I am familiar with Café Clement before I arrive for lunch. All summer long Instagram has delivered me images of the restaurant’s Thames-side terrace as if it was feeding a foie gras goose. Within weeks of opening in June, Café Clement had become one of the most sought-after reservations in London, welcoming a stream of A-listers from Stanley Tucci to Paul Mescal and Adele.
Its lure should perhaps be no surprise.
The restaurant is part of the new St Clement hotel — the latest project from Nick Jones, founder and former chief executive of Soho House and one of the most influential people in global hospitality.
Source: St Clement Hotel With Soho House, which he founded in 1995, Jones is credited with upending the traditional private members’ club model and creating a new form of casual exclusivity that prioritised cultural cachet over wealth or class.
He is celebrated for his eye for design and an instinctive understanding of how a venue should make people feel, with a unique ability to bring together decor, staffing, music, food, drink and membership to produce the desired effect.
Under his stewardship, Soho House grew from a single venue to a global empire, spanning dozens of “Houses”, health clubs, restaurants, workspaces and a range of home furnishings.
While critics say it sacrificed exclusivity for growth, the company floated on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021 (a $2.7bn take-private deal was agreed in August last year), before Jones stepped down as chief executive in 2022 following treatment for prostate cancer.
The glitzy St Clement — a 90-room, 15-suite new-build hotel, with two restaurants and a health club (the site is expected to be fully open in the coming weeks) — is his first project since.Inside, at the top of a plush, curved green staircase, Café Clement’s hostess greets me and notes a request for a quiet table, before leading me towards the back of the restaurant.
Jones’s assistant, Sophie, arrives to say that he will join me shortly (I am 10 minutes early for our midday lunch). She returns moments later to ask if I would mind moving to a different spot.
“Nick really likes this table,” she says, directing me to the core of the restaurant and a curved banquette along the back wall. From here we will not only see guests arriving at the entrance to our left, but also the terrace to the right, and the entire dining room, which soon fills with people who have IMDb pages or honours bestowed by the monarchy.
Jones, 62, with greying blond hair, bright blue eyes and wearing a navy pinstriped bomber jacket, arrives soon after. “I’m a bit nervous,” he says with a smile, taking a seat. He is speaking at the FT Weekend Festival in two days’ time. “The FT is making me nervous this week.” A server comes over to ask if we’d like drinks; I opt for a glass of champagne, while Jones orders a Bad Belze beer. “We’re launching it here with Daniel Craig,” he says. “It’s his beer.”
His eyes move around the room, and I ask what he looks for when he comes into a restaurant.
“If the lighting is right, the music is right, the team is smiling. If there’s anyone I need to quickly say hello to,” he says. “And you look at the customer . . . If the customer is laughing, they’re deep in conversation, they’re not looking around thinking ‘where the hell is my food’, you don’t need to go up and ask if everything is all right. That’s the worst thing anyone can say in a restaurant, because you should be able to radar it.”
Jones, who grew up in Surrey, has calibrated his radar over decades. Severely dyslexic and struggling at school, he worked behind the bar at his local rugby club from the age of 13 and joined Trusthouse Forte, the hospitality conglomerate, at 17.
He tells a story of a chef throwing a sack of potatoes at his belly, ordering him to peel them and calling him a very British expletive. But he loved it. “I was a shy teenager . . . I went to private school, I had a posh voice, I suppose, and I went into an industry where there was no one from private school,” he says. “The kitchen was full of people from different continents and different backgrounds.”
Our server stops by to ask what we’d like to eat. We’ve not looked at the menu, so she suggests some snacks to get started — zucchini fritters, crostini and a parmesan custard. Jones interviews every member of staff here as the final stage in the job application process.
“Anyone who runs a hotel should spend five minutes with the people you’re going to employ,” he says. “It creates a connection and people know they’re being taken seriously.”
I ask what he looks for at that stage. “When you’re customer-facing, you haven’t got long to make an impression,” he says. “So you need to have an instant sort of feelgood factor.”His instincts haven’t always been so acute. Jones left Trusthouse Forte after eight years to launch his own venture, a trio of ill-fated restaurants called Over the Top, at which customers chose a base meat and paired it with different toppings named after famous mountains.
“There were so many things wrong with it,” he laughs. He eventually converted the Soho location, a corner site on Old Compton Street and Greek Street, into Cafe Boheme, a French-style all-day brasserie that opened in 1992.
He abandoned the gimmicky menu and “did the opposite”, opting for a more romantic, Parisian style. Cafe Boheme was social and frothy, and critically, at a time when most venues in Soho, the hub of London’s creative, media and artistic scenes, shut down at 11pm, was open until 3am on weekends. It was a hit.
Our snacks arrive — a reminder that, while the restaurants Jones launched under the Soho House umbrella were more about what is now called “vibe dining”, there is a serious chef behind Café Clement, Danny Bohan, who has worked alongside Rowley Leigh, Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, most recently as the head chef of The River Cafe, where he spent 20 years.
The piles of zucchini fritters and tomato and anchovy crostini are light and moreish, but it is the bowl of parmesan custard (a Leigh recipe, Jones tells me) that steals the show: a silky flavour-bomb topped with a dollop of caviar and served with a side of salted crisps.
We order our mains: I go for the turbot while Jones chooses the chicken casserole and some sides for the table, including the house “crinkles” (hand-cut chips). I’ve heard good things about the gruyère soufflé, so that’s on the docket too, as well as two glasses of Muscadet.
Jones was eventually offered the lease on the Georgian townhouse above Cafe Boheme, and opened it as a members’ club, starting with the creatives who had become regulars at his restaurant. A 25-person committee, mostly from film and television, recruited the first 500 members.
Jones called the venue Soho House because it was a house in Soho. Why make it a private club? “Because it had a small door,” he says. “I thought public restaurants should have a bit of frontage. It was as simple as that.”
The opening coincided with a political and cultural shift in London: the rise of New Labour and Cool Britannia, and an optimistic rebranding of British identity. It arrived as the traditional establishment fractured, making way for an influential, youth-driven creative class — and Soho House became its de facto headquarters.
Over the next three decades, Soho House grew from Greek Street into a multinational network, with houses from New York and Berlin to Mumbai and Hong Kong, spawning an aesthetic — low lighting, mid-century-style furniture, vintage pieces and rich fabrics — that became a hospitality genre in itself.
Today there are 50 clubs in 19 countries and about a quarter of a million members. (Since returning to the UK in August, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex has been spotted at Soho Farmhouse in the Cotswolds, where the Beckhams are regulars. The club keeps its membership lists private, and photography and video recording are banned inside.)
As our main dishes arrive, so does Jones’s wife, Scottish broadcaster Kirsty Young, who is also having lunch here today. “Is he saying anything interesting?” she jokes, before heading to her table.
My turbot is beautifully cooked: soft, flaky and basted with butter. The crinkles — thick-cut, furrowed chips — were Jones’s addition to the menu. “I said, ‘Danny, I make these things at home, with an old crinkled chopper’ that Kirsty got me for Christmas one year,” he says, before describing a Blumenthalian method of boiling, freezing and frying, “but without perfection. They have to be a bit messed up.”
The dining room is heaving now, and with plenty of food on the table, I ask Jones about previous comments he’s made that he wanted Soho House to feel warm, and not too popular. “I always said I wanted it to be like a warm bread roll,” he says. “So it’s not cool but it’s still very relevant.” Can you control that? “You can try . . . when you open a place, everyone wants to go there, but you’re in it for longevity.”
Source: Soho House Critics of Soho House say that it felt less exclusive as the company expanded — exacerbating the “friction between people with cachet and people with cash”, as the FT’s Janan Ganesh wrote. “We were never trying to be exclusive, we were trying to be inclusive,” Jones says. “We went into cities where you find 5,000 members who are interested, like-minded people.”
Is a membership model not inherently exclusive? “Without naming names, you had the most famous actor in the world in one corner, and a struggling one yet to get their first part in the other,” he says. “You had the same with artists. And we had the under-27 membership fees [typically discounted by around 50 per cent] . . . I think that’s inclusive.” (Fees vary by location and use. The annual cost for a member in London with access to all global houses is £4,500, or £2,500 if under 27 years old).
“[Soho House] has been around a long time,” he adds. “There are going to be moments where people have different perceptions.” He says his replacement, the current CEO Andrew Carnie, has found the right balance of expanding the brand globally and keeping it warm.
Soho House’s parent company traded publicly for four years before it agreed to go private last year.
Asked whether he would go public again, knowing what he knows now, Jones pauses to consider his response. “Probably not,” he says. “We did it for the right reasons, which was expanding growth. It was certainly tougher than I expected.” He says the business “didn’t quite fit” the quarterly public-market system, which inevitably changes culture. “Your washing, clean or dirty, is hung out to dry every quarter.”
Were there decisions he made then that he wouldn’t make now? “Personally, when I ran Soho House, because I love creating — I did The Ned, Mollie’s, Pizza East, Chicken Shop — in hindsight, even though I love those places and they stand alone in their own right, I probably should have just focused all my time on Soho House.” Did he ever feel spread too thin? “At times when we were opening seven, eight houses in a year — yes.”
The soufflé arrives — a twice-baked beauty sitting in a pool of thick, creamy sauce. Jones, the consummate host, hands me a spoon. “Take this and scoop up some of the sauce,” he insists. It is delicious.
Jones was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the summer of 2022. He stepped away from Soho House that autumn, following successful treatment.
“I was very lucky. I self-screen,” he says. “I had an MRI, then a biopsy. I had a pretty serious, aggressive tumour and something had to happen.” He describes the period when he didn’t know whether it had spread into his bones or other organs: the sleepless nights contemplating how many more years he might have to hold his grandchild, see his children, wife and friends.
Cancer changed his priorities. “What I didn’t want was to continue to be on a plane every day,” he says. He wanted to spend time with people and enjoy days off without jet lag (he cooks Sunday lunch for his family each week).
“I didn’t really have a next step for what I was going to do,” he says. “Even though I didn’t want a life of running around the world on planes and opening houses, I still love this business.”
The opportunity to work on the St Clement came through property developer Mark Wadhwa, with whom he collaborated on Soho House Berlin and other projects. Jones describes the undertaking as “creating a luxury hotel for today”.
“It’s got to feel friendly and relaxed. When the Savoy was built,” he says of London’s first luxury hotel, a nine-minute walk from our table, which opened in 1889, “everyone was in tails and bowler hats and high heels and dresses. Now people are in cashmere T-shirts and trainers.”
He credits his designers, Alex Eagle and Sophie Hodges, for pushing him in a new direction. I ask how much of the granular stuff he is involved in. “Probably too much,” he says. “I like detail. I think customers notice details. They notice a sense of generosity.”
Source: Soho House He thinks about what he would want as a guest — and what he sees annoys guests, like lengthy check-in procedures and putting a card down for the minibar. Guests should not be charged for a KitKat. (Other new hotels in London have pushed basic rates above £1,000 per night. Entry-level rooms at the St Clement start around £600-£800, with chocolate included.)
He says he is not a control freak, however. “I think to get the best results, you want to listen to everyone’s opinion and then make a decision. What you don’t want to do is make a decision to try and keep all the people who’ve given you an opinion happy.” Does anyone challenge him? “Yes.” What does he have bad taste in? “I’m not allowed to choose the music here.”
Jones is also not at the hotel every day: “I’m a recovering workaholic.”For dessert, we order the chocolate mousse for two, but Ewan Venters, the executive chair of Paul Smith, formerly of Fortnum & Mason’s parish, briefly distracts Jones, so I steal a bit more than my fair share. Its name is an understatement: the pudding is the handsome progeny of a mousse and a fondant, warm and gooey, and served with a scoop of custard ice cream.
With lunch over, Jones offers me a tour of the hotel, starting with Bobbi’s Bar, the late-night, speakeasy-style venue on the ground floor that he modelled after a character he created.
“I fit it to this person who is very social, and everyone loves going back to Bobbi’s apartment,” he says. “It’s always full of interesting people. There’s a DJ playing vinyl and it’s sort of Bobbi’s bangers. People start singing.”
This, I realise, is how Jones designs. “You have to put the slight story behind it,” he says, “to be able to refer back to when you’re doing something to make sure it fits.”As we walk through the various hotel rooms and encounter the final bits of construction under way, Jones warmly greets and chats to the builders, housekeeping staff, chefs and photographers we encounter, while showing me the views, finishings and furnishings he’s most proud of.
With the tour complete, we say our goodbyes. He has an afternoon of interviewing prospective staff ahead. I zip back to the office, resisting the urge to Instagram any of the evidence.
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