Tonight:
5°c
Duped by an £18 set-lunch offer, I tried yet another daftly lavish restaurant this week. The food was pointlessly novel and grotesquely rich, bedecked with improbable foams and mousses, many of them tasting actively nasty. All kinds of needless "amuse-bouches" and "pre-desserts" added to the grief.
With a small coffee - for an extra £4 - came a final assault: a thimbleful of hot chocolate that had been ingeniously converted into a top-notch anti-personnel device. After gagging on the violent spices -ferocious concentrations of cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg - it was a relief to swallow it. Then a huge dose of hidden chilli suddenly kicked in, stripping the throat raw.
Not surprisingly, the joint was almost empty, the staff outnumbering the customers. But then, this January, many better restaurants than this have been deserted. This week it has been announced that Aaya, an expensive Japanese restaurant in Soho which I thought was thrilling when it opened last May, has gone into administration. Many others seem doomed to follow soon. When the new Michelin Guide appears next week it may already be out of date.
In the past year, an unprecedented number of restaurants have opened in London, many of them wildly ambitious. But many of these new places were hopeless anachronisms from day one. In current conditions they are as cruelly exposed as a person confidently dressed for a hot day at the beach suddenly dumped in the middle of a frozen tundra.
It is not simply that no one is spending money any more. More interestingly, what we want to eat when we go out is changing, too. In the boom years - the great Ponzi scheme that took us all in - restaurants became ever grander, ever more fanciful. For what we want in expensive restaurants has almost nothing to do with the need to eat. It's not even primarily about the strange concept of "gastronomy", whereby lots of greedy troughers seem inexplicably happy to feel ill after eating a "memorable" meal, full of fat and sugar, three times too big.
Expensive dining has always been about rewarding ourselves with what we feel is appropriate to our wealth and status. Over the past decade restaurant-goers all insensibly became power-diners - mini-Trimalchio's, perhaps not feasting quite on dormice sprinkled with honey and poppy seeds but not far off.
Such excess is over for now. You walk into many restaurants these days, just like the one proudly serving the chocolate bomb, and know they are never going to make it unless they change their ways radically. Already it feels as though they belong not just to another era but to another country entirely. And it's not one for which I can feel any nostalgia. Not yet, anyway.
The natural place for Boris
It's an exciting time to be a resident of Highbury. It seems Boris Johnson has put his house in Islington on the market for £1,700,000 and plans to come and join us. No doubt he has tired of the self‑consciousness of proper Islingtonians, and, reaching for a new maturity, aspires to the only part of the borough that escapes that horrid taint. For Highbury is indeed, as our local historian David Starkey put it to me, not just N5 but rus in urbe.
Boris will know already that it is best to treat the Holloway Road as a torrential river, and match days as man-made tsunamis, and have discounted these tiny drawbacks to our blessed plot. For our part, we can hardly wait for his arrival, consecrating our happiness. Highbury — the Mayor's Choice.
Posh's warning to women
Poor old Victoria Beckham has seemed at a bit of a loose end recently. So I was delighted to see her appearing in some new billboard ads, sprawled on the floor, eyes closed and naked apart from underwear and high heels. It seems some carpers have been suggesting the snaps may have been touched up a bit to make her look more appealing. If so, it was in a jolly good cause. I can't remember a more forceful demonstration of the folly of wearing high heels.
Poor Posh has obviously tripped over and knocked herself unconscious. I can only wish her a speedy recovery. And also — as a man committed to the frightful perversion of preferring women to wear shoes that they can walk in normally — thank her for her brave contribution to such an important campaign.
Reader views (1)
About restaurant, I am surprised you have just realised the obvious. But don't worry, next week your master will send you to celebrate the opening of the ultimate one. And again. And again.
- giovanpietro, Bournemouth, 16/01/2009 21:33
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