Food for adults remembering childhood: Dover Street Counter reviewed

Dover Street Counter is the tiny sister of The Dover, a very good restaurant on – who knew? – Dover Street, Mayfair. This is the site of P.G. Wodehouse’s fictional Drones Club, if following Wodehouse’s paths is your way of coping, and there is nothing wrong with that. There are some bad restaurants in Mayfair now, with slutty Roman gods and monumental Caesar salads; passive-aggressive tributes to Elizabeth II in bad cake, and enslaved fish staring at sex workers with the mute anguish of recognition. This is better.

Good restaurants have the gift of suppressing fear, and this is one such

The Dover is delivered by professionals for adults – that is, people who do not put intimacy on expenses, and who can recognise neo-Stalinist soft furnishings when they see them. I recommended it to James Cleverley, my favourite failed candidate for the Tory leadership, and I like to imagine him there, sipping a Vesper martini and slagging off Robert Jenrick, who does not belong in The Dover, because there is not enough fear for him there. I remember it as a puddle of gold that serves burgers, with an aesthetic poised halfway between Olympus and the Kit Kat Club, or elation and despair.

Dover Street Counter is a measure of The Dover’s success. It has an immense curtain to the street – a sort of gilded draft excluder – though, now I think of it, I have never met a wind in Mayfair, ill or otherwise. For some reason, it seems immune.

Inside, it replicates The Dover’s hush in browns and golds. This is a man’s restaurant at heart, but gentler, and so better, than most. There is a long bar with low lighting: behind it, the open kitchen and its handsome chefs. The impression, of course, is of a silky train that goes nowhere – ah, metaphor! – or the inside of Stephen Poliakoff’s head without the terror. Good restaurants have the gift of suppressing fear – for me, that is what they are for – and this is one such. It is all cosmetic, of course – you can build it in a night, you can unbuild it in an hour – but that is the charm of such places, especially in a great city. Everything is fleeting.

Perhaps they saw the size of our arses as we fought the curtain, because they do not sit us at the counter, but in the small room at the back, at a corner table, from which I watch rich women pick at food as if in pain. I do not understand them – food as pain is not my way – and we order too much of it, because we are happy.

The menu is Americana made posh and exquisitely wrought. We eat handmade crisps, which are small, purple and addictive as cigarettes; a dish of whipped ricotta, which looks like ice-cream in its pretty curls; an excellent tuna coupe; chicken katsu, equally fine; some roasted beets; exquisite French fries. Then we eat cheesecake, which is the subject of a mini renaissance in London, possibly because it is something famous and American that isn’t Donald Trump; and finally a perfect cheeseburger.

This is food for adults remembering childhood, or people who like amphetamines too much. A good restaurant in Mayfair is still a restaurant in Mayfair, where the Princes of Arabia have homes. Now they have war in the Middle East to add to their woes. If they want to sit it out here, in this idealised, semi-celestial Wimpy Bar made by people with taste, well – there is nothing wrong with that either. Dover Street Counter is a wonderful place. They won’t be lonely.