MAYFAIR’S FINANCIERS HELP EAT ALL THE PIES
PIES AND prosecco were yesterday on the menu at Dartmouth House at Mayfair’s answer to the long-running annual Gull’s Eggs lunch.
Mayfair hedge fund managers met hotel brokers at the Macmillan Cancer Support fundraiser, including Jones Lang LaSalle’s Jonathan Goldman, who has a personal connection to the cause, having recently endured a 20-hour operation for throat cancer.
Goldman, whose licensed leisure and hotels team recently sold the Sanderson, St Martins Lane and W hotels to Middle East sovereign wealth funds, was a guest of Puma Hotels director Peter Procopis – also a cancer survivor – who was recently enlisted to the Macmillan committee by Shore Capital’s chairman David Kaye.
Also at the event were Anton Black and Dominic Epton of Rothschild, while jewellery designer Victoria Tryon and her brother Edward, the owner of Lichfields, caught up with Amber Aikens, the estranged wife of chef Tom Aikens.
Chairman of the committee for the last two years is Zoe Couper, now known as Zoe de Givenchy following her June wedding to JP Morgan’s private banking head Olivier de Givenchy on a beach in the Bahamas, where the couple have a home.
“We wanted something that felt a bit more barefoot, less formal,” the founder of Couper and Partners and Financial Jam Sessions told The Capitalist.
BORIS EXPOSED
SONIA Purnell left nothing out in her biography of Boris Johnson – the journalistic chicanery, rivalries with fellow Tories, scandal at City Hall and, yes, that friendship with the Spectator’s femme fatale Petronella Wyatt.
As Channel 4’s political correspondent Michael Crick observed: “Sonia must have had huge fun writing this wonderful book. The only person who won’t be amused is Boris himself.”
So it was perhaps no surprise that the London mayor (right) was a no-show at last night’s book launch for Just Boris at the Corinthia Hotel. “He was invited, but he never RSVP’d,” said a publicist forlornly, leaving the ex-Sun editor David Yelland and Boris’s rival 2012 mayoral candidates Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick to fill the charisma vacuum.
LAST ORDERS
GOOD news for fans of the top-end City curry house Cinnamon Kitchen. The restaurant’s chief executive Vivek Singh has expanded his empire by signing a 35-year lease for the Red Bar in Kingly Street, after an “extremely competitive bidding situation”.
Meanwhile, across town in Islington Green, a buyer has been found for the former premises of the Playtime Bar – the brainchild of Boujis owner Ignite Group, led by chief executive Matt Hermer, which stopped trading last Friday. Step forward French bistro chain Cote, which said the 4,000 sq ft unit “really hit the spot” for its twenty-ninth outlet.
CHILD SUPPORT
CAMPAIGNING body ECPAT UK is lobbying the government for more support for child victims of trafficking, which is why it yesterday summoned MPs to the river for the naming of its Row to Freedom boat The Guardian.
Christening the boat on Anti-Slavery Day was Olympian Matthew Pinsent, ahead of its awareness-raising trip across the Atlantic this winter. The vessel’s all-female crew of six includes Katie Pattison-Hart, currently taking a year out from corporate life after setting up a branch of Lloyds TSB in the United Arab Emirates.