Material gains: the Cloth trio on their second London restaurant

On a day in late September, days before its official launch, the great and good of the London restaurant world packed themselves into the downstairs bar of Cloth Cornhill, the celebrated City chop house that until a year or so ago had operated under the name Simpson’s Tavern for more than two and a half centuries. After silver platters of devils on horseback were passed around and pints of Guinness dispatched, the wooden stairs were climbed, and guests were ensconced among the oak tables and wood panels of a dining room whose patrons once breathed in the Georgian London air between mouthfuls of chops and slugs of claret.

The name Simpson’s Tavern may have since been consigned to history, but that is as much of the site that has. Upstairs in the creaking candle-lit dining room it’s not hard to envisage Charles Dickens, a regular at the chop house in the mid-1840 and 50s, surrounded by his fellow men (women were not permitted to dine at the restaurant until 1916) tucking into his ‘optional sausage’ while he plotted how the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce might play out at nearby Lincoln’s Inn. Its new owners Joe Haynes, Ben Butterworth and Tom Hurst have breathed new life into the restaurant, which has stood tucked away in Ball Court since 1757, but the ghosts of its past are still there in the room with you.

Cloth Cornhill (the original Simpson’s Tavern name was unable to be used because it is trademarked), is the second restaurant under the Cloth banner, joining Cloth Fair, the trio’s debut restaurant in nearby Farringdon that is named after its equally historic location being part of a row of buildings that survived the Great Fire of London in 1666. With their latest project, the three have brought the site into the twenty first century while simultaneously ensuring that it also remains firmly rooted in its celebrated past.

“We have ripped everything out and restored everything that required restoring and replaced for new all the things that were not in good enough condition,” says Butterworth when I meet with the trio a few hours before the industry dinner. “The building is listed inside and outside so we have preserved all the historical details, but we’ve also brought it into modernity.”

This proved to be no small undertaking, with the infrastructure of the nearly 300-year-old building being upgraded, including new electrics, extraction, heating and cooling (air conditioning was put in to replace radiators) and the hitherto gas-run kitchen being replaced with a more worker-friendly all-induction suite. Walk into the site, however, and very little of this will be apparent, but that’s exactly the point. To illustrate this, Butterworth points to the downstairs 200-year-old mahogany bar, which has been reinforced within by stainless steel. “The aim is to walk into the pub and feel like it’s been here for 200 years but for it to work really efficiently.”

Operational changes

Such an observance to history runs through Cloth Cornhill. The talk inevitably turns to the significance of the building (the word institution is used on more than one occasion) and of a pressure to ensure it lives up to its expectations. While Simpson’s Tavern under its most recent ownership only closed in 2022, becoming victim to Covid and a subsequent disagreement with the landlord over unpaid rents, history casts a long shadow over the site. In a statement on its forced closure the business described the site having survived fires, world wars, an industrial revolution, and a plague. “The tables elbows rest on, in our booths, are from the underwriting room of Lloyds 2nd room and were soaked in its ink and now the claret from generations of brokers, underwriters, and agents, we are woven into the City’s DNA. We have been here before the U.S. of A was born.” Emotive stuff.

“The pressure of history is there but it’s very small compared to some of the other operational pressures,” says Butterworth, acknowledging the importance of the building they have taken on. “A lot of people are watching us carefully to see what comes out of this.”

Many operational pressures have been addressed, including the relocation of the dumb waiter, which runs between the basement kitchen, the ground floor bar and first floor restaurant, as well as the aforementioned switch to induction to help create a better cooking environment for the chefs. Perhaps the biggest change, however, has been the transformation of the entire ground floor into a pub rather than it being one part restaurant, one part drinking space.

Historically, guests would walk past the acid-etched glass windows to enter the building, turning right into a narrow bar area, left into the downstairs restaurant or heading straight upstairs into the main dining space that is set over a collection of rooms. While the downstairs space has retained the dining room layout, complete with its dedicated booth areas, it now functions as a pub.

“If we’d have kept the space as a restaurant, it would have been too much, says Hurst, the chef of the outfit, whose CV includes London restaurants Brawn, The Marksman and Lasdun. “We’ve got 74 covers upstairs, which is very manageable, but another 40 down here would have made it 114, and that becomes a lot.”

There is a food offer, but only bar snacks, with the menu printed onto the coasters. Options include ‘the sausage’ and Welsh rarebit, both of which are available upstairs (the rarebit features on the dessert menu) as well as a pig’s head brioche; coronation crab rosti; and sausage pie, which can only be found in the bar area. Augmenting these will be specials, such as a porchetta and apple sandwich with pickled slaw. Each snack is £8, or you can pay ‘35 quid the lot’ as the coaster reads.

Hurst says they looked at The Devonshire’s model because clear parallels can be made between the City and the Soho sites. The Devonshire’s very successful clear delineation between its pub and restaurant areas, and the synergy between the spaces, led them to believe that a similar model would work at Cloth Cornhill. “We looked at The Devonshire for inspiration, not for the food but for how the downstairs pub works. You see how busy it gets and that it serves snacks, but when you want to have lunch or dinner there is a definite separate space. That was appealing.”

As The Devonshire trio will likely attest, such a model may be effective, but it is not without it challenges, and the Cloth trio are under no illusions either on this point. “Downstairs won’t shut from 11am until 11pm so we should constantly have cash coming through the door,” says Hurst. “At Cloth [Fair] we earn money from 12pm to 2.30pm and then in the evenings. Here it will be constant, and that will be a tricky thing to navigate.”

A very British menu

Hurst’s previous kitchen experience before opening Cloth, as well as his time in the Farringdon restaurant, have helped inform the menu. “Two and a half years’ trading at Cloth Fair has given us a good knowledge of how and what people eat, what works and what doesn’t work,” he says. Yet the very nature of the site as London’s oldest chophouse (Blacklock was also interested in taking on the site) meant that straying too far from the original premise would likely have not gone down too well with customers.

“Our head chef is Italian and makes amazing pasta, but it just wouldn’t work here,” Hurst jokes, pointing out that the Cloth Cornhill’s menu is a modern interpretation of classic British dishes while Cloth Fair has a more European leaning (but still with a British brogue). “The food is very different from Cloth one, it’s a menu that fits the space and is significantly more British. If you want something slightly more European go to Cloth one; for something richer, warmer and meatier you come here. The menus are very specific to each place.”

Snacks include warm beer bread and salted butter; Carlingford oysters with apple and lovage; devils on horseback with black pudding and brown sauce; and cured pork loin. Hurst’s take on the famous Simpson’s sausage, that was famously served a complimentary or signature option to every meat dish, also features, with the dish going through nine iterations before the final recipe was landed on.

Starters meanwhile include a rich and indulgent duck liver and foie parfait with pickled pear and truffled brioche; and a lighter Dorset crab cocktail with pickled celeriac, apple and chervil; while larger dishes are split between ‘mains’ and ‘grill’ and feature the likes of grilled lemon sole with potted shrimp and sea beet; a venison, bacon and prune pie; Suffolk pork chop and sauce Robert; and a Hereford sirloin with bone marrow and caper butter. There are also two sharing dishes - a 750g Somerset Barnsley chop with anchovy and rosemary butter; and an 800g Hereford ribeye with bone marrow and caper butter.

Unlike at Cloth Fair, where the menu changes regularly, Cloth Cornhill will be more consistent although seasonality will still play its part, with British asparagus, morels and game on the menu when in season and a pie remaining on the menu in the summer months, but with a lighter filling such as rabbit.

Old fashioned values in a brave new world

It’s hard to argue with any of this. The space has undeniably been brought back to life sensitively and with a precision that has retained its history and charm, but which also feels modish in an old school kind of way. The increased pub element will bring a welcome clatter to the cobbled back street. Equally, the menu has that rugged, old fashioned chop house feel so popular among City folk over the generations but with enough flair to not come across as stodgy - a trick expertly pulled off by The Quality Chop House in Farringdon.

And yet the climate makes opening and operating restaurants the most challenging it has been in decades, with soaring costs and political unrest continuing to create unease for restaurateurs and diners. Slam dunks in hospitality are few and far between. Can Cloth Cornhill be the next one?

“This is very different to Cloth one,” says Haynes, acknowledging these concerns. “We were creating something that had never existed before and no one knew who we were, so there was kind of nothing to lose. But here there is a huge expectation of the place. We want to do it well and breathe good life into these walls, and that requires a lot of work.”

Hurst points to rampant foodservice inflation as an issue, with prices for beef, butter and other dairy having almost trebled in some cases. Yet he is bullish about the restaurant sector. “There is this whole narrative that restaurants are in the shit and can’t make money, but that’s not true. If you get it right and deliver a product that people want to eat there’s no reason why you can’t make money.

“We won’t know exactly what people want until we start trading but I’ve had a pretty good guess at what they will want to eat. In my mind we’ve got it right.”

The weekday-only trading hours at both Cloth restaurants, thanks to their City locations, is also a benefit the trio want to continue to take advantage of. Staff not having to work weekends has kept retention ‘incredibly high’ they say and has also proven to be beneficial in other ways. “We do tend to employ a slightly older and more engaged person who sees hospitality as a career and the team are very engaged,” says Haynes. “Everyone has two days off together - the fact that it is Saturday and Sunday is a bonus.”

Whatever the immediate challenges, the trio are in it for the long haul. “There absolutely is that pressure to get it right, but I feel confident that we can,” adds Butterworth. “The day after the deep clean was lovely. And seeing the warmth come back after a year of darkness and it being so sterile is amazing. It’s a space that deserves to have people eating and drinking in it.”

Or to quote William Thackeray, another Simpson’s Tavern regular: “Bravery never goes out of fashion.”