Is this the most famous restaurant on television?
Want to eat at the table where the ‘Fleabag’ fight scene was filmed? Now you can, writes Lucy Holden
‘Is it just me or is this place ridiculous?” Lord Porchester asks his dining companion in series one of The Crown, gazing across a swanky white table-clothed restaurant with emerald walls. “Two of my great hates in life: fine dining and central London,” he adds; “I just thought it was the kind of special occasion place one came if one had a question to ask.”
The venue? Smith & Wollensky: a Twenties-style high-end steakhouse in Covent Garden. And it’s not just good enough for the Queen’s former racing manager to make a marriage proposal (at least fictionally) – the restaurant, with its eye-catching green and white interior, is fast becoming the most famous eatery on television.
Since opening in 2015, it has featured in Mcmafia, JK Rowling’s The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Child in Time, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Episodes of Made in Chelsea and Celebrity Masterchef have been filmed there. It even conquered Hollywood, appearing
in Denial with Rachel Weisz and Timothy Spall in 2016, and recent Laurel and Hardy biopic, Stan and Ollie.
Mostly recently, it was the setting for the first episode of the second series of Phoebe Waller-bridge’s Fleabag, which concludes next week. But while viewers at home winced as the chaos unfolded, during the engagement dinner of Fleabag’s father and her
‘People get excited and often ask if they can book the table in The Crown’
brilliantly awful stepmother (Olivia Colman), diners in the restaurant were wondering where the screams and “f--- offs” were coming from.
“Food good?” Fleabag’s father asks during the scene. “This sauce is disgusting,” her sister replies.
It ends in a punch-up, but Smith & Wollensky is no stranger to blood. The restaurant is known for a “humongous whole cow menu”, which uses as many cuts of the animal as possible. Arguably, though, it is becoming even more well known for its on-screen credentials.
“People recognise us all the time,” says Susannah Palmer, its marketing manager. “They get very excited anytime they see us on screen, and the morning after a show has come out we have dozens of emails with screen grabs, telling us we were on TV last night. People often ask if they can book the table in The Crown or whatever.”
Even off-screen, the rich and famous can’t get enough. Anthony Joshua chose it for his cocktail-soaked celebrations after beating Wladimir Klitschko in 2017 to become the world heavyweight boxing champion, while former England cricketers Michael Vaughan and Phil Tufnell once rocked-up, pleading for a hair of the dog (Bloody Mary’s) after a night at Henry Blofeld’s retirement party.
Tom Jones is a regular; always taking the same table and ordering the Cajun fillet steak with a bottle of Samuel Adams beer. Christian Slater and the cast of Glengarry Glen Ross descended for the play’s opening party in 2017 and got wrecked on Maker’s Mark. Even The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) has been twice, posting on Instagram a picture of a steak so big he could have fought it when he was a professional wrestler.
So how does a restaurant become as famous as its guests?
Most offer themselves as filming locations online, and are booked for 24 hours at a time, for up to £13,000. “Usually production teams come to us ... looking for ‘an American restaurant in London’ or ‘a restaurant with Twenties art deco décor’,” says Palmer.
“Our location is perfect, because we’re just a street behind the Strand, close to Trafalgar Square, the London Eye and most of the other iconic London sites they might also want to feature. But the street’s very quiet and the buildings are a similar style, without a lot of signage, so you can ... easily make it look like it’s anywhere between the Twenties and the Sixties.”
The £8.5 million restaurant was the first international outpost of the famous New York steakhouse, which opened in 1977 and has been seen in films such as The Devil Wears Prada and American Psycho. With 300 seats, three private dining rooms and two bars, it is one of the city’s biggest restaurants.
On the menu? Lavish seafood platters to share for £125 and 600g Chateaubriand steaks for £80. The American-sized pricetags are as heavyweight as the slabs of meat hanging downstairs in the kitchen, although usually the restaurant’s chefs aren’t needed during filming, with shows bringing their own catering teams and food stylists. Filming takes place during 15-hour-days, with as many as 80 people working on each scene.
The Crown was the height of professionalism, it’s whispered, but you’d expect nothing less of a regal drama. Mcmafia might have been on the vodka, if the rumoured levels of rowdiness are anything to go by – but you’d expect nothing less of a drama about an exiled Russian crime family.
Something the restaurant didn’t bank on, when signing up to stardom, was the potential loss of staff to the big-time. Richard Chebbi, its assistant general manager, was asked to play a maître’d opposite Cumberbatch in The Child in Time. “I thought: ‘My big break! My way out of the restaurant trade!’,” he laughs.
“I didn’t have any lines, but I was to approach the table... make eyecontact as though Mr Cumberbatch were a regular, and then pour him some wine when he gave me the nod.
“Unfortunately they cut me out. Only my hand’s in it.”
Chebbi can still be found pouring drinks with his famous digits at the Smith & Wollensky bar. Which might make up for it if you can’t get the table from The Crown.