Burlington Arcade on Piccadilly has a caff down from Charbonnel et Walker, where you can buy a box of chocolates as big as a cow, though I never have. Perhaps the time is now? I am being facetious of course: it is Le Café by Nicolas Rouzaud, who oversees the Maison de Haute Pâtisserie at the Connaught Hotel, and two unfortunate branches in Qatar. I wonder if the Hamas leadership visit and stick their fingers in pistachio gâteaux.
The café is a marvellous construct, as the arcade is. It exists so that spoilt Regency women, the Chelsea hags of then, could shop without walking in horseshit. I know how they feel.
It isn’t lunch in the common sense of it. This food is to slake boredom and vanity, not hunger
It is a truism that fashionable food exists to be seen, not eaten, and this is a function of oligarchy. Its women are slender and, to judge by their eating houses, more bored and child-like each year.
Here is something to entertain them: an ice-pink café with tiny portions of cake in the window in a gated arcade. The woman is, potentially, locked up with the cake, and I can think of nothing more frightening for her. It stands in rows, as if militarised: pear charlotte (£10); tarte au citron meringuée (£10); chocolate mousse brownie (£12).
It is three-storeyed but feels miniature: a doll’s house, or a very careful fashion interpretation of In The Night Garden. The colours – pink and red, replicated, ongoing – are those of absolute femininity but controlled: made pretty, clean and thus bearable. I could describe it as a ‘house of anorexia’ or a ‘self-hating doll’s house’. The aesthetic has a rationale to it, if mad.
It’s undeniably beautiful, if this is your thing: walls, chairs and tables in shades of pink; flower-shaped lights on the walls; a bright-red staircase; dispensers for five separate types of sugar, including vanilla; an umbrella stand; a tiny sofa that looks, quite innocently, like a bloodied hand. Ah – unborn female rage. (Just eat it, sister.) We sit down at a table but are told it is reserved for a delegation from Harper’s Bazaar. We move, and we are served what this café thinks is lunch. It isn’t lunch in the common sense of it. This food is to slake boredom and vanity, not hunger.
We order endive and blue cheese salad (£15) from a section called Comforting Plates (it also includes an artichoke velouté soup, which would make me laugh if I were not in a funk); a smoked salmon and cucumber sandwich (£14); and the fascinatingly named My Father’s Brioche, which is a warm ham and egg sandwich (£16). None of it works. No skill – and these chefs are skilled in the visual arts – can make this food anything other than righteously tormented. The ham is too thick, the egg is too cold, the smoked salmon sandwich is indifferent; the salad, though a trier, just cannot live up to its surroundings. They should have gone full fashion – food as Hilliard miniature; that is what they want, to be smaller – but perhaps that wouldn’t work either. It’s still food, and food is the opposite of all their hopes. I wish I could say that the Victoria sponge (£12) was anything other than ordinary, but I can’t.
The trip is not without value – nothing ever is. It foretells a future where, for the feminine elite, all common bodily functions will occur in reference to the protocols of high fashion: the Louis Vuitton ambulance, the Chanel drip, the Dior brain.
Le Café by Nicolas Rouzaud, Burlington Arcade, 51 Piccadilly London W1; tel: 07482 813258.
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