Mario Gallati opened The Caprice restaurant in 1947, not an auspicious time for eating out in London. Well, an even less auspicious time than the previous three hundred years. Rationing actually got tighter after the war, the country was near bankruptcy, there were shortages of everything - paper, cloth, bricks - the only glut was of holes in the ground but the war was over, the men were coming home and there was the first Labour government and a general sense of a new beginning, a sense of optimism. The Festival of Britain was being planned but still no restaurant could charge more than five bob for a meal, not that there was all that much to cook. The location, under a block of 1930s flats that Lord Beaverbrook lived in, had been a number of restaurants - The Corvette, Quintos and Cicogne, but until the Caprice, had never been a success. However, Mario Gallati, ex-maître d’ of The Ivy, had no trouble finding backers for, Caprice (no ‘Le’ in the original). Terence Rattigan, Ivor Novello and the famous agent A.D. Peters all put in money as did the Lord Mayor of London and the divinely named Viscountess Rhondda.
