I have lost count of the number of times that I’ve requested an “Old Paradise Flat White”, from my coffee chain of choice.

Costa Coffee has been with us for over 50 years now, starting in 1971 when Sergio and Bruno Costa arrived in London and started a small roastery in Fenchurch Street in an attempt to change the drinking habits of Londoners. They blind-testing 112 variations of coffee before producing their signature blend, naming it ‘Mocha Italia’, and apart from recently tweaking the roasting time this blend is identical to their original formulation.

I worked for six years in Clerkenwell’s ‘Little Italy’, and a request for coffee then was a proffered cup of instant brown liquid from a ‘greasy spoon’ often run by a family of Italians. In fact, only in Soho during the 1960s was it possible to get a real cup of coffee.

Demand for the Costa brother’s coffee grew, and in 1978 they built a roastery in Old Paradise Street, Lambeth, hence the name of my coffee of choice.

Three years later the brothers opened their first Costa Coffee shop on Vauxhall Bridge Road and became the first coffee provider in London to serve Espresso and crafted Cappuccino in a porcelain cup.

That first coffee house is now the CA Japanese Pancakes.

Taken from Costa Coffee

So what has this to do with London’s cabs, I hear you ask. As Costa state on its site:

Before we opened our famous coffee shops we sold our coffee beans to prestigious hotels in London, such as The Ritz, and they were delivered in style by famous London black cabs.

The featured image of the first Costa Coffee shop was taken from Google Street View.

Despite atrocious weather, with high winds and driving rain, entering the Prince Regent, a floating restaurant on the Regents Canal (where else?) was a welcome, and warmer, relief.

Moored just yards from Paddington Station the two-and-a-half-hour cruise in the converted barge takes you from Little Venice, through the Maida Hill Tunnel, past a large community of barges moored behind the Lisson Grove power station. At this point we were apparently gongoozlers, meaning bystanders who enjoy watching the activities of boats as they pass them.

We were gongoozlers

The trip skirts around the London Zoo, where you can see the wild dog enclosure, and finally ending at Camden Town, where the Prince Regent turned around and retraced the route back to Paddington.

I have spent nearly 30 years discovering London, whilst studying for The Knowledge and later driving a cab, thinking I knew most secret places, but this trip was a revelation. The very large number of people living on well-maintained colourful and not so ship-shape vessels on the water, palm and banana trees at the water’s edge, and barges with deck chairs and plants upon their roofs, one even had a play area with an arbour of wisteria, none of which I’ve ever seen in central London.

Light at the end of the tunnel

As for lunch, just how can you produce an exceptional 5-course meal for 10 diners (more apparently in high season) in a galley measuring 6ft by 15ft?

Not the cheapest meal (it was a gift), with four fish-based courses: oyster in batter; smoked salmon and horseradish; mackerel and tomatoes; and Cornish cod with a stunning raisin and chicken jus. This was followed by pear and caramelised mousse. Highly recommended.

London restaurants are ephemeral. As the ‘famous faces’ become well known, before long they want to offer culinary delights, but their failure list is endless: Pharmacy, Bank, Tiddy Dols, Mirabelle. As cabbies, we have to learn their location and as inevitably as eggs are eggs they fall from fashion and are gone.

Their reputations are based upon publicity, usually on the back of their famous owners, and upon their unusual and ‘innovative’ menus.

[B]ut one establishment knows its clientele, they should, their diners are probably the great-great-great descendants of an early patron. Wilton’s has been serving ‘English’ food since 1742 and with prices to match their reputation. Bertie Wooster would not seem out of place here in conversation about the servants at Blandings Castle while enjoying a lunch of guinea fowl.

Wilton’s is the oldest restaurant in London. George William Wilton opened the original location in Haymarket as a shellfish mongers. It passed down through his family until the name became Wilton’s Shellfish Mongers and Oyster Rooms.

The restaurant seems to have been itinerant moving to Little King Street, onwards to Great Ryder Street then to Kings Street, Duke Street was next before a return to Kings Street. Next, it alighted in Bury Street and finally in 1964 settled in Jermyn Street.

It has had many owners and one story which it worth retelling involves a Mrs Bessie Leal who acquired the licence in 1930. Bessie ran the restaurant with her two female associates During the Second World War one evening in 1942 Bessie was talking to one of her regular customers, a Mr Olaf Hambro, who was dining alone at the bar. Without warning a bomb, which landed near St James’s Church Piccadilly, shook not only the walls of Wiltons but Bessie’s nerves.

As history has it, Mrs Leal folded her tea towel, unpinned her apron and then proclaimed that she no longer wished to live in London during the war and wished to sell Wiltons. She asked Mr Hambro if he knew of anybody who would be in a position to purchase the restaurant, to which he calmly replied that ‘he did not know of anybody other than himself’!

A somewhat surprised and relieved Mrs Leal inquired at the end of his meal how he wished to proceed to which he replied “put the restaurant at the end of the bill!” and she did just that! The following day she packed her bags and left for Cornwall, never to return to her beloved restaurant.

Featured image: Wilton’s Restaurant, 55 Jermyn Street, noted since 1742 for the finest oysters, fish and game by “Tweedland” The Gentlemen’s Club