A cake shop from the time of the Profumo affair: Maison Bertaux reviewed

Amid the bronze cladding of Soho, with its pop-up, suck-down restaurants – the Cadbury’s Creme Egg Café was a nadir – Maison Bertaux hangs on, the oldest French patisserie in the UK, and 151 this year.

It was founded by Monsieur Bertaux, a Communard fleeing France with a book of recipes. Their loss, our gain. Perhaps in 2173, if we are still here, there will be a similarly beloved patisserie in Rwanda. Let us hope so, for their sakes. He came here because Soho was polyglot, though it isn’t now. It’s an impersonation of a former Soho because that’s the fashion now: destroy something, pretend to lament it and build a tinny echo of that which you killed. Karl Marx’s haunts are cocktail bars. The Colony Room Club is someone’s flat: the social cleansing of alcoholics.

This is real: a glass frontage under two early Victorian houses next to the Coach & Horses on Greek Street in what used to be a Little France. A very little France, which is how the English like it. The houses are painted a cheerful blue: a colour with the kind of mad clarity you never find in Soho. It is early morning, and Soho sweeps itself clean, or it tries. The smell of these streets is so evocative I could place them from the moon: carbon monoxide, sugar, alcohol, bleach. Like all very old restaurants – this one reminds me of Maxim’s in Paris with its shuttered velvet rooms – it contains spectres of celebrity customers doing something as normal as eating. Alexander McQueen had his birthday party here. Jeffrey Bernard came and slept when the Coach & Horses closed in the afternoon. Virginia Woolf ate her feelings, though unsuccessfully. So did Karl Marx, who shagged his maid up the road in what is now the private members’ club Quo Vadis, because that’s liberty.