Brasserie Angelica is the – is the word signature? – restaurant inside the Newman, Fitzrovia, a new hotel that has landed in the capital like a spaceship containing aliens who are into menswear. I don’t mind buildings that look like they don’t belong. Fitzrovia is charming because it feels like remnants left by other places. We have too much Edwardiana already: in the Aldwych– formerly the best surviving medieval part of London after the Great Fire – I feel like I am stomping through cakes of stone.
The Newman is a wail in glass and brick on a quiet lane near Gower Street. There are pale awnings, brass fittings and uplighting: Manhattan in its last boom. It is attached to a Victorian house renovated to the standards of a grouter with OCD. The Newman is far less ugly than many new hotels (my resentment towards the Peninsula will endure until it is an island). If the cheapest room is £560, including access to the ‘wellness floor’ (I add quotation marks so you will know I didn’t invent the phrase ‘wellness floor’, I just typed it), I won’t tell the communists. They left anyway, priced out, and the old Communist Club at 49 Tottenham Street is now a private house. At least it’s not a brasserie, though it could be. Karl Marx lived above what is now Quo Vadis in Soho.
The Brasserie itself is long and silent, presumably because the clients are in an airport lounge
Inside the Newman are the sleek necrotic lines of an airport lounge. What else? The itinerant rich want the world to look the same wherever they are, because it makes them feel safe, and they specifically want it to look like their bedroom. If this makes you want to scream ‘so why leave it?’ don’t bother. They can’t hear you: being very rich is the spiritual equivalent of wearing earmuffs. Neither can the lobby, which is, again, ever–replicating browns and tans and golds: the colour of fantastical mud flown here, at least metaphorically, from the Emirates in someone’s brain, or on someone’s shoe.
Beyond the lobby is an emotionally freezing Art Deco parlour. For some reason I think of Wallis Windsor’s teeth. The Brasserie itself is long and silent, presumably because the clients are in an airport lounge. It doesn’t matter which one. If they were here, they would recognise the pale floors, the brown banquettes with occasional brown cushions, the nipple lights and the mirrors with whimsical swirls. All it lacks is the buffet breakfast.
The menu is ‘modern European’, or the EU on paper but in food: a herring plate; winter endive salad; cod loin; confit duck leg; king prawns from the wood fire; a hake tail. I do not say this to make a point about the EU or Britain, or a civilisation swallowed by an Emirates lounge aesthetic because it can’t think of anything better, but the food is strangely pallid.
I do try. I order French fries (£6.50), grilled leeks (£7) and the Angelica’s mixed grill (£80) from the sharing (for two) menu. If the explanation indicates some people think that sharing is for one, this will not disabuse them.
It arrives neatly packed, as body parts are: lamb chop and kidney; thick cut bacon; Falu sausage; stuffed tomatoes; a pile of over-wet mushrooms on the pig. It’s an adequate meal for a Cornish giant, though it’s missing an egg, and it rests queasily with an insipid lemon and blueberry custard tart (£13) and an ashen apple almond cake (£11). Because in its soul it’s a breakfast: aeroplanes and animal fat. I think I knew that.
Brasserie Angelica, 49 Newman St, London W1; tel: 020 3989 8100.
Comments