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EXCLUSIVE – Matthew Steeples shares that “now is the time to drink” as Claude Bosi and Bibendum return to Brompton Cross in Chelsea in July after having been closed for a year
On Sunday 31st August last year, the acclaimed French chef Claude Bosi “permanently” closed his Bibendum and associated Oyster Bar restaurants on Brompton Cross citing that “despite our very best efforts, we were unable to reach a resolution with our partners and landlords that would allow Michelin House to move into its next chapter.” Bosi had run the restaurant since 2017 and had been preceded by Simon Hopkinson from 1987 until 1994.
Going further, in an interview for JancisRobinson.com a month later, Bosi cryptically commented: “The situation is complicated because the lease is held by members of the Conran and Hamlyn families and I do not want to jeopardise anything or antagonise anybody.”
Named after Michelin’s portly mascot ‘Monsieur Bibendum’ who, in turn, took his name from the latin phrase Nunc est Bibendum – “Now is the Time to Drink” – The Steeple Times can now exclusively reveal that the Bibendum restaurant will reopen with Claude Bosi at the helm in July.
Two Michelin starred Claude Bosi and his representatives were approached for comment, but had not replied by the time of publication. Meanwhile, the adjoining 31,750 square foot former Conran store remains shuttered and to let through agents Colliers. Whilst the rental figure for the space is not publicly available, the rateable value for the space alone is the astoundingly off-putting sum of £1 million per annum.
Now is indeed the time to drink. We join all raising a glass and say cheers to this truly great, rare piece of restaurant news.
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Of the restaurant premises, in September 2025, Claude Bosi told Nick Lander of JancisRobinson.com: “Although this is a building that looks wonderful from the outside and from the interior if you are a customer, what the restaurant trade refers to as ‘back of house’ was inadequate and getting worse. The kitchen staff needed a lot more space; the restaurant staff were having to store tables in the flower shop, and because it had originally been built as Michelin House, it included a tyre-fitting bay and a place where motorists could plan their journeys. The services [for a restaurant] were inadequate. The one downpipe for the lavatories and kitchen would overflow from time to time and the electricity supply was never sufficient. We tried to negotiate but sadly that failed and when it did I had no option but to close. It’s a beautiful building and one that needs to be looked after.” These problems will hopefully have been resolved prior to July 2026’s grand reopening.Designed by François Espinasse – who was also responsible for Michelin’s Paris headquarters – and built “as an ode to the glory of the tyre,” Grade II listed Michelin House, 61 Fulham Road, Chelsea, London, SW3 6RH stands at the northern end of Sloane Avenue and the start of the Fulham Road. It has a façade clad with green and white tiles and features stained glass windows based on the tyre manufacturer’s adverts of the time. The premises opened for business on 20th January 1911 and remained owned by Michelin until 1987 when it was acquired by Sir Terence Conran and Lord Hamlyn for £8 million. The pair redeveloped the site to provide retail, restaurant and office spaces and increased its size from 90,000 square foot to 118,000 square foot with the addition of a new steel and glass structure on the Sloane Avenue elevation.A tyre-fitting workshop within Michelin House, photographed circa 1912.The original Michelin Man mascot, introduced in 1898, was a slightly intimidating, mummy-like figure rather than the friendly marshmallow character known today. The design – also known as the ‘Michelin Tire Man’ or ‘Michelin Tyre Man’ and ‘Bib’ and ‘Bibelobis’ – reflected multiple stacked rings designed to resemble stacked rubber tyres. The ‘Michelin Guide’ itself was first issued in 1900 and awards up to three Michelin stars to a select few restaurants in certain geographic areas annually.‘The Steeple Times’ featured a party that was held at Bibendum on 7th June 2019 for a London to Monte Carlo car female only car rally that ironically sought to raise funds for victims of sex trafficking. The Cash & Rocket event in Michelin House was attended by heiresses including Paris Hilton and Chloe Green, but became infamous for being the last public sighting in the United Kingdom of the since convicted mucky madam sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell. The pension pot plundering ‘Bouncing Czech’s’ deviant daughter subsequently vanished before being located at the equally ironically named ‘Tucked Away’ on 2nd July 2020; she was then unceremoniously hurled into the clink and rightly remains there rotting.
‘Tatler’ magazine called out for suggesting a Chelsea restaurant that closed down in August 2016 as a “hot spot” post ‘Lockdown 3.0’ ending in May 2021
A “tattler” is an “observer or spectator… a gossip who tells tales,” whilst ‘THE’ Tatler is defined by the Oxford Learners’ Dictionary as “a British magazine, published once a month and containing articles about upper-class and upper-middle-class social events, fashion and the arts.”
Given the Condé Nast lifestyle publication’s staff – amongst them previously the current editor of the Daily Mail, Geordie Greig, and the ex-editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Tina Brown CBE – have variously included many Oxbridge alumni, one would assume they’d be a little better at fact checking than the notoriously sloppy seconds employed by the MailOnline (which is rated 1 out of 5 by the Microsoft Edge browser given its propensity to share fake news), but instead a recent edition of the monthly society bible featured a complete balls-up.
“[Brasserie Gustave at 4 Sydney Street, London, SW3 6PP is] located at the exact point where South Ken meets Chelsea (and on a site that has seen more restaurants than Ramires has had yellow cards), this French bistro is a keeper. If the art-deco posters look a bit hackneyed, not to say banal, the food is anything but. It’s fresh and lively, classic French dishes prepared with punctilious attention to detail. Confit de canard is superb and you won’t find a better plate of kidneys in London. Great wines too, managed with gusto by experienced sommelier Richard Weiss.”
Whilst of their thirteen selections, the loathed by Dan Wootton magazine prattled: “We’ve eaten our way around Chelsea’s top restaurants… We’ve got you covered,” a comment on OpenTable from as long ago 22nd August 2016 reads: “I made a reservation and got there and the restaurant was closed.” Plainly, anyone with half a brain would have realised five years ago that Brasserie Gustave turned out actually to be anything but “a keeper.”
In the time since, Tatler’s editorial team also missed their very own one-time contributor Giles Coren’s visit to 4 Sydney Street on 15th July 2017. At that time, he lauded “pan-Asian” Zheng Chelsea as “the sort of places foodies go in quest of the new and wonderful.”
Pictured top: 4 Sydney Street has been various restaurants over the years including Carpaccio, Sette, Marco Pierre White’s Sydney Street Grill, Brasserie Gustave and most recently Zheng Chelsea.
The magazine’s May 2020 feature on Brasserie Gustave – a restaurant that closed in August 2016.In August 2016, an OpenTable user commented: “I made a reservation for [Brasserie Gustave] on Open Table and got there and the restaurant was closed.”The front elevation of Zheng Chelsea, 4 Sydney Street, Chelsea, London, SW3 6PP.The interior of the restaurant as it used to be during the era that Brasserie Gustave (left) occupied the site and as it has been since circa 2016 as “pan-Asian” Zheng Chelsea (right). Of food there, in July 2017, Giles Coren remarked: “Food this good and this unusual would normally never be found in Chelsea… Chelsea is not absolutely the last place in the entire world that I would go looking for brilliant authentic Malaysian cooking, but it comes close. What with the well-upholstered complacency of the locals, the lack of any significant oriental population, the high throughput of tourists and idle shoppers in need of plasticky chain food, the sky-high rents and concomitant historical lack of any decent restaurants here at all, Chelsea is perhaps the second last place in the known universe that I would go in expectation of fiery, original, challenging but entirely successful Straits Chinese cuisine.”The society go-to title was previously accused of a “swathe of inaccuracies and false misrepresentations” in May 2020 by Kensington Palace after it published an article about one-time friend of its current editor, Richard Dennen (pictured together right), the Duchess of Cambridge titled “Catherine the Great.”
Legal challenge to Boris Johnson’s government’s completely illogical refusal to allow indoor hospitality venues to open whilst allowing indoor retail to open to be decided on this week
In spite of venues with outdoor space being allowed to serve customers on their terraces and in gardens, the hospitality sector in the UK will continue to lose around £200 million per day until the government allows them to serve indoors in mid-May.
This week, following a perfectly sensible legal challenge by Sacha Lord, the night-time economy adviser for Greater Manchester, and Hugh Osmond, the founder of Punch Taverns, the government could be forced to bring forward the date for indoor opening for bars, pubs and restaurants.
Lord and Osmond together quite sensibly argue there is no justification or scientific basis for indoor hospitality to be kept closed for five additional weeks after non-essential retailers in England were allowed to serve customers indoors from 12th April. Their call is correct and the continuation of this illogical set of double standards is doing just one thing: Dealing another body blow to an already devastated sector.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning of their challenge to the crackpot crazy decisions of borderline bonkers’ Boris Johnson’s Tory government, Osmond remarked:
“This is something of a David versus Goliath battle. We are reassured that David won in that instance.”
“At the start of this pandemic there was a totally understandable assumption that hospitality venues might be responsible for the spread of infections. The vision of drunken people in crowded pubs is an easy and obvious target that people understand.”
“The data [now] definitively shows that hospitality was not the major source of infections.”
Elsewhere on Twitter on Friday, Lord remarked: “The government’s defence is just in… They must be concerned, they’ve put their No. 1 legals on the case, Sir James Eadie QC, the First Treasury Counsel.”
Going further this morning, he added: “Thank you for all the good luck messages. It’s not necessarily today, the Judge has said: ‘The week commencing the 19th.’ Again, a real long shot, but as soon as there’s news, I’ll post it here. Enjoy the sun.”
Today, all at The Steeple Times join those supporting the logic of allowing indoor hospitality venues to reopen and reopen now. Let’s get the indoor show back on the road.
Pictured top: Restaurants such as Fifty Cheyne in Chelsea, London have tables that are very clearly separated from one another. As shown in this image, diners can be socially distanced in a manner perfectly reasonable. Why shouldn’t such places – which lack outdoor dining areas and thus cannot even benefit from the currently allowed outdoor opening rules – not be able to get back to business whilst small, cramped shops with little-to-no precautionary measures are allowed to trade?
Hospitality vs. Headbangers – Echoing scenes from December 2020 reported on in ‘The Steeple Times,’ on Sunday the ‘MailOnline’ reported on yet another swarm of maskless, tempestuous teenagers descending on Harrods on Saturday. Sharing the article on Twitter on Monday, Hugh Osmond remarked: “It is surely clear that all-seated, licensed hospitality venues, with table service only, cannot present more of a risk than non-essential retail… Open indoor hospitality now.”Hospitality vs. Headbangers – Giuseppe Turi, who owns Enoteca Turi on Pimlico Road, London, SW1 with his wife Pamela, is currently just serving people on his two outside tables “after loyal customers begged him to reopen,” the ‘Daily Star’ last week reported. Speaking to the ‘Mail on Sunday,’ Mr Turi added: “It doesn’t really make financial sense with just two tables, but our customers are so desperate to come back. We are now fully booked until May 17 when we can open inside. We are very excited to connect with our regulars again, but unfortunately we’ve not been able to accommodate everybody.” The chances of this business making a profit from such activity stand in the area of “zilch-zero-nothing,” but provide proof that it is businesses that are showing initiative and not the illogical, rudderless, incompetent government of Boris Johnson.Hospitality vs. Headbangers – Last October, Richard Caring, owner of many of London’s best-known high-end restaurants, stuck up two dummies of Boris Johnson (in spite of having previously given over £510,000 in donations to the Conservative Party previously). At the time of the lockdown then in place, Caring raged: “Make no mistake, this is a disastrous decision, taken by people who do not understand what terrible damage they are doing to the country.”
