Charles Dickens ate there. So did Charlie Chaplin, David Bowie and Madonna. Now the building that houses Rules, London's oldest restaurant, has been given away to one of Europe's biggest conservation charities.
J-P Mayhew, who has owned 34-35 Maiden Lane in Covent Garden for four decades, donated the building to the National Trust, the Associated Press reported. The Trust values the gift at £11 million (about $14 million).
What's Included
Along with the four-story building, the donation includes a trove of history: visitor books, old menus, caricatures, photographs, stained glass and signs. The Trust will also collect the restaurant's annual rent and use it to fund conservation work.
228 Years of Oysters and Treacle Sponge
Thomas Rule opened the place as an oyster bar in 1798, in the turbulent years after the French Revolution. Rules has since outlasted the British Empire, the Blitz and a 1970s road plan that would have bulldozed it. Poet John Betjeman stepped in to defend it in 1971.
The roughly 90-seat dining room serves traditional British fare. Novelist Graham Greene held birthday meals there and featured it in "The End of the Affair," and rooms are named after both Greene and Betjeman. King Edward VII is also reputed to have met his lovers there.
Business as Usual
Ricky McMenemy, who has worked at Rules since 1989, will keep running the restaurant as a commercial tenant of the Trust and said he looks forward to another two centuries there. National Trust director-general Hilary McGrady marveled that Rules is still open, with treacle sponge still on the menu.
Mayhew said few restaurants anywhere have endured like Rules has.