Food

The Ten Room is the -restaurant inside the new Café Royal Hotel, which occupies the curve of Regent Street from Air Street down to Piccadilly Circus and its bundles of mad tourists, who stare like Doctor Who extras at the nothingness in the sky and the greater nothingness beyond; it is neat advertising, neat capitalism. Soho on Easter Sunday is pleasingly empty and sinister and these great white buildings seem, as ever, to have landed on London from a planet of horror: pure unadulterated money, greed, sin and doughnuts, which can be purchased from Dunkin’ Donuts on Glasshouse Street, the most convenient gateway to hell in the whole metropolis. The restaurant is in the lobby, which is problematic.

I love metaphor, and now metaphor has led me to a toilet near Goodge Street, in that thankless patch of London idiots call No-Ho. Because this is not a toilet any more; it’s an espresso bar that used to be a toilet, and it is called Attendant, and it was in the Daily Mail, because the Daily Mail, while seemingly robust, is easily frightened by things that seem strange, and crack the curve of its happy universe. I am here with an architectural historian, which is good, because I can now imagine him six inches high, and declaiming, like Nikolaus Pevsner, from the toilet bowl — by far the best visual obituary for humanity I can think of. He thinks Attendant has ‘lovely detail’ but, first, the entrance.

Balthazar is a golden cave in Covent Garden, in the old Theatre (Luvvie) Museum, home to dead pantomime horses and Christopher Biggins’s regrets. It is a copy of a New York restaurant, which was itself a copy of a Parisian brasserie, and it is the first big London opening of the year. This means diary stories and reviews and profiles of the co-owner (with Richard Caring), Keith McNally, the most ludicrous of which was in the FT, and was an interview with his house, which is in Notting Hill. It wasn’t quite as ridiculous as: F.T. What are you proudest of, Keith McNally’s House? Keith McNally’s house Guttering. But it could have been. This is the age of the celebrity restaurateur, as distinct from the celebrity chef, and we must kiss the hem. It could be worse.

It’s Oscar time! I know this because the British media, usually so prudent, has transformed itself into naked advertorial for films that usually — not always — tell America the lies about itself it most wants to hear. This is why Argo will win Best Picture. Bad Muslims want to kill us! (If I am wrong, feel free to write to me to tell me I am wrong. I will ignore you; but I promise I’ll be hurt.) So, where to go on the night of America’s mass (and failed) psychotherapeutic experiment? This glittering night when we worship the most self-hating people we can dig up — that is, actors. (How I love this paradigm. It is my favourite paradigm.) The madness is explicit. The answer is Planet Hollywood, of course. Where else?

Maxim’s! The very name is drool from Maurice Chevalier’s lips, as he perved around Gigi and sang, ‘Thank heaven for little girls/ And hebephilia generally.’ Myths sprout up around Maxim’s, which was always, in restaurant terms, a kind of Prince Michael of Kent with sex appeal. The female customers were so overdressed in 1913 according to Jean Cocteau that taking their clothes off was ‘like moving house’. Ho Chi Minh was apparently a bus boy, so the food at Maxim’s and the communist revolution in North Vietnam are obviously connected — although exactly how I cannot say. Maxim’s is off the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine stood.

The Churchill Arms in Kensington is a sort of Winston Churchill fetish bar, full of every conceivable piece of Winston Churchill memorabilia, or toy. Relics of his actual corpse may lurk, loitering behind a decorative mug or a Plasticine bust of his head. There is a three-quarter-size cardboard cutout of the Queen, photographs of every other British prime minister looking confused or disappointed, and what I think are the ‘scores’ from the Battle of Britain. I am here because it is seasonal suicide week and who needs to be near Richard Caring’s event napery or log styling in seasonal suicide week?

Goldeneye is the house in Jamaica where Ian Fleming wrote James Bond, and spanked his wife; that is why Fleming created Bond I think, even as he ran the Sunday Times foreign desk and (some say) spies — to spank the Russians, who have very big bottoms. Ah, for the days when hacks could afford houses in Jamaica and lived exquisite fantasy lives in which they got loads of sex, and killed people (usually foreigners) to pay the mortgage. (As I never tire of pointing out, James Bond was a civil servant.) Goldeneye is a hotel now, smooth, twinkling and monetised, with a line of wooden villas stretched along a raked beach, dotted with flippers, because tourists love, for some reason, to impersonate fish.

The British Pullman on platform 1 at Victoria station looks mad, because it is 9 a.m. and ugly British commuters are running around, looking wracked and unhappy, like extras from Les Misérables, in slightly uglier clothes. Yet this train, which could have steamed out of Julian Fellowes’s head, sits in a grand puddle of cliché, like a duchess desperately trying not to look as if she is shopping at Lidl: graceful, romantic, a bygone age, the romance of steam, er, Foyle’s War. Its customers, a pile of mother/daughter forgiveness jaunts and happy — or unhappy — couples, are trying to look classy, which isn’t easy at Victoria station on a weekday.

A creation myth: Earl -Cadogan wandered into Oriel, the ancient Sloane Square brasserie on his land, like a lardy dachshund, if slightly more cadaverous. For 25 years Oriel served as a second home for the Chelsea hags and, worse, the brats, who still wear strange coloured cords, work in estate agency or PR, and are called, even now, Caroline; and it was pretty bad, stuffed with idiocy and yapping. (I would say that Chelsea deserves no better, and should be nuked with pies, but that is not my job.) Cadogan, who has taste, hated it, and so, with the neat malice of a guardsman, he decapitated it. He gave it to Chris Corbyn and Jeremy King, who own three of London’s prettiest restaurants — the Wolseley, the Delaunay and Brasserie Zédel.

Food and fashion are enemies, so congratulations to the Berkeley Hotel for attempting detente with something insane. It has invented a fashion ‘tea’ called Prêt-à--Portea which is, I am told by a press release, ‘designed to add a creative twist to the classic elements of the traditional English afternoon tea with cakes and pastries resembling the latest catwalk designs for the style conscious’. It gets worse, if there is anything worse than ‘style-conscious’ people eating in public.

Bubbledogs is a restaurant from cinema. It is violently 1980s, American and flash. The sign Bubbledogs shines neon pink from the window, a twin to Tom Cruise’s Cocktails & Dreams sign which twinkled at the end of Cocktail (1988) to say his narrative arc was done. He owned his own cocktail bar, even if drunken Doug the Babycham philosopher — ‘I know when the bottle is empty… heh-heh-heh’ — was dead. He was saved by a combination of homespun small-business ethics and populist alcoholism. Here in Fitzrovia, where restaurants gather in piles, the menu is only  hotdogs and champagne, a food and a drink with such complex meaning and agonised marketing history that they surely belong together. Hotdogs have an awful reputation.

Opus has written its name in letters six foot high outside, which is such a screaming act of narcissistic self-doubt, I wish I’d thought of it myself. I put this down to Opus being in Birmingham, a city that is stuck in low to medium self-hatred. Its roads are mad, and think they are in Miami, and wander around pointlessly with eight lanes, looking for malls and gun shows and Charlton Heston but then they realise — still Birmingham. Opus is a ‘smart’ restaurant. I know this because a) it thinks pistachio is a good colour for things other than pistachio nuts, in this case, chairs, and b) Francis Maude is here. He is sitting with Nick Robinson of the BBC, leaning on padded pistachio tubes.

Burger & Lobster is a -restaurant for capitalism in crisis, an existential moan for something simpler and less awful. Either that, or it is restaurant for small boys with jobs, who cannot make up their minds what they want and miss that -restaurant where you could get custard and a beating from a woman who looked like your mum but might conceivably shag you. Because it is simple — you arrive, and you order a burger or a -lobster, or both of them, or none of them. There is nothing to confuse, baffle or upset the small boy with a job living in a crisis of late capitalism, who may also have an Oepidus complex. Burger or Lobster, Oedipus? What’s it to be?

Alan Sugar’s Turkish restaurant, Sheesh, is in Chigwell, a land of soft lawns, hard money and fairies who count it. They come out when footballers beep their horns, so to speak. If it sounds disgusting, it isn’t really — Essex is simply Surrey with a makeover and thinner legs. Sheesh is a huge, white, half--timbered Tudor ex-pub, sitting, or rather screaming, in a photogenic lane begging for folk tales starring shouty TV lords. It is one of the most beautiful restaurants I have ever seen, because I have no taste. It is fantastically fake, Camelot crashing into Monaco; I suddenly imagine Sugar on a horse jousting with a broken Amstrad computer. Yander lies the kebab house of my fadda. Etc.

The Witchery is almost a themed restaurant; it is a weeping medieval tenement, just below Edinburgh Castle, which looks like a blackened tooth. Inside, it has wood panelling, wall paintings, red velvet table clothes and an enormous silvery head of Dionysus, which the waiter says is made of polystyrene. Upstairs are the sort of suites you can imagine Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel bouncing up and down in, dressed as Robespierre and Voltaire, but because it is August and the Fringe is in town, they are all booked up with writhing comedy agents plotting things. It is all very The Ninth Gate. (The Ninth Gate, should you be ignorant of late Polanski, is a film about a demonic book, starring Johnny Depp.