Restaurants

A French creole restaurant rises in the sullen ruins of London. It is called Louie, for French king or trumpeter, depending on your wish. It is next to the Ivy — now a private members’ club and franchise stretching to the London suburbs bearing small bowls of shepherd’s pie — and it is infinitely preferable. That is, I can get a table, and no pastiche medieval windows or tabloid photographers are involved. It’s a terrible thing being jostled into a gutter so someone can photograph the former cast of Crossroads. The Ivy is the Love Island of grand restaurants. It is for the spuriously famous, which is now everyone. The zeitgeist cries: we’re going to need a bigger Ivy. Or at least it used to. Louie is a small, golden rebuke.

Imad’s Syrian Kitchen is an eyrie off Carnaby Street, a once-famous road which seems to exist nowadays to sell trainers to tourists who have fallen, as if by wormhole, out of the Liberty homeware department with its pathological dependence on florals. No matter. Nearby, in Kingly Court, which is like Covent Garden before it fell to Dior and Apple, more interesting things happen: the sort of things that London, so sunken, needs. Kingly Court is charming because it invokes an ancient coaching inn — London was once filled with them — and it is, due to the presence of independent eating houses, still palpably bright, pleasing and alive. The restaurant is likewise cheerful: wooden floors; pale walls; blue windowsills; blue tiles; a beamed ceiling; photographs of Damascus.

The other day, I came across a description of afternoon tea written by Alfred Douglas in 1920: ‘Two kinds of bread and butter, white and brown, cucumber and tomato sandwiches, cut razor thin, scones, rock buns and then all the cakes — plum, madeira, caraway seed — the meal had about it the lavishness of a Victorian dinner.’ There are a few things about this feast which I find striking. It includes two kinds of bread and butter. Sliced bread and butter never features on the modern table but a century ago, people used it to fill themselves up; it took the edge off your appetite. Note also the simplicity of the cucumber and tomato sandwiches. Both are excellent if they’re made from good stuff. The crucial thing was that they were cut thin.

The Roof Garden is a pale, Nordic-style restaurant at the top of the glorious Pantechnicon in Belgravia — formerly a bazaar — opposite a Waitrose I didn’t know existed. (Waitrose seems too human for Belgravia. Food seems too human for Belgravia.) This thrilling building, which should be a library — it has Doric columns — is instead a collection of restaurants, shops and what I think are called ‘outlets’ (a Japanese café; something called, gnomically, ‘Kiosk’), all celebrating the ‘playful’ intersection — I mean meeting, but marketing jargon is addictive if you are an idiot — between Nordic and Japanese food. It is a wealth mall from hell, then, in the style of Terminal 5’s main street.

You cannot have cars and dining tables in the same dreamscape: it doesn’t work, unless you think carbon monoxide is a herb, or are wearing full Hazmat, like some teachers. London is in much denial about its air pollution; in the East End child asthmatics are choking. But we must embrace it for a few days more; others have lost more in pandemic than an attachment to the convention that if we dine outside it should be in a flower-filled garden. Perhaps there are enchanted restaurant gardens in London, but I have never found one. I conclude that, outside fiction or aristocracy, they do not exist. Instead, we have modish kerbside dining.

The St Pancras Brasserie and Champagne Bar by Searcys is as expansive as its name, but ghostly. It is an immense Art Deco restaurant spilling on to an empty platform at the station. When restaurants opened their patios and gardens, I fretted that they would be too busy to be enjoyed: a diner would cling to a square of Astroturf, fearing to sink. But not here: the people have been removed, and they have not returned. Inside, it is empty if not shuttered: a great, golden brasserie with dark wood, dark leather and pale globes of light. The door to the loo is so tall I imagine they stole the idea from Mr Greedy (and the giant who loved peas).

The west end of London is still pale and necrotic, but there are points of light. Hatchards the bookseller is open and its memorial to the Duke of Edinburgh is relatively, blissfully, restrained: a portrait in the window, with minimal text for a writer to trip up on his own sycophancy. People are buying whisky on Jermyn Street. The greasy spoon Piggy’s in Air Street survives and if before you merely loitered outside restaurants and ate your food from a bucket you can now sit down, though a strange sort of duck marshal lurks in St James’s Park, and I do not trust him. I do not think he is really watching the ducks. I celebrate the end of this lockdown at Bentley’s Oyster Bar & Grill in Swallow Street.

When I arrived a month ago, one wouldn’t believe LA was suffering a major pandemic. The roads were still busy with fast cars, the freeways choked when we ventured on to them, all vehicles seeming to be dodgem cars, zooming across the lanes with ferocious abandon. There was a major accident recently in front of my building. I looked out of my window at a speeding sports car, which had been careening down the boulevard at 120 mph and had crashed into another expensive car (as well as a few others on the way). It had been cut in half and exploded into flames. Both drivers died. Sadly, there’s an epidemic of young rich boys playing speed games on the wide boulevards.

Restaurant-goers who cannot let go of restaurants — for professional or other reasons — are floating on a sea of takeaway boxes, which have none of the glamour. Which of us fell in love on a takeaway? I wish I did not have to write about them, nor you to read about them, but if this is the worst thing that happened to you this year — packaging — it is not so bad. I have already begun a small counter--revolution by shopping at the greengrocers and the cheesemongers, and I suggest you do the same. Even so, they are faintly mesmerising by volume: a box-themed version of the Rumpelstiltskin myth, which is familiar to all children, and adults with an eating disorder. Perhaps it is a metaphor: we float on glut and are lucky, if not happy.

The Corbin & King dining and home entertaining box includes dishes from the Delaunay, the Wolseley and Brasserie Zédel ‘delivered to your home and finished by you’. My husband doubts it, because it comes from London, of which some Brexiters are more suspicious than the whole of France, and because it is not ‘cooked from scratch’. He claims he never heard this phrase before he married me, but he had the sort of rural Wiltshire childhood where he would roam the fields chasing hot air balloons while his mother stood in the kitchen in an apron with a spoon waiting for him. ‘It’s like being a latchkey kid,’ he moans, as I stroke the box with tiny whimpers of joy. Then he says: ‘What’s a latchkey kid?