Rules of engagement

Rules, which claims to be the oldest restaurant in London, has been in the news this week following the announcement that it has been ‘given’ to the National Trust.

According to the BBC, the Covent Garden restaurant, founded in 1798, ‘will continue to trade, while becoming a commercial tenant of the charity. Under the deal, the rent payments will go towards conserving the building’.

Funnily enough, in December 2005 (and therefore prior to the smoking ban) I booked a table at Rules for the Forest Christmas lunch which was attended by nine or ten people including our chairman, Lord Harris of High Cross, restaurateur Ranald Macdonald, and Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood.

Ralph was a dedicated pipe smoker, Ranald enjoyed cigars, and Ronald smoked cigarettes. I’m sure there would have been several more smokers there too, so in hindsight it was a mistake to book Rules because, four years earlier, the owners had unilaterally introduced a comprehensive no-smoking policy at a time when no-smoking restaurants weren’t exactly rare but they were probably in a minority. Instead most offered smoking and no-smoking areas which wasn’t enough for the tobacco taliban.

Anyway, according to the Daily Telegraph:

Rules, the 300-year-old Mayfair grouse trough that boasts of being the oldest restaurant in London, is the last place you'd expect to have banned smoking. Alas, it has done just that.

"We had so many complaints about not having a no-smoking area that we had to do something," says Rules. "This restaurant does not lend itself to being split, so we've banned smoking everywhere. I was also concerned about the health of our staff."

"It's a disgrace to be doing this in a restaurant 300 years old," splutters John Carlisle of the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association, a regular luncher there in happier days. "I am now boycotting the place."

Blissfully ignorant of the policy, this then was the restaurant I chose for our annual Christmas lunch. Worse, I broke with recent tradition because two or three previous lunches had taken place at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, one of the most smoker-friendly restaurants you could wish to find. (In 1999 we even booked Simpson’s for a smoker-friendly fry-up on No Smoking Day.)

Two months after our lunch at Rules parliamentarians voted to ban smoking in all indoor public places, including every restaurant, so you could say that Rules was only bowing to the inevitable.

Nevertheless it taught me a valuable lesson and since then we have always checked and double-checked the smoking policies of potential venues, if only to ensure they have have a comfortable outdoor smoking area because, as I discovered when booking Rules, nothing can be taken for granted.

Home page photo credit: iStock / Paha_L