Secret Cinema serves supper for the future

We had been instructed to dress in a 1940s manner, arrive at an iron gate in Clerkenwell and breathe a password to the guards. The clandestine nature of the operation will be familiar if you've ever been to the cultish Secret Cinema - an anti-multiplex movie-going experience where the spectators (if that's not too passive a term) are only given a vague clue to the film they are going to see. Instead, they turn up to a secret location and plunge into the atmosphere of the movie itself, ingeniously conjured by actors, set designers and very capable project managers.

The happenings have been such a success (this month's event will see 19,000 visitors) that the organisers have upped the ambition with an on-site pop-up restaurant, catered by a nearby Michelin-starred London institution (alright, it's St John). To reach it, however, we first had to undergo an interrogation from Comrade Brodsky, a barking Bolshevik attack dog.

Only, to Brodsky's slight surprise, I could respond to his questions, as I happen to speak Russian. Once I had convinced him that I was no enemy to the Motherland and that the reports I wrote for my London newspaper were covert socialist propaganda (true enough), he forced me to act as his translator. My first task was to inform an American and his terrified Chinese girlfriend that they were capitalist lickspittle and bound for the Gulag.

Anyway, before long our papers had been checked and a Frenchman named Léon was leading 10 of us into the compound, where American GIs, German civilians and suspicious-looking East Europeans criss-crossed through many floors and passageways.

The site was vast. We ducked into a shop; we crawled through a sewer. In a dripping anteroom, Léon showed us a secret handshake. Eventually, we found ourselves in Sankt Dzhon, a candlelit Russian restaurant, where a rouge-lipped hostess was kissing us thrice on the cheeks and telling us, in a thick accent, that it had been too long.

We were led to a table and eventually joined by some other, equally excitable guests. The food proved more delicious than it needed to be, more English than was strictly accurate: I had pot-roasted Gloucester Old Spot pork; my wife had baked fennel with Berkswell cheese; we both had Eccles cakes and whisky for afters. (The bill came to £75 for two). The meal was consumed in sepulchral gloom and a Gulag cold but the house red and convivial atmosphere were warming enough.
So was the entertainment. An English spiv came by selling hosiery; Comrade Brodsky sang a lusty rendition of Kalinka; a tall, grey German shimmered in, asking if we had perhaps guessed what the film might be. I had an idea - and was proved right when we were ushered to the screening room. If I told you, sadly, I would have to kill you.

See the Secret Restaurant Facebook page for future events. To book email bookings@secretrestaurant.org