Where princes, celebrities go to party
AT BUNGA Bunga supper club, a sublimely ridiculous ode to Italian kitsch in Covent Garden, there’s a speedboat turned table that seats 10, communal cocktails served from 3-metre-high replicas of Michelangelo’s David – yes, the tap is part of his anatomy – and a Pompeii-style fresco featuring cavorting nudes.
Look closer at two of the faces in the orgy and they are the club’s owners: Charlie Gilkes and Duncan Stirling. The mural’s designer did it as a joke, but Gilkes, 33, and Stirling, 36, were sufficiently amused to let it stand.
It’s a fitting tribute to their growing domain, which includes seven boisterously decorated drinking dens frequented by young aristocrats (among them Prince William and Prince Harry) and celebrities ( Jennifer Lawrence, Margot Robbie).
“A question we ask a lot is, ‘Can we do that or is it a bit Disney?’” Gilkes said.
Even after drinking a Colosseum (about $160), a flaming spectacle of a drink that includes vodka, cherry liqueur and a bottle of prosecco, it would be hard to imagine any cartoon princess at Bunga Bunga, which is named for Silvio Berlusconi’s infamous sex parties.
Ditto at Maggie’s, Gilkes and Stirling’s Thatcher-inspired den of 1980s disco, which offers drinks menus in the era’s View-Master toys, but also a young, glammed-up Iron Lady look-alike stripping down to her Union Jack sequined underwear.
“There’s nothing boring and tiring about these places because they don’t take themselves terribly seriously,” said Ben Elliot, a founder of the luxury concierge service Quintessentially, which recommends the clubs to its clients.
Elliot, a nephew of Camilla, duchess of Cornwall, is a fan of Maggie’s, in particular, and not because at 16 he inter- viewed the just-ousted prime minister for the Eton College magazine.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a future king of our country,” Elliot said. “They’ve got a very equal way of treating people.”
Gilkes and Stirling, former rivals, began working together in 2003, after a bar where they both worked in promotion accidentally double-booked them during the lucrative run-up to Christmas. At the time, Gilkes was taking a gap year before college and Stirling was working for an events company.
In short order they persuaded a stuffy Sloane Square hotel to let them turn its basement into Kitts, the de- funct nightclub where Kate Middleton celebrated her 26th birthday and Noel Gallagher, the lead signer of Oasis, his 40th.
In 2009, after forming a company they called the Inception Group, they began trying the time-honoured formula of turning undesirable spaces into “destinations”. A hard-to-find former squash court tucked into a sleepy Chelsea apartment block became, in their hands, a Prohibition-themed speakeasy called Barts, whose address could be obtained only by word-of-mouth. Barts is still open, proudly referring to itself as the city’s “worst-kept secret”.
Instead of fighting the lack of natural light in a former air raid shelter in Soho, they kitted out a bar they named Cahoots like a World War IIera London Underground station, complete with a tube carriage and ticket inspectors on the door.
In 2014 Gilkes and Stirling took over the space of K Bar, the place that had double-booked them 11 years before. And in 2015, on St Martin’s Lane in Covent Garden, they opened Mr Fogg’s Tavern, their second imagining of the Victorian pub that Jules Verne’s adventurer Phileas Fogg might have returned to after his round-the-world-in-80-days jaunt. ( They already had a Mr Fogg’s Residence in Mayfair: a 19th-century old boys’ club with a hot-air balloon in the corner and penny farthings above the bar.)
Gilkes and Stirling share an exacting attention to detail and chose to sit facing the wall during an interview at Bunga Bunga so as not to be distracted with a to-do list. The effort failed: a TV above the stage not angled just so and an unpainted curtain rail made Gilkes fidget. “It’s killing me,” he said.
Described as “an eccentric, hospitality version of Willy Wonka” and “a Sherlock Holmes character” by friends, Gilkes is mostly the front-of-house guy, hitting antiques markets to realise whatever Narnia he has dreamed up.
He won prep school speaking competitions with irreverent speeches (one was on hair, which the headmaster lacked) and at age 13, wanting to follow four elder siblings to London night life, he organised a Chelsea club outing for pocket money (the place turned off its cigarette machine and refused to serve alcohol to its pimply customers).
It’s Stirling who is more likely to think about worst-case scenarios; who looks pained at the thought of paying for Savile Row’s Gieves & Hawkes to tailor uniforms for any more staff, as it did with the first Mr Fogg’s. Subsequent versions of the Mr Fogg’s concept – and the two that will open next year – have outfits that are more generic but “equally smart”, Gilkes said.
Not everything the pair has opened has been a success. There was the Studio 54-ish disco where, at the door, staff dressed like Pan Am stewardesses handed out boarding passes “from: London, UK, to: Disco, Manhattan”. And a Wyoming-theme log cabin that served group pickleback shots on repurposed spinning wagon wheels. A recent foray into fast healthy food with the treehouse-inspired Squirrel restaurant is proving trickier than a fad diet.
“You don’t make the margins on an avocado as you do on a bottle of vodka,” Gilkes said.