzy, star-packed and notoriously unbookable restaurants: The Ivy, Le Caprice and J Sheekey. All three operate on the brasserie principle, where diners can order a snack or a £100 blow-out. In their new enterprise, King and Corbin are going further still to liberate Londoners from the three-course straitjacket.

The Wolseley will be open seven days a week from 7am (9am at weekends) until midnight. Modelled on the grand cafés of Vienna, Milan and Paris, it seats up to 200 customers and will give them whatever they require, from a single espresso to full dinner. The idea appears odd at first. After all, London has no shortage of either restaurants or all-day cafés. But how many places combine the two approaches, offering relaxed luxury at less-than-ruinous prices? Certainly, the spacious premises in Piccadilly are ideal for a grand European café. The Westminster volume of Pevsner's Buildings of England says that the building's "details and proportions are irreproachable". During my pre-launch peek inside, the "strident patterned marble floor" was hidden by a protective covering, but the "marvellous black-and-gilt lacquered screens" that portray Chinese aristocrats playing mah-jong was in full view. Under a 30ft-high vaulted ceiling supported by massive columns, the dining area is wonderfully light and airy. Perhaps to respect the dining environment of the A-list, photographers are not being allowed into Wolseley's main room, just as at King and Corbin's earlier restaurants.

The architectural grandeur of the Wolseley is something new for King and Corbin. Both Le Caprice and J Sheekey take the form of a number of small, interlinked dining rooms. Even the largish, wood-panelled dining room of The Ivy is somehow rendered cosy and convivial by the placing of tables and artworks. (In his glossy book on The Ivy, AA Gill records "the fact - known to few - that its apparently timeless interior is, apart from the windows, completely new, achieved at crippling expense".) It is, however, a sure bet that King and Corbin will bring to The Wolseley the same assiduous attention to detail and peerless care of customers that paid such dividends in their previous enterprises.

Janet Street-Porter predicts instant success. "The Wolseley will be the in-place when it opens because of the track record of the guys. Everything they've done has an amazing atmosphere. They're really good at understanding a room and making everyone feel important. They're not patronising but affable and easy to talk to. You feel their places have always been there. They're not interested in the cutting edge." Rowley Leigh, chef-patron at Kensington Place restaurant, explains the strengths of the duo: "Chris is a restaurateur down to his fingertips. He is a classic suit, completely calm and in control. With Jeremy, every single precept is questioned. It's not good enough to say 'We've always done it this way.' He is a radical. Both have a reputation for nit-picking. They are legends along the lines of César Ritz." According to Mark Hix, chef director of the Caprice Group and food writer for The Independent: "If you're not open-minded, they're not the easiest people to work with. Chefs set in their ways can get a bit offended. On the other hand, they're very open-minded themselves. For both of them, god is in the details."

The precision-engineered showbiz bar/ brasseries that King and Corbin have created are hybrids of the two restaurants where they first made their mark. Corbin was manager at Langan's, the art-lined restaurant that was once the hottest place in town. King was maître d'hôtel at Joe Allen, the buzzy actors' gaff for post-performance hamburger and ribs. They pooled resources in the early Eighties and, in association with the fashion designer Joseph Ettedgui, bought Le Caprice. This smallish restaurant in a secluded side-street behind The Ritz was opened in 1947 but was faltering by the Seventies. It changed hands several times before King and Corbin took the plunge. Despite a stylish conversion, the re-opened Caprice had a rocky start. King was on honeymoon with his American in-laws when he received a call from London informing him that his new venture was on the skids. Obliged to keep up a brave front, he smiled and said, "Oh, that's wonderful", before cutting short his honeymoon and returning to put together a rescue package. This time, Le Caprice soared.

Lined with David Bailey photographs, its creamy interior is the epitome of cosmopolitan luxury. It is the kind of place you always hope to find in Manhattan but never can. It serves possibly the world's best Egg Benedict. With the money rolling in, King and Corbin were able to buy out their partner and, after six years' negotiation, bought The Ivy and began their subtle, if expensive refurbishment. Tucked away down a dog-leg of a street off St Martin's Lane, The Ivy was a favourite theatrical haunt from the time it opened in 1917, though the name came somewhat later. (When the owner apologised for building works, an actress replied by quoting from a song: "We will cling together like the ivy.") In the first year after The Ivy reopened in 1990, it was possible to get a table relatively easily, but soon the restaurant gained a reputation as the celeb hang-out.

This impression has been reinforced by Ronnie Wood's triptych of the restaurant, commissioned by Andrew Lloyd-Webber and currently on show in the Royal Academy, as a kind of gastronomic Stella Street, where Jennifer Saunders rubs shoulders with Naomi Campbell and Mick Jagger shares a joke with Tom Stoppard. In fact, punters who book six months in advance for a table in anticipation of a night of celeb-spotting are liable to be disappointed. When I had lunch there a few months ago, the only famous face was Brian Blessed, gratifying enough but scarcely the kind of thing you shout from the rooftops. "It's a canteen for the working theatre," explains Mark Hix. "Agents will lunch there five days a week. People may be disappointed to see no famous people, but they're actually surrounded by people who work for famous people and are sometimes more important." Hix claims that the best way to get a table at The Ivy is "just to pop in. Any time from 5.30pm to midnight."

When King and Corbin acquired and revamped J Sheekey - a tucked-away fish restaurant that had fallen on hard times - this, too, was an instant success. "Before they took it over, Sheekey's was a dump, absolutely ghastly and horrible," says Janet Street-Porter. "Cleverly, they made an interior that is really modern but looks very traditional. It's a piece of set design really, a series of rooms like some of the very successful restaurants in Milan." Offering three kinds of caviar (50g of Beluga will set you back £125), J Sheekey has a more conventional menu than its siblings, though even here it is possible to get away without losing either arm or leg. You can have half-a-dozen rock oysters at the bar for £8.25. Many patrons swear by the fish pie at £9.75.

Luke Johnson's Belgo chain, which assisted with the take-over of J Sheekey in 1997, bought out King and Corbin in 1999. Hix, who worked for them as executive chef, can understand their reasons for selling out. "In the restaurant business, you can work your nuts off for years and years and not make much money, so £13m was a very good offer. In a lifetime of owning restaurants, you wouldn't make that money." King and Corbin stayed on as directors until last year, when they resigned from the board. It is a tribute to their managerial standards and painstaking perfectionism that the handover went so smoothly. The unimpeachable standards they established at Le Caprice, The Ivy and J Sheekey continue without the slightest tremor.

But will they be able to repeat the trick at The Wolseley? One long-term observer of London restaurants expresses doubts. "Sooner or later, they'll have a blip. It happens to everybody. In effect, they've been out of the business for five years. The zeitgeist may have moved on." However, most people in the trade believe that King and Corbin will succeed. "They are restaurateurs rather than restaurant owners and have a very good vision of what customers want," says Hix. "The Wolseley is ambitious, but it's just an extension of what they were doing at Le Caprice and The Ivy. People go there five times a week because they feel at home and the service is good." Rowley Leigh agrees: "I think they'll pull it off. They have accumulated a serious, heavyweight team. The key to success is having their kind of sensitivity, being in tune with the market."

There is no denying the hefty firepower that King and Corbin have gathered at 160 Piccadilly. The general manager of The Wolseley is David Loewie, formerly managing director of Conran restaurants. The executive head chef is Chris Galvin, who, after winning a Michelin star for Conran's Orrery restaurant, became executive chef of Conran restaurants. Other senior figures have been plucked from Conran's Almeida and J Sheekey. The star pastry chef Claire Clark will produce The Wolseley's patisserie.

If anyone can make a success of The Wolseley, it is Corbin and King, who are also planning to open a hotel. So far, mainly the rich and famous have benefited from their scrupulous standards of hospitality and service, but now we'll all be able to pop in for a croissant and cappuccino.