LONDON’S SOCIETY SALMON

Boulestin was a failed actor, great raconteur, cookbook writer and superb Soho restaurateur who catered to the louche side of “Tout” London Society in the nineteen thirties. 

His restaurant, “Boulestin’s,” was a stunning place with yellow walls and curtains in a deeper shade of the same tone, made from silk with a design of Dufy’s called “Paris.” I mention the color because it was much copied at the time, and also by me at “Stars” restaurant in San Francisco fifty years later. Except I did not have the courage to cover the paint in cheap varnish as he did (by mistake), thereby achieving that a dark, smoky, old amber color that gave the room a certain stature of age and became the rage for restaurants for the next thirty years. 

By “society” here I mean Douglas Fairbanks and Gertrude Lawrence, the fascist Oswald Mosely and the Mitfords …